Correlates of phrasing in French and German from an experiment with semi-spontaneous speech

Caroline Féry

Robin Hörnig

Serge Pahaut

Correlates of prosodic phrasing are examined in a comparative study between two languages, German and French. The material was elicited in a production experiment with 30 speakers of German and 20 speakers of French, who were asked to describe orally the spatial arrangement of toy animals on a table. Prosodic phrasing clearly correlates to syntactic structure in both languages, but tonal excursions correspond to pitch accents plus boundaries in German, and have a demarcative function in French. This difference is explained by the presence vs. absence of lexical stresses in the two languages. It is reflected in the position of tones, which are peripheral in the French prosodic phrases, but are associated with metrical heads in German, and also with final lengthening, which is systematic in French, but not in German. A final difference between the two languages is deaccenting, used in German, but not in French.

Keywords: focus, French intonation, German intonation, givenness, localizations, spontaneous speech, word order

Published online: 26 January 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.10.03fer

Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Bhatara, Anjali, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Trevor Agus, Barbara Höhle & Thierry Nazzi

2016. Language Experience Affects Grouping of Musical Instrument Sounds. Cognitive Science 40:7 ► pp. 1816 ff.

Bhatara, Anjali, Natalie Boll-Avetisyan, Annika Unger, Thierry Nazzi & Barbara Höhle

2013. Native language affects rhythmic grouping of speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134:5 ► pp. 3828 ff.

Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka, Barbara Höhle & Thierry Nazzi

2016. Early Prosodic Acquisition in Bilingual Infants: The Case of the Perceptual Trochaic Bias. Frontiers in Psychology 7

BOLL-AVETISYAN, NATALIE, ANJALI BHATARA, ANNIKA UNGER, THIERRY NAZZI & BARBARA HÖHLE

2016. Effects of experience with L2 and music on rhythmic grouping by French listeners. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19:5 ► pp. 971 ff.

Kachkovskaia, Tatiana & Nina Volskaya

2013. In Speech and Computer [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8113], ► pp. 257 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 february 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.