Typological Variations in the realization of French Accentual Phrase

Mathieu Avanzi (1) , Guri Bordal (1) , Nicolas Obin (1)

1 Analyse et synthèse sonores [Paris]

In this paper, we examine certain aspects of the French Accentual Phrase produced by L2 speakers of French, and discuss the implications language contact may have on our knowledge of the French prosodic system. We study the same text read by four monolingual Parisian speakers and two groups of different L2 speakers: four Central Africans and four Swiss Germans. The data are semi- automatically processed, and three prosodic features are analyzed: metrical weight of the realized APs, respect of restructuring-APs rules and the distribution of sandhi phenomena. Our findings suggest that the prosodic systems of L2 French speakers are closer to word prosodic systems than the system of Parisian French speakers: the former produce shorter APs than the latter, tend to allow accentual clashes and to avoid sandhi phenomena beyond their APs boundaries.

Mots clés: prosody; accentual phrase; language contact; prominence; sandhi phenomena.

Mots clés: Informatique musicale

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Neurosciences

Mathieu Avanzi, Guri Bordal, Nicolas Obin. Typological Variations in the realization of French Accentual Phrase. ICPhS, Aug 2011, Honk-Kong, China. pp.1-1. ⟨hal-01161279⟩