Conditional realisation of post-focus compression in Japanese

The typological feature ‘post-focus fo range compression’ (PFC) is often considered an all-or-nothing phenomenon, being completely absent in -PFC languages but applied across-the-board in +PFC languages. This paper presents production data from Japanese and shows that, within a language, the realisation of PFC can be conditional upon lexical prosody. We further argue that this condition itself is language-specific, by comparing Japanese PFC with that in other +PFC languages. It is hoped that these results will further our understanding of the nature of focus intonation across languages. Copyright © 2018 International Speech Communications Association. All Rights Reserved.