The effect of focus on lexical tones in Vietnamese

We investigated the effect of focus on the formation of f0 in two of the six tones of the Hà Nội dialect of Vietnamese. This dialect contrasts six lexical tones, has no tone-sandhi, the language does not have focus markers and uses prosody exclusively to express pragmatic contrasts (Jannedy, 2007) by means of intonational emphasis in ways similar to English or German. To tease out the effect of focus on the duration and f0 of the level tone ngang and the rising tone sắc, identical short SVO-type utterances were elicited with a question-answer paradigm under three focus conditions (subject-, verb-, and object focus). Results indicate that the tone especially under subjectand verbbut also object focus shows an f0-excursion for the ngang tone and a scoop and sharp rise for sắc. Duration of the focused syllable also increases.