The present paper addresses the phonological realization of focus in French and claims that this language uses a single strategy to signal focus, namely phrasing. A second, associated claim is that the tonal variation accompanying focus is due to boundary tones, and not to pitch accents. As a correlate, it is postulated that the different syntactic strategies, often used in French to identify a focussed constituent like clefting and fronting have a phonological motivation: they enhance the phrasing. Prosodic phrasing is highly sensitive to focus structure, not only in French, but probably in all languages, judging from the large amount of literature on the subject (to cite a few examples, see Gussenhoven 1984 on English, Beckmann & Pierrehumbert 1986 and Kanerva 1990 on Chichewa). Different languages use different methods to signal phrasing, like segmental alternations (see below for French), tones (Chinese is well studied, especially w.r.t. the third tone sandhi phenomenon, see Shih 1990, among others), lengthening or absence of shortening (as in Kimatuumbi, see Odden 1997), and, of course, intonational structure. However, phrasing is just one way to express focus domains. Beside phrasing, stress is widely used, as in all Germanic and most Romance languages, but some languages also use morphological markers: Wolof, as described in Rialland & Robert (2000), is one example, Swahili another. Finally, the order of constituents is also crucial in many languages, as for example in Hungarian (see Kenesei 1986). These methods can also be combined.

https://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~astechow/Festschrift/Fery%20.pdf

Prononciation du français standard : aide-mémoire d'orthoépie

Focus and Phrasing in French

This book provides a state-of-the-art survey of intonation and prosodic structure. Taking a phonological perspective, it shows how morpho-syntactic constituents are mapped to prosodic constituents according to well-formedness conditions. Using a tone-sequence model of intonation, it explores individual tones and how they combine, and discusses how information structure affects intonation in several ways, showing tones and melodies to be 'meaningful' in that they add a pragmatic component to what is being said. The author also shows how, despite a superficial similarity, languages differ in how their tonal patterns arise from tone concatenation. Lexical tones, stress, phrase tones, and boundary tones are assigned differently in different languages, resulting in great variation in intonational grammar, both at the lexical and sentential level. The last chapter is dedicated to experimental studies of how we process prosody. The book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in linguistics, and particularly in phonological theory.

Intonation and Prosodic Structure

Ceci s’explique aisément du fait que les Français sont beaucoup plus sensibles au maniement défectueux de la grammaire qu’aux aberrances de prononciation. Aucun “accent” reconnu comme français ne saurait déclasser personne, pourvu qu’il ait, par frottement, perdu de son agressivité: qu’il roule les r ou qu’il grasseye, qu’il distingue un de in ou qu’il les confonde, qu’il fasse ou non sentir certains e “muets”, un Français sera toujours “distingué” si sa syntaxe est impeccable et s’il choisit immanquablement le mot juste. (Martinet 1964: 350–351 [1969: 123–124])

background

Le français de référence et les normas de prononciation

The quality of vowels in French depends to a large extent on the kind of syllables they are in. Tense vowels are often in open syllables and lax vowels in closed ones. This generalisation, which has been called loi de position in the literature, is often overridden by special vowel-consonant co-occurrence restrictions obscuring this law. The article shows first that the admission of semisyllables in the phonology of French explains a large number of counterexamples. Many final closing consonants on the phonetic representation can be understood as onsets of following rime-less syllables, opening in this way the last full syllable. Arguments coming from phonotactic regularities support this analysis. The second insight of the article is that Optimality Theory is a perfect framework to account for the intricate data bearing on the relationship between vowels and syllable structure. The loi de position is an effect dubbed Emergence of the Unmarked, instantiated only in case no higher-ranking constraint renders it inactive.

/pdf/markedness-faithfulness-vowel-quality-and-syllable-structure-4kkvulmb5t.pdf

Markedness, Faithfulness, Vowel Quality and Syllable Structure in French

L'objectif de cette these est de proposer une analyse de la problematique de l'utilisation de l'ecrit dans l'enseignement/apprentissage de l'oral en langue etrangere, illustree par le cas d'apprenants japonais de francais en milieu universitaire au Japon. Il s'agit d'une these de didactique des langues et des cultures, qui, dans une approche implicationniste, etablit une perspective de recherche didactique vis-a-vis du rapport entre multimodalite des supports (visuel/orthographique et auditif) et apprentissage de l'oral (en perception et en production), plus particulierement celui du systeme phonetico-phonologique du francais. Les domaines didactique, phonetico-phonologique et psycholinguistique sont des lors sollicites pour rendre compte du rapport entre interphonologie et representations orthographiques chez ces apprenants. La these s'articule en six grandes parties : 1) une introduction didactique (presentation des problematiques initiales a partir d'observations de terrain) ; 2) une partie linguistique (comparaison des systemes phonetico-phonologique et phonographemique francais (L2) et japonais (L1)) ; 3) une partie psycholinguistique (description du fonctionnement cognitif des apprenants, en tenant compte de leurs specificites vis-a-vis des processus de perception de la parole et de l'ecrit) ; 4) une partie « problematiques » (reformulation des problematiques initiales et elaboration d'un protocole d'investigation quasi-experimental) ; 5) une partie experimentale (description des tests, resultats et interpretation, les tests etant axes sur la perception des segments /b, v, r, l/ et des groupes biconsonantiques /CC/) ; 6) une partie didactique conclusive (implications pour la recherche et pour les pratiques de classe, vis-a-vis de l'utilisation de la modalite visuelle dans l'enseignement/apprentissage de l'oral en L2). Il apparait que si l'on souhaite faire apprendre le systeme phonetico-phonologique d'une L2, il conviendrait de prendre davantage en compte la dimension phonographemique d'un tel apprentissage.

Interphonologie et représentations orthographiques. Du rôle de l'écrit dans l'enseignement / apprentissage du français oral chez des étudiants japonais