BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
Focus Prosody in Fijian: In-Situ Focus Marking
Provisionally accepted
- 1The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong, SAR China
- 2The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji
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In this paper we investigated the prosodic focus markers of Fijian, an understudied language in the focus prosody literature. Fijian is a verb-initial language in which narrow focus is typically marked by syntactic means (i.e. fronting), making prosodic cues to focus harder to identify. We tested 10 native speakers of Fijian, and elicited in-situ corrective focus by asking them to confirm the correct item sequences. The results showed that regardless of focus location, there is a general elevation of fundamental frequency (f0) and intensity compared with neutral focus, like in Tagalog – another verb-initial language. We argue that, in addition to fronting, Fijian uses F0 and intensity to mark focus.
Keywords: Fijian1, focus2, MANOVA5, prosody3, verb-initial language4
Received: 05 Jul 2025; Accepted: 15 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mut, Simard, Tamata and Lee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Albert Lee
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