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Focus on Additivity: Adverbial modifiers in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages
Edited by Anna-Maria De Cesare and Cecilia Andorno
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 278] 2017
► pp. 107–136

Chapter 4
French additive particle aussi

Does prosody matter?

| Université Paris 8, CNRS UMR 7023 SFL
| Université de Lille, CNRS UMR 8163 STL

The goal of this study is to determine whether prosody contributes to the discrimination of meaning in sentences with the French additive particle aussi (‘also’). Previous research has highlighted the frequent use of this particle in structurally ambiguous positions, especially in spoken data, while authors diverge on their views as to the possible contribution of prosody to their disambiguation. In order to verify the role of prosody, we have run an experimental study based on a reading task: 20 native speakers were recorded while reading a set of contextualized sentences with aussi placed in both structurally ambiguous and non-ambiguous positions. The results show the presence of different types of prosodic correlates associated with aussi, but also that they are not exploited in a systematic way.

Keywords: additive particles, French aussi , ambiguous positions, prosodic marking, experimental study, reading task
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Additive particles in French
    • 2.1 Syntactic mobility and semantic scope of aussi
    • 2.2Preferences in language use
    • 2.3Prosody with additive particles
      • 2.3.1Prosody and information structure
      • 2.3.2Prosodic marking with aussi?
    • 3. An experimental approach to the prosody of aussi
      • 3.1A pilot study
      • 3.2Methodology
    • 3.3 Aussi in an ambiguous position
      • 3.3.1The aussi-accent
      • 3.3.2Other prosodic parameters
      • 3.3.3 The prosody of the object as the domain of application of aussi
    • 3.4 Aussi in the post-subject position
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.278.04ben
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Dimroth, Christine & Sandra Benazzo
2018. Chapter 11. Developing strategies for encoding additive and contrastive relations in French and German child narratives. In Focus Realization in Romance and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 201], ► pp. 313 ff. DOI logo
Patin, Cédric & Sandra Benazzo
2018. La prosodie joue-t-elle un rôle dans la détermination de la portée ? Le cas d’également. Revue française de linguistique appliquée Vol. XXIII:1 ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
Thörle, Britta
2020. « Et le chien aussi i’ regarde ». Language, Interaction and Acquisition 11:2 ► pp. 298 ff. DOI logo

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