Our study explores prosodic focus in Cantonese within the framework of Prosodic Syntax and seeks to test the idea that Cantonese syntax is also prosodically constrained through a series of acceptability judgment, speech production, and perception tasks. Our main target structure is the noncanonical triadic construction, Inverted Double Object Construction (IDOC), in Cantonese. It is observed in the acceptability judgment task that IDOC favours prosodically light IO and hence is indeed prosodically constrained. There is also age-graded variation in the acceptability of this construction. Therefore, we would like to further analyse the prosodically constrained constituent in the follow-up production and perception tasks among different age groups to gain a comprehensive understanding of how focus is realized and interpreted in a tonal language like Cantonese.

Inverted Double Object Construction (IDOC): S V DO IO

Ngo sung jat bun syu keoi.

I send one CL book him

“I send a book to him.”

Production task is to identify the acoustic features used in realizing contrastive stress and sentence neutral stress. Perception task tries to reveal the interaction of syntax and prosody in Cantonese, such as, whether stress falls on Nuclear Stress position is better judged, and whether Native HK Cantonese speakers detects the prosodic information encoded.

鳴謝

This research project is fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. UGC/FDS25/H01/20).