The Right Edge of the IP in Cantonese Focus Perception

Prosodic focus in Cantonese is found to lack f0 marking both at on-focal and post-focal positions, and instead, the fine-grained differences in meanings related to focus tend to be conveyed through sentence-final particles. Less discussed is the role of edge tones, which are part of the intonational phonology fulfilling a function similar to that of sentence-final particles. It has been reported that a lengthened falling contour attached to the final syllable conveys contrastive focus or serves as a signal to draw attention. In the current study, a perception experiment was conducted with stimuli manipulated to have prominence on either subject or object, interacting with an edge tone on the last syllable. Both a linguistic task of rating appropriateness and a metalinguistic task of annotating emphasised syllables were adopted. The combined results of the two tasks revealed that edge tones can trigger the perception of prominence on the final syllable, but when the context requires, edge tones can be reinterpreted at the discourse level as indicating a preceding focus. The prevalence of edge tones along with the rich inventory of sentence-final particles in Cantonese points to the salience of the right edge of the IP in focus marking.