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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 30, Frankfurt
Edited by Ingo Feldhausen, Martin Elsig, Imme Kuchenbrandt and Mareike Neuhaus
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15] 2019
► pp. 135–156

Chapter 7
Intonation of alternative constructions in French

Which cues allow distinguishing statements from questions?

| Université de Nantes (Laboratoire de Linguistique LLING-UMR 6310)
| Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (UMR 7110), CNRS-Université Paris Diderot

Alternative questions in French are described as ending by a falling contour, while a rising contour occurs on the non-final conjuncts. This configuration is very similar to the one observed in statements with a disjunction. The similarity at the phonological level raises the following questions: Are intonational contours equally implemented at a phonetic level in questions and statements? If not, what are the acoustic cues that allow for distinguishing the two sentence types? The aim of this study is to show that the phonetic implementation of the intonation contours at the end of both sentence-medial and sentence-final conjuncts differ in alternative questions and statements with a disjunction in French. This finding may deepen our understanding on the relation between intonation and meaning.

Keywords: intonation, alternative constructions, intonational meaning, suprasegmental cues
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on the prosody of alternative constructions
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Materials and participants
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Utterance-final contour
      • 4.1.1Phonological analysis
      • 4.1.2Phonetic analysis of the falling contour
      • 4.1.3Interim discussion
    • 4.2Non utterance-final prosodic events
      • 4.2.1Intonational contours at the end of the non-final conjuncts
      • 4.2.2Phrasing: Final lengthening and pausing
      • 4.2.3Prosodic analysis of the matrix verb
      • 4.2.4Interim discussion
  • 5.Discussion and phonological analysis
    • 5.1The phrasing hypothesis
    • 5.2The tonal hypothesis
  • 6.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.15.07del
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