Chapter 8
Compression in French
Effect of length and information status on the prosody of
post-verbal sequences
This paper sheds light on the conditions for
post-focal and post-verbal compression in French canonical
sentences. We report on a production experiment, which results
suggest that arguments and adjuncts are phrased differently, and
that length and information structure only exert a significant
influence on the realization of adjuncts. We formalize these results
in terms of phrasing, arguing that French, as
opposed to English for instance, does not allow compression at any
prosodic level, but only in syntactically motivated prosodic
phrases. We motivate the variation in our data via optional
phrasing.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background on French prosody
- 3.The production experiment
- 3.1Hypotheses
- Hypothesis 1.Arguments and adjuncts are phrased differently
- Hypothesis 2.Long and short constituents are phrased
differently
- Hypothesis 3.Given and new/focused constituents are realized
differently
- Hypothesis 4.In French, if a given element is not at least the size of
a Φ-phrase, it cannot be compressed
- 3.2Participants
- 3.3Materials and procedure
- 3.4Data treatment & analysis
- Prosodic transcription and measurements
- Statistics
- 4.Results
- 4.1Post-verbal constituent
- 4.2Prosodic length
- 4.3Information Status
- 5.Discussion and conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
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Language and Speech 64:2
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