Aoju Chen1 and Emilie Destruel2
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2University of Texas aoju.chen@mpi.nl, emiliedestruel@gmail.com
How intonation is used to encode focus in French is still a matter of debate.
One view is that words are accented primarily for structural reasons instead of pragmatic reasons in French (e.g. Garde 1968). A second view is that (narrow) focus is marked by a large rise or fall whereas the pre-focus sequence is realized with a reduced pitch range and the post-focus sequence is realized with a flat contour or deaccented (e.g. Di Cristo & Hirst 1993, De Cristo 1998). Similar observations are made for contrastive focus by Jun and Fougeron (2000), who also suggest that the exact tonal patterns do not matter (2002). There is yet a third view. Skeptical about the relevance of accentuation in French intonation, Fery (2001) argues that French only uses phrasing to encode focus. The co- existence of such diverse views is perplexing and calls for further investigations.
In this study, we aim to shed new light on this matter by examing the role of mulitiple cues in encoding focus of different types and in different positions in a sentence in French. The cues include phonetic cues (i.e. pitch range and word duration), deaccentuation, variations in tonal patterns, and phrasing
We tested six monolingual speakers of a southern variety of French. We obtained 24 SVO sentences from each speaker in a semi-spontaneous setting by means of a picture matching game. The sentences were uttered as answers to false guesses about the pictures with the correction on the object (Contrastive focus on object or CF-O), answers to WHAT-questions, with focus on the object (NF-O), and answers to WHO-questions, with focus on the subject (NF-S) (see Appendix). Subject and object nouns were all disyllabic words. Each object noun occurred in all focus conditions. Subject nouns were identical in NF-S and NF-O.
Each sentence was annotated for tonal patterns and phrasing following Jun and Fougeron (2000, 2002), and acoustically annotated for phonetic analysis in focused words.
In respect of phonetic cues, mixed-effect modelling showed that duration and pitch range appeared to be longer in NF-S than in NF/CF-O but the differences did not reach statistical significance, indicating substantial between-speaker variations in the use of these cues, contra related claims in earlier literature.
Regarding post-focus deaccentuation, our binary logistic regression analysis showed that the contour following the verb was significantly more frequently flat in NF-S than in CF/NF-O (P < 0.05), according with Di Cristo & Hirst (1993) and Jun & Fougeron (2000). As regards phrasing, subject nouns almost always formed their own accentual phrases (AP). Interestingly, object nouns formed independent APs significantly more frequently in CF-O (74%) and NF-O (63%) than in NF-S (24%) (p < 0.0001). Finally, regarding variations in tonal patterns, subject nouns were frequently realized with LH* and LLH* across focus conditions. However, in the object nouns, a tonal pattern with a high tonal target (i.e. Hi) occurred
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significantly more frequently in CF-O (37%) and NF-O (27%) than in SF-O (8.7%) (P < 0.005), contra Jun and Fougeron (2002).
To conclude, our results show that French uses different types of phonological cues in tandem to mark focus. Notably, as in many languages, focus realisation is more pronounced in sentence-final position (phrasing & tonal patterns) than in sentence-initial position (post-focus deaccentuation) in French. Future research is needed to verify the current findings in other varieties of French.
Examples
(1) A sample trial with contrastive focus on the object (CF-O):
Experimenter : Regarde! Un canard! (Look! A duck!)
Est-ce que le canard mange une fraise ? (Is the dark eating a strawberry?) Participant : (non) Le canard mange un marron.
(2) A sample trial with narrow focus on the object (NF-O):
Experimenter : Regarde! Un lézard! (Look ! A lizerd!)
Qu’achète le docteur ? (What is the lizerd eating?) Participant : Le lézard mange un marron.(The lizerd is eating a chestnut.) (3) A sample trial with narrow focus on the subject (NF-S):
Experimenter : Regarde! Un marron! (Look a chestnut.)
Participant : Qui mange le marron ? (Who is eating the chestnut ?) Un lapin achète le marron. (A rabbit is eating the chestnut.)
References
Garde, P. (1968). L’accent, Presse Universitaire de France:Paris.
Di Cristo, A. (1998). Intonation in French. In D. J. Hirst and A. Di Cristo (eds), Intonation Systems: A survey of Twenty Languages (pp.195-218). Cambridge: CUP.
Di Cristo, A. & D. Hirst. (1993). Rythme syllabique, rythme mélodique et représentation hierarchique de la prosodie du franỗais. Travaux de l’Institut de Phonộtique d’Aix, 15: 9- 24.
Fery, C. (2001). Intonation of focus in French. In C. Féry & W. Sternefeld (eds). A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow (pp.153-181). Akademie Verlag. Berlin.
Jun, Sun-Ah & C. Fougeron. (2000). A Phonological model of French intonation. In Antonis Botinis (ed.) Intonation: Analysis, Modeling and Technology (pp.209-242). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht.
Jun, Sun-Ah & C. Fougeron. (2002). Realization of accentual phrases in French intonation.
Pobus, 14: 147-172.
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