Multiple focus in Mandarin Chinese

Xu (1999), reported that a single (non-sentence-final) focus in Mandarin Chinese has the phonetic effect of F0 raising in the focus and F0 lowering and compression following the focus. In this paper, results of an experiment on multiple (non-sentence-final) focus in Mandarin Chinese are reported, with baseline conditions single focus and no focus. The single focus conditions showed the expected effects. In the multiple focus conditions, only the second of two foci shows phonetic F0 effects, while the first focus does not show such F0 effects. Duration measurements also provide no clear evidence for a phonetic focus effect on the first of the two foci. The analysis we suggest, combining suggestions of Schwarzschild (1999), and Selkirk (2005), is that one focus in a focus-construction attracts intonation phrase stress, and that the phonetic effects are triggered by intonation phrase stress, rather than by the F-feature that marks focus.