Aspects of Prosody in Vietnamese
Stefanie Jannedy (HU Berlin)
Vietnamese is a Mon-Khmer language distinguishing six lexical tones (northern dialect). The canonical
word order in Vietnamese is SVO (Nguyễn Đình-Hoà, 1997; Thompson, 1965), and this structure is
used consistently when answering any wh-focus alternative question, i.e. focus is always marked in situ
for all sentence constituents.This paper reports work on the expression of Information Structure in
Vietnamese and argues that focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no
specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar
ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically
expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended
focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters
(duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis. Occasional references to the
use of prosodic means for emphasis and for phrasing can be found on some of the older, somewhat
sparse, literature (Thompson, 1965; 1981; Nguyễn, 1990; Dung et. al. 1998).
”Heavy stress singles out the syllable or syllables of each pause group which carry the heaviest
burden of conveying information. Weak stress accompanies syllables, which bear the lowest
information-conveying load in the pause group. They often refer to things which have been
brought up earlier or which are expectable in the general context. Other syllables are
accompanied by medium stress.“
Thompson (1965:106)
Tran (1967:24) also describes intensity as one of the integral aspects of intonation in Vietnamese.
Intonation contours are ”superimposed on the basic tone system; they modify the pitch characteristics
of the tones, but do not affect the tonemic contrast between them […] the basic intonation contours are
intrinsically linked with the overall intensity patterns.”
For this investigation, we collected three different types of utterances, each having different lexical
tonal specifications. The sentence in (1a) is specified for the neutral tone, the level tone ngang, with
exception of the last syllable, which carries the nặng (final laryngealization) tone.
(1) a. Phuong is riding a bicycle. Phương đi xe đạp.
b. Lan is drinking coffee. Lan uống cà-phê.
c. Men is drinking water. Mến uống nuốc.
The sentence in (1b) has a neutral tone on the Subject, a rising tone on the verb (sắc) and a falling tone
huyền on the first syllable of the compound cà-phê and a neutral tone again on the final syllable, while
the sentence in (1c) is specified lexically throughout with the modal rising tone sắc. To investigate the
phonological expression of focus in this language (see example 2), we elicited replies to focus
alternative questions asking for sentence focus (a), subject focus (b), object focus (c), verb focus (d),
and VP focus (e) from two native speakers of Hà Nội Vietnamese. A sample paradigm is shown below.
(2) a. Chuyện gì vậy? What is happening?
[Phương đi xe đạp]F [Phuong is riding a bicycle.]F
b. Ai đi xe đạp? Who is riding a bicycle?
[Phương ]F đi xe đạp. [Phuong]F is riding a bicycle.
c. Phương đi gì? What is Phuong riding?
Phương đi [xe đạp.]F Phuong is riding a [bicycle.]F
d. Phương làm gì với xe đạp? What
is Phuong doing with the bicycle?
Phương [đi]F xe đạp. Phuong [is riding]F the bicycle.
e. Phương làm gì vậy? What is Phuong doing?
Phương [đi xe đạp.]F Phuong [is riding a bicycle.]F
In each panel in Fig. 1, we have bracketed the particular part of the utterance that was in focus. The
duration analysis of the three tokens of (1a) by the female speaker indicates that in the subject- and the
