Chapter 7
Intonation of alternative constructions in French
Which cues allow distinguishing statements from
questions?
Giuseppina Turco | 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.
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
-
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Beyssade, Claire & Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie
2022.
The prosody of French rhetorical questions.
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