Emphasis does not always coincide with phrasal boundaries in spontaneous spoken French

Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2012, volume 1: JEP, pages 17–24, Grenoble, 4 au 8 juin 2012. c ⃝2012 ATALA & AFCP Emphasis does not always coincide with phrasal boundaries in spontaneous spoken French Caroline L. Smith Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001, USA caroline@unm.edu RÉSUMÉ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ L’accentuation emphatique ne s’aligne pas toujours avec une frontière prosodique en français parlé La prosodie française se caractérise par un lien étroit entre la proéminence et la découpage du flux de parole en unités prosodiques. Les chercheurs se mettent d’accord sur la proéminence de la syllabe finale (pleine) de la plus petite unité. Mais la possibilité de mettre de l’emphase sur d’autres syllabes peut créer des proéminences qui ne se situent pas dans la position pré-frontière. Ici nous présentons des exemples de parole spontanée tirés de deux émissions radiophoniques où les auditeurs perçoivent l’emphase sans l’occurrence d’une frontière prosodique. Ensuite, nous examinons quelques-uns des modifications prosodiques que peuvent employer les locuteurs pour communiquer l’emphase avec ou sans la présence d’une frontière prosodique. Nous concluons que, à la différence de la proéminence, l’emphase ne se situe pas toujours en fin du syntagme. ABSTRACT _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The prosodic structure of French involves a tight connection between the location of prominent syllables and locations where the flow of speech is divided into prosodic units. Researchers agree that the final (full) syllable of the smallest prosodic unit is prominent. The possibility remains that other syllables or words may be emphasized that do not precede a prosodic boundary. This paper examines cases from two radio broadcasts where emphasis is found without a boundary, and illustrates some prosodic modifications that speakers use to create emphasis with or without boundaries. The data demonstrate that emphasis is not tied to a specific phrasal position, even though words preceding a boundary are more prominent than other words. MOTS-CLÉS : syntagmes prosodiques, proéminence, perception de la prosodie, français. KEYWORDS : phrasing, prominence, perception of prosody, French. 1 Introduction In French, prominence and phrasing are largely co-dependent. The location of prominence is coincident with syllables receiving accent by virtue of their position in the prosodic unit (Di Cristo 1999, 2000). Mertens (2006:70) is particularly explicit about this connection, saying that “final stress entails a right hand boundary of the intonation unit.” The smallest prosodic unit has prominence (stress, according to Mertens) on the final non-schwa syllable, and may also have an initial prominence on its first or second syllable. (This unit consists of a single lexical word with optional preceding function words – the Unité Tonale of Di Cristo (2000), Phonological Phrase of 17 Post (2000), and Accentual Phrase of Jun and Fougeron (2002).) The initial accent is often associated with the expression of emphasis (e.g., Di Cristo 2000), although this has been challenged (see below). These analyses have been most clearly validated for prepared speech, such as reading aloud, but also for spontaneous speech. However, spontaneous speech frequently includes emphasis that does not fit so cleanly into the prosodic structure …

Content truncated to 500 words