Part of
Prosody and IconicityEdited by Sylvie Hancil and Daniel Hirst
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 13] 2013
► pp. 181–192
This paper explores some iconic properties of melodic contours in French as vocal gestures possibly similar to other kinds of body gesture or to gestures in general. The melodic contours considered specifically are correlative to the conclusive sentence modality, the continuation majeure and the postfix or theme in a rheme-theme division of the sentence.