Subordination and the prosodic marking of punctuation in L’étranger by Albert Camus
This article examines the role of French prosody in indicating a subordinate relationship between the clauses in L’étranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus (1942) [1998]. More precisely, this article presents different prosodic realizations of the commas that occur between subordinate clauses and main clauses. The objective of the study is to determine if this particular syntactic position constrains the possible prosodic uses of the comma in French. This analysis has been conducted using the methods adopted in instrumental phonetics. Theoretically, this analysis is based on the predictive intonation theory proposed by Mertens (1987, 2008, 2011).