杨 洋 李艳惠 刘承贤
Previous studies have shown that Beijing Mandarin can encode focus prosodically and realize de-focalizing through tonal reduction, specifically, neutral tone. In Taiwan Southern Min, however, it remains unclear whether prosody plays a role in focus encoding, given its strict tone-group constraints and the widespread use of sentence-final particles. Taking wh-words in Taiwan Southern Min as the object of investigation, this paper examines their prosodic realization in wh-questions, declarative sentences containing wh-words, and wh-questions with sentence-final particles. The results of a production experiment show that, unlike Beijing Mandarin, Taiwan Southern Min does not use prosody to mark focus status. Prosodic parameters such as duration and F0 differ only in ambiguous sentences with identical strings, and the presence of sentence-final particles does not affect sentential prosody. These findings suggest that the grammatical weight of prosody varies parametrically across languages or dialects: in Taiwan Southern Min, prosody does not participate in the marking of focus or clause type but functions only as a “last resort” when no other means of disambiguation is available.