Post-focus-compression (PFC) in Tibeto-Burman Languages: Is PFC a Genetic Feature?

Bei Wang

bjwangbei@qq.com

Minzu University of China

Acknowledgement

Yi Xu (University College London)

Qifan Ding (Mandarin), Liu Lu (Bai), Qingyi Song (Tujia), Xueqiao Li (Bai), Yuanyuan Zhang (Wu, Gulin), Xiaxia Zhang (Lasha Tibetan, Qiang), Fanglan Li (Nanchang), Qian Wu (Li, Hainan Tsat), Baofeng Wang (Buyi), Shaobo Sun (Mogolian, Jing), Ling Wang (Deang, Wa, Ando Tibetan), Wei Lai (Shanghai), Miaomiao Yang (Hmong), Sisi Chen (4 Wu dialects), Qiaoyun Yin (Deang), Chao Wang (Xian), Qubi Erlian (Lolo), Erkbulan (Kazakhstan)

National Social Science Foundation of China (18BYY079)

National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 60905062)

Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University of Ministry of Education of China (NCET-12-0584)

“111” Project of Minzu University

Contents

Post-focus-compression (PFC) in Beijing Mandarin

and Taiwanese

Worldwide Distribution of PFC

Distribution of PFC in Tibeto-Burman Languages

General Discussion on the origin of PFC

Focus is to highlight part of a sentence against the rest of the sentence as motivated by

a particular discourse situation. Focus can be realized prosodically. (Bolinger, 1958; Eady &

Cooper, 1986; Ladd, 1996; Xu, 1999, 2005 among many others)

50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Monolingual Beijing Mandarin

((Xu, Wang & Chen, 2012; Xu, 1999; Chen & Gussenhoven, 2008; Wang & Xu, 2011; among many others)

Ma ma mo mao mi

mother stoke kitten

Initial Focus: Who is stoking the kitten?

Medial Focus: What is mom doing on the kitten?

Final Focus: What is mom stoking?

Neutral Focus: What do you see?

Neutral

Post-focus-compression (PFC): F0 and

intensity is compressed in post-focal words.

妈 妈 叫 妹 妹去 买 槟 榔

(Wang et al., 2012)

PFC is the key feature to distinguish focus from new topic.

(Wang & Xu, 2011).

Initial Focus:

不是李晓。汪英参观车间。

It is not Lixao. Wangying visited the factory.

Wangying Canguan Chejian.New Topic:

大家都有事情要做。汪英参观车间。

Everyone has something to do. Wangying visited the factory.Wangying visited the factory.

(Wang, Xu & Ding, 2017).

PFC

(Liu & Xu, 2005)

• PFC is a robust feature, which applies in question intonation as well.

• PFC can go across a strong prosodic boundary with a long silent pause.

肖英担心张薇开车发晕？

XiaoYing danxin ZhangWei kaiche FaYun

Xiaoying worry Zhangwei drive dizzy

Xiaoying worried that Zhangwei got dizzy while driving.

Wo mai le Youli, dou song gei Mao nainai le.

I buy ASP Youli, all give to Mao grandma.

I bought Youli, and gave all of them to grandma Mao.

50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Monolingual Taiwanese

50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Bilingual Taiwanese

50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Monolingual Taiwan Mandarin50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Bilingual Mandarin

50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Monolingual Beijing Mandarin

Taiwan Mandarin and Taiwanese are closely related to Beijing Mandarin, but with a very different focus intonation, i.e., without PFC!!

Unexpected

Chen, Xu, & Wang, 2009

Xu, Chen, Wang, 2012. The Linguistic Review

Post-focus-compression (PFC): F0 and intensity is compressed in post-focal

words. PFC only presents in Beijing Mandarin, but not Taiwan Mandarin or

Taiwanese.

9

PFC is critical for focus perception!

Why does Beijing Mandarin have PFC?

The three possibilities:

(1) it emerged locally in the language,

(2) it developed through language contact

(3) it was inherited from a proto-language.

• PFC does not depend on linguistic features of a

language.

• PFC is hard to evolve automatically in a language.

• PFC is hard to transfer in language contact.

(Chen, Wang, & X产， 2009； Xu, 2011; Xu, Chen & Wang, 2012)

50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Monolingual Taiwanese50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Monolingual Beijing Mandarin

Inheritance Hypothesis of PFC(Xu, Chen & Wang, 2012)

PFC is inherited from a proto-language, which implies that Mandarin is a descendant of

Altai languages, and there is a common ancestor to both European and Altaic languages.

Contents

Post-focus-compression (PFC) in Beijing Mandarin

and Taiwanese

Worldwide Distribution of PFC

Distribution of PFC in Tibeto-Burman Languages

General Discussion on the origin of PFC

(English: Xu & Xu, 2005)

(Persian: Ardali & Xu, 2012)

Indo-Iranian

Indo-European

(Finnish: Arnhold, 2013)

Uralic

Dravidian

(Brahvi: Syed, Shah, Xu & Xu, 2018)

PFC Languages

(Hindi: Fery, Pandy & Gerrit, 2016)

Altaic

(Kazakhstan: Erkebulan, 2018)

Language Families

without PFC

AstronesianAstro-Asiatic

Kra-dai

(Deang (Mon-khmer): Wang, 2011)

(Zhuang: Zhang, et al., 2017)

(Tagalog: Nagaya & Hwang, 2017)

Niger-Congo

(Aka: Genzel, 2013 pp.215)(Thai: Thongsrinut, 2018)

Kra-dai

???

Distribution of PFC in world languages

Indo-European

Indo-European

Indo-European

Uralic Altaic

Altaic

Dravidian

Austro-Asiatic

Austronesian

Tai-Kadai

Niger-Congo

Nilo-Saharan

Indo-Irania

Sinic

Northern Chinese Dialects

Lanyin Mandarin: Shen & Xu, 2016

Jinan: Duan & Yuan, 2015

(Xiang: Yang,

2012)

www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/chinese-language/chinas-

languages.htm

Shanghai Songjiang

Ningbo Suzhou

Wuxi

Ningbo

Shanghai

suzhouWuxi

Northern Han admixture proportion in southern Hans

Wen et al. (2004)

Demic diffusion vs. Cultural diffusion

Demic diffusion: the incoming migration of groups of people who rely on

agriculture, and who can thereby support large populations. The incomers replace

less populous and less powerful existing forager populations.

Cultural diffusion: resident populations remain in place, but adopt new practices

and ways of speaking.

(Bellwood 1992; Blust 1994; Higham 2002; Edmondson and Gregerson 2007;

Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 1971; Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1993;

Nichols 1992)

Guilin: North dialect of Chinese

(Wang et al., ms.)

Gulin has a long history back to 10,000 years ago.

In 214 B.C. the first Emperor of the Qin Dynasty

(221 B.C.-206 B.C.) set up the Guilin Shire in this

region. At the same time, due to the construction of

the Ling Canal, Guilin became one of the gateways

between the Central Plains and the Lingnan Region

(current Guangdong, Guangxi and part Hunan,

Jiangxi).

Tibetan (Anduo)

(Wang et al., 2011)

Tibetan (Lasha)

(Zhang, Wang, Xu, 2012)

Hahka (Guangxi)

(Zhang et al., 2017)

Bai

(Liu & Wang, 2017)

Qiang

(Zhang & Wang, 2019)

Yi

(Wang et al., 2011)

Neutral

Initial

Final

Tujia

(Song & Wang, ms)

A brief history of BaiDai (1994)

Some basic words and ancient phonetic and syntactic features are similar to Burmese-

Yi languages. Basically their genetic relatedness could be confirmed.

However, due to the heavy contact with Chinese for over 2000 years, lots of Chinese

elements have been transmitted into Bai. That’s why 70% of the elements of the Bai

language are of Chinese characteristics.

Due to the long-term influence from the language of different family, a certain language

becomes more and more different from languages of the same family. Then it may

become a Creole, or closer to languages of a different family.

Translated by Wang. F. (2005)

The genetic position of Bai Language

Bai people were from Kiangsu near Nanking, mixed in race. Chinese, Mosso,

Lolo and Tibetan words have been adopted, and Mon character of the

language is still recognizable. (de Lacouperie, 1887; Davies, 1909)

Bai is a dialect of Chinese, which split from the mainstream before the Han

Dynasty (206BC to 220 AD) (Zhao, 1940; Greenberg, 1953; Benedict, 1982;

Starostin, 1994; Zhengzhang, 1999, Wang, 2013).

Bai belongs to Lolo (Yi)-Burmese branch (Li, 1916, 1937; Luo, 1943;

Wiersma, 1990; Zhao, 1982; ; Lee &Sagart, 1998; Wu, 2000, Dai, 1994)

Bai is a separate subgroup of Tibeto-Burman (Mitisoff, 2001).

Wang, F. (2005). On the Genetic Position of the Bai Language.

Cahiers de linguistique - Asie orientale, 34(1), 101-127.

PFC is hard to gain by L2 speakers

L1 Taiwanese→L2 Mandarin

50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Monolingual Taiwan Mandarin50

100

150

200

250

Normalized time

F0 (

Hz)

Initial Focus Medial Focus Final Focus

Bilingual Mandarin

Xu, Chen, Wang (2012)

L1 Deang → L2Mandarin

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

0 1 2 3

基频(半音

)

句首焦点 句中焦点

句末焦点 宽焦点

妈妈 摸 猫咪

王玲，2011

L1 Hainan Tsat → L2 Mandarin

Wang et al., 2012

L1 Cantonese → L2 English

Wu, 2011

Perception of focus in Mandarin by

Mandarin and Tsat speakers

Quanzhou Min L1 and Mandarin L2

Chen, Guion-Anderson, and Xu, (2012)

Yangshao

Culture

7000-5000 BP

Lolo-Burmese (Burmish, Nusu, Loloish)

Na-Qiangic(Qiangic, Erusish, Naic)

Bodic (Bodish, Gurung-Tamang, Kinnauri)

Nungish

Tani

Digarish

Sal

Kuki-Chin-Naga (Naga, Kuki-Chin)

Karenic

Sinitic

Majiayao

(5300-4000 BP)

(Zhang, Yan, Pan, Jin,

2019 Nature)

Distribution of PFC in world languages

Indo-European

Indo-European

Indo-European

Uralic Altaic

Altaic

Dravidian

Austro-Asiatic

Austronesian

Tai-Kadai

Niger-Congo

Nilo-Saharan

Indo-Irania

Nostratic MacrofamilyBarbujani and Pilastro (1993, PNAS) provided genetic evidence on the Nostratic Macrofamily,

which includes Indo-European, Elamo-Dravidian and Altaic speakers, but not Afro-Asiatic.

Renfrew (1992) proposed that Nostratic was spoken by populations of the Near East more than

10,000 years ago.

Barbujani & Pilastro, 1993, PANS

Diamond, J., & Bellwood, P. (2003). Farmers and their languages: the first

expansions. Science, 300(5619), 597-603.

Novembre, & Ramachandran (2011).

Bae, Douka & Petraglia, 2017.

Science

Fig. 1. Map of sites and postulated migratory pathways

associated with modern humans dispersing across Asia

during the Late Pleistocene.

PFC might make it possible to uncover language

relationships at far deeper levels

The traditional comparative method with cognate words can only be used to

make inferences about languages that diversified within the last 6,000-10,000

years (Nicholas, 1992; Ringe, 1995; Kaufman & Golla, 2000).

Some typological features that describe the structures present in a language,

such as ergativity, head marking, and numeral classifiers, are more stable than the lexicon (Nichols, 1992， 1994).

Limitation of PFC

PFC may get lost in language contact

PFC is just an on-and-off feature

PFC does not seem to relate to any other linguistic feature

www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uclyyix/focus_crosslinguistic/

Publications Wang, B. & Xu, Y. (2011) Differential prosodic encoding of topic and focus at sentence initial position in Mandarin

Chinese, Journal of Phonetics. 39(4): 595-611

Wang, B., Xu, Y., & Ding, Q. F. (2017). Interactive prosodic marking of focus, boundary and newness in Mandarin.

Phonetica, 75(1), 24-56. doi: 10.1159/000453082

Wang, B. & Féry, C. (2018) Prosody of Dual Focus in German: Interaction between Focus and Phrasing. Language and

Speech vol 61(2). 303-333

Xu, Y., Chen, S.-w., & Wang, B. (2012). Prosodic focus with and without post-focus compression (PFC): A typological

divide within the same language family? The Linguistic Review, 29, 131-147.

Wang, B., Zhang, Y., Xu, Y., & Ding, H. (2017). Prosodic focus in three northern Wu dialects: Wuxi, Suzhou and Ningbo.

Paper presented at the The 8th Experimental Linguistic Conference, Crete, Greece. 117-120

Wang & Féry (2015). Dual focus in Chinese. COCOSDA, 2015 Shanghai Pp. 101-106

Wang, B., Li, C. X., Wu, Q., Zhang, X. X. Wang, B. F., (2012) Production and Perception of Focus in Hainan Tsat:

Compared with Beijing Mandarin. Interspeech 2012. Portland, USA.

王蓓＊, 刘璐, & Féry, C. (2019). 汉语普通话中双焦点的产出及其感知. 《声学学报》. Vol44(1), 1-9.

王蓓＊, 吐尔逊•卡得, 许毅. (2013). 维吾尔语陈述句中焦点的韵律实现及感知. 《声学学报》, 38(1), 92－98.

王蓓＊, Féry, C. (2010)：话题和焦点在分裂句中的韵律编码方式及其对感知的影响，《声学学报》，35卷第6期，694－700

张夏夏, & 王蓓＊. (2018). 藏语拉萨话中焦点和疑问的韵律编码方式. 清华大学学报(自然科学版), 58(4), 368-373.

吐尔逊·卡得, & 王蓓＊. (2013). 维吾尔语中疑问和焦点对语调的共同调节作用. 计算机与应用, 33(3), 784－788.

Bai Qiang DeangBuyi Miao

Thank you very much!!