Discourse 'Major Continuatives' in a Non Monotonic Framework

Jacques Jayez (1) , Mathilde Dargnat (2)

1 L2C2 - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition
2 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

Delattre (1966) proposed a classification of French basic melodic contours. He defined in particular 'major continuatives' as melodic rises that mark the frontier between higher constituents in a hierarchy of clausal and sentential constituents. Although Delattre's empirical basis for his classification has been discussed, there is a strong intuition that some sort of melodic rise can be used in French at the frontier between discourse constituents. The goal of this paper is to explore this possibility in two directions. First, we provide experimental evidence that, taken in isolation, major continuatives are not significantly discriminated from interrogative contours by 'naïve' subjects, having no training in phonetics. Second, we try to account for the fact that, in real discourse, people do not confuse major continuatives and interrogative contours, by controlling the interactions between interpretation constraints using a non-monotonic logic in the general framework of Answer Set Programming.

Domaines: Linguistique

Jacques Jayez, Mathilde Dargnat. Discourse 'Major Continuatives' in a Non Monotonic Framework. Interface s Interfaces Discourse & Prosody IDP 2009 Actes / proceedings - ROUSSARIE, Sep 2009, Paris, France. ⟨hal-00932556⟩