Focus marking and prosodic boundary strength in French

Amandine Michelas (1) , James Sneed German (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

Background/Aims. In French, the size of a focus constituent is not reliably marked through pitch accent assignment as in many stress-accent languages. While it has been argued that the distribution of lower-level prosodic boundaries plays a role, this is at best a weak cue to focus, leaving open the question of whether other marking strategies are available. In this study, we assess whether the right edge of a contrastive focus constituent is marked by differences in prosodic boundary strength. Methods. We elicited utterances with target words in six combinations of focus and syntactic contexts using an interactive production task. Results. The results show that if a given location is realized as an Accentual Phrase boundary in an all-focus context, then it is realized as an Intermediate Phrase boundary when it coincides with the right edge of a narrow focus constituent. A location that is an Intermediate Phrase boundary in an all-focus context, however, remains unchanged under narrow focus. Conclusion. These findings suggest that focus constituents are constrained to align with a minimum prosodic domain size in French (i.e. the intermediate phrase), and that French does not rely on a general strategy of prosodic enhancement for marking focus.

Domaines: Linguistique

Amandine Michelas, James Sneed German. Focus marking and prosodic boundary strength in French. Phonetica, 2020, 77, pp.244-267. ⟨10.1159/000499071⟩. ⟨hal-02172736v2⟩