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Part of
Rhapsodie: A prosodic and syntactic treebank for spoken French
Edited by Anne Lacheret-Dujour, Sylvain Kahane and Paola Pietrandrea
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 89] 2019
► pp. 339–363

Chapter 18
Syntax and prosody mapping: What and how?

The case of intonational periods and illocutionary units

| Modyco, Paris Nanterre University & CNRS, France
| Modyco, Paris Nanterre University & CNRS, France
This chapter is devoted to the intonosyntactic interface, by exploring relationships between major prosodic and macrosyntactic units. It presents different kinds of mapping between intonational periods and illocutionary units, and discusses three basic constructions: alignment, when prosodic and macrosyntactic boundaries coincide; inclusion, when an intonational period groups several illocutionary units; and fragmentation, when an illocutionary unit is segmented by several intonational periods. We also exhibit a singular case of matching, called desynchronization, when neither prosodic boundaries nor macrosyntactic boundaries coincide with each other. These different patterns are discussed in the light of functional and discourse constraints.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.General overview of IU and IPE boundaries
    • 2.1IUB/IPEB ratio
    • 2.2IUB-IPEB mapping
    • 2.3IUB-IPEB mapping per sample
    • 2.4IUB-IPEB mapping per discourse sequence
  • 3.Distribution of boundaries
    • 3.1Intonosyntactic units
    • 3.2Distribution of ISUs
    • 3.3.Inclusive ISUs
    • 3.4Fragmented ISUs
    • 3.5Asynchronous ISUs
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
Published online: 6 June 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.89.19kah