Language Log

« previous post |

In a comment on "Reading Instruction in the mid 19th century", Rachel Churchill asked

Does contrastive emphasis (as in "George or his brother") exist in all languages? If not, which ones don't have it?

I've sometimes noticed non-native English speakers – even those whose pronunciation and accent are pretty good – failing to use it. For example, they might say "This one is fifty GRAMS, but the other one is twenty GRAMS", where a native speaker would emphasise the "fifty" and "twenty" rather than the "grams". I'm guessing it's because their native language doesn't use contrastive emphasis and maybe they've never been taught the concept, but I don't know this for sure.

I responded:

See Yong-cheol Lee, Bei Wang, Sisi Chen, Martine Adda-Decker, Angélique Amelot, Satoshi Nambu, and Mark Liberman, "A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus", IEEE ICASSP, 2015. The abstract:

We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

See also "Victor Hugo, hélas", 4/13/2024, "LÀ encore…", 4/14/2024, and "Intonational focus", 4/21/2011.

Roger C. continued the discussion:

In Spanish, focus contrast is generally achieved by changes in word order; syntax is more flexible than in English.

And I responded:

I'm guessing that (as in French) the word-order changes are combined with tonal and durational changes, and that in some cases (as in corrective focus on number or letter strings), the prosodic changes are the only cues.

In "Victor Hugo, hélas", I discussed the extreme ambiguity of the term "focus", the false prejudice that French doesn't allow prosodic focus, and a series of experiments that showing that "corrective focus" works in French essentially as it does in English, although there are languages (like Korean) where this is not true.

It would be easy enough for a native speaker of Spanish to perform a quick check of the same question: what happens when you correct someone's misunderstanding of a digit string, e.g.

No es "tres cinco seis", es "tres nueve seis".

(Sorry if that's not an idiomatic correction…)

Meanwhile, I thought I'd try looking for a different kind of focus in Spanish, as I did for French in "Victor Hugo, hélas":

[T]his encouraged me to finally look for "focus" in some samples of actual French talk. Or at least at one sample — I went to LibriVox, and randomly picked a reading of Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d’un Condamné.

I noticed a relevant example in the second sentence of the preface — but a couple of paragraphs later, there's a sentence with a whole bunch of them:

Il le déclare donc, et il le répète, il occupe, au nom de tous les accusés possibles, innocents ou coupables, devant toutes les cours, tous les prétoires, tous les jurys, toutes les justices.

So for a comparison to Spanish, I randomly picked a Librivox reading of the first chapter of El 19 de marzo y el 2 de mayo by Benito Pérez Galdós.

And I was pleased to find a comparable passage early in the chapter, in a passage describing the narrator's reactions to work as a typesetter (starting at 3:32.844 of the recording, emphasis added):

Poníalos yo en movimiento, y de aquellos pedazos de plomo surgían sílabas, voces, ideas, juicios, frases, oraciones, períodos, párrafos, capítulos, discursos, la palabra humana en toda su majestad; y después, cuando el molde había hecho su papel mecánico, mis dedos lo descomponían, distribuyendo las letras: cada cual se iba a su casilla, como los simples que el químico guarda después de separados; los caracteres perdían su sentido, es decir, su alma, y tornando a ser plomo puro, caían mudos e insignificantes en la caja.

¡Aquellos pensamientos y este mecanismo todas las horas, todos los días, semana tras semana, mes tras mes! Verdad es que las alegrías, el inefable gozo de los domingos compensaban todas las tristezas y angustiosas cavilaciones de los demás días. ¡Ah!, permitid a mi ancianidad que se extasíe con tales recuerdos; permitid a esta negra nube que se alboroce y se ilumine traspasada por un rayo de sol.

I set them in motion, and from those pieces of lead emerged syllables, voices, ideas, judgments, phrases, sentences, periods, paragraphs, chapters, speeches, the human word in all its majesty; and then, when the mold had played its mechanical role, my fingers decomposed it, distributing the letters: each one went to its place, like the simples that the chemist keeps after they have been separated; the characters lost their meaning, that is, their soul, and, returning to pure lead, fell mute and insignificant into the box.

Those thoughts and this mechanism every hour, every day, week after week, month after month! It is true that the joys, the ineffable joy of Sundays compensated for all the sadness and anguished musings of the other days. Ah! Allow my old age to be enraptured by such memories; allow this black cloud to rejoice and be illuminated, pierced by a ray of sunlight.

Here's the sentence where todas/todos are "focused", ithe speaker referencing all rather than some of the hours and days:

¡Aquellos pensamientos y este mecanismo todas las horas, todos los días, semana tras semana, mes tras mes!

And zeroing in:

In addition to higher pitch and greater vocal effort, the stressed syllables of "todas" and "todos" are lengthened — see below for a comparison with an unfocused version.

The very next sentence has another use of todas, this one naming all the sadnesses and anguished musings, without (much of?) an implied contrast to some of them:

Verdad es que las alegrías, el inefable gozo de los domingos compensaban todas las tristezas y angustiosas cavilaciones de los demás días.

Zeroing in a bit:

compensaban todas las tristezas y angustiosas cavilaciones de los demás días

…And a bit further:

todas las tristezas

In this case, the pitch of "tristezas" is essentially the same as that of "todas".

And a comparison of syllable and word durations underlines the difference:

Phrase	First Syllable	Whole Word
todas (las horas)	280 ms	503 ms
todos (los días)	242 ms	438 ms
todas las tristezas	144 ms	329 ms

 

August 18, 2025 @ 4:21 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Phonetics and phonology, Pragmatics

Permalink