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F0 trace, spectrogram and intonation labels for one speaker's production of a target sentence (PP-focus long).
Source publication
This study addresses the relationship between information structure and intonation in French. More specifically, it tests whether phrase-initial rises (LHi) are associated with the left edge of contrastively focused constituents in wh-interrogatives. Since LHi distribution has also been correlated with length, the study further examines the relativ...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... early rise, or initial rise, also involves a sequence of low and high tones (denoted by LHi) but is doubly associated to a syllable near the beginning of the phrase (typically either the first or second syllable of the first content word occurring in the phrase) as well as to the left edge of the AP [3]. Since LH* is obligatory, a minimal AP consists of the LH* sequence, while a maximal AP would consist of the sequence LHiLH* (see Figure 1). Other well-formed and attested sequences include LLH*, LHiH* and HiLH*. ...
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Citations
... o. Grammont, 1933;Martin, 1975, Rossi, 1980Dell, 1984;Mertens, 1990), and it has been claimed that it plays a role in information structure marking (German and D'Imperio, 2010;Beyssade et al., 2011). Since the initial rise is independently controlled and does not generally involve the shaping of the contour we will have nothing further to say about it in the rest of the paper. ...
The aim of this study was to test if the meaning of intonational contours involves speaker commitment and attitude attribution to the addressee. We examined whether the pragmatic choice of a contour signals how the speaker (S) anticipates the reaction of the addressee (A) to his utterance by attributing attitudes to him and calling for his next move. We focused on four French contours (a fall L*L%, a rise H*H%, a rise-fall H*L% and a rise-fall-rise H+!H*H%). In an original forced-choice interpretation task, participants heard sentences carrying one of the contours and had to choose among four possible reactions chosen for their hypothetical link to the contour meanings (I get it; I’ve no idea; I guess you’re right; No, really, it's true). The results show that L*L% was consistently associated with “I get it”, confirming that A did not know proposition p before and signaling that p was added to the common ground, H*H% with “I’ve no idea”, which rejects S's attribution to A of knowledge about p, and H+!H*H% with “No, really, it's true”, which signals that A actually believes p while S does not. They give experimental support to the view that intonational meaning is dialogical.
... BEAUjolais nouVEAU, 10: 41). Previous studies have shown that initial accents occur often (along with final accents) at the left-edge of an AP in presence of a pragmatic contrast [11]. A similar feature (the so-called C-accent) is produced in specific cases of contrastive topics [12], although this observation requires more systematic evidence. ...
This study compares rising contours produced in the context of contrastive topics by French natives and by low and high proficient learners of French with German as mother tongue. Results show a systematic pattern for French natives who mostly produced a final rise LH*, and hardly ever a bridge accent on the whole phrase. Our results on French natives seem to support earlier claims that tonal patterns with late dip alignments may be recruited for encoding contrast meaning. Results on French learners show a development in the acquisition of the prosody-semantics mapping principles (shifting the accent position from the phrase-initial mon to the phrase-final image) and, not surprisingly, differences in the phonetic implementation of the final rises. Crucially, the impact of phonological and phonetic transfer is more complex than expected: text-to-tune associations are not easy to re-programme when a new accent location has to be learnt.
... However, one could argue that the same relationship between contrastive discourse status and the Accentual- Phrase right boundary could be found in a non IP-final position in French in a context in which the acoustic properties of the pitch accent are not superimposed with the acoustic properties of the boundary tone. Note also that prosodic cues such as the presence of an initial accent which is associated to the left edge of the AP could also mark the phrasing of the word " Mariloup " separately from the rest of the utterance (see for instance Beyssade et al., 2009; German and D'Imperio, 2010; D'Imperio et al., 2012). Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) experience deficits in social cognition, resulting in theory of mind (ToM) impairments and communication disorders (Brüne, 2005; Sprong et al., 2007; Green et al., 2008). ...
Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) often display social cognition disorders, including Theory of Mind (ToM) impairments and communication disruptions. Thought language disorders appear to be primarily a disruption of pragmatics, SZ can also experience difficulties at other linguistic levels including the prosodic one. Here, using an interactive paradigm, we showed that SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode the contrastive status of discourse referents in French. We used a semi-spontaneous task to elicit noun-adjective pairs in which the noun in the second noun-adjective fragment was identical to the noun in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron “brown candies” vs. BONBONS violets “purple candies”) or could contrast with it (e.g., BOUGIES violettes “purple candles” vs. BONBONS violets “purple candies”). We found that healthy controls parsed the target noun in the second noun-adjective fragment separately from the color adjective, to warn their interlocutor that this noun constituted a contrastive entity (e.g., BOUGIES violettes followed by [BONBONS] [violets]) compared to when it referred to the same object as in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron followed by [BONBONS violets]). On the contrary, SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode contrastive status of target nouns. In addition, SZ's difficulties to use prosody of contrast were correlated to their score in a classical ToM task (i.e., the hinting task). Taken together, our data provide evidence that SZ patients exhibit difficulties to prosodically encode discourse statuses and sketch a potential relationship between ToM and the use of linguistic prosody.
... cted the realization of an Hi on one of the first syllables of the non-finite verb. In principle, an initial accent on the non-finite verb could occur in VF and NVF cases alike, given that the focal domain starts at the auxiliary in both contexts. In other words, the auxiliary should be located at the left-edge of a focused AP in both contexts (cf. German & D'Imperio, 2010). We tested whether in cases with an Hi on the non-finite verb, speakers realize an Hf to distinguish VF from NVF contexts and if so, where they locate Hf (on Hi and/or on H*). Our focus is hence on the prosodic realization of the verb construction (the finite verb followed by the non-finite verb). ...
... Kappa Coefficient of Agreement of 0.93 (SD = 0.04) for the categories LH*, LHiH*, HiLH*, LHiL* (see letters a, c, d, e inTable 5). For the object noun, Kappa was 0.79 (SD = 0.11) for the accentual realizations HiLL%, LHiL% and Unaccented. On the basis of previous studies reporting the presence of initial accents on the left-edge of focused APs (cf. German & D'Imperio, 2010), we investigated their occurrence in both conditions. Furthermore, we tested whether their location (i.e. on the auxiliary or on one of the first syllables of the non-finite verb) is influenced by pragmatic condition. For the identification of initial accents, we largely followed the criteria defined by German and D'Imperio (2010) . In ...
German and French differ in a number of aspects. Regarding the prosody-pragmatics interface, German is said to have a direct focus-to-accent mapping, which is largely absent in French--owing to strong structural constraints. We used a semi-spontaneous dialogue setting to investigate the intonational marking of Verum Focus, a focus on the polarity of an utterance in the two languages (e.g. the child IS tearing the banknote as an opposite claim to the child is not tearing the banknote). When Verum Focus applies to auxiliaries, pragmatic aspects (i.e. highlighting the contrast) directly compete with structural constraints (e.g. avoiding an accent on phonologically weak elements such as monosyllabic function words). Intonational analyses showed that auxiliaries were predominantly accented in German, as expected. Interestingly, we found a high number of (as yet undocumented) focal accents on phrase-initial auxiliaries in French Verum Focus contexts. When French accent patterns were equally distributed across information structural contexts, relative prominence (in terms of peak height) between initial and final accents was shifted towards initial accents in Verum Focus compared to non-Verum Focus contexts. Our data hence suggest that French also may mark Verum Focus by focal accents but that this tendency is partly overridden by strong structural constraints.
... To sum up, it is conspicuous that the authors working on the intonation of French agree more on the form of the tones than on their function. I will argue in section 5 for a decidedly phrasal German & D'Imperio (2010) are interested in the optionality of the first rise. They experimentally investigated object phrases like le merlan aux navets/aux macadamias 'the whiting with turnips/with macadamias' in questions and found that the initial rise is more likely to occur at the left edge of a contrastive focus domain, and also more likely to occur in longer phrases, although phrase length does not influence the extent to which the initial rise correlates with focus. ...
... Specifically, the greatest number of LH* AP configurations was found for three-syllabic words uttered at fast rate. Note that a length effect on the occurrence of the initial rise has been reported in previous work on French (Asté sano, 2001; German & D'Imperio, 2010; Welby, 2006), which is in line with our findings. Our rate results are also in line with the findings presented in Fougeron and Jun (1998), which might be accounted for by a general articulatory reduction. ...
Though two levels of phrasing are generally accepted for French, a large degree of intra-speaker variability in the amount of preboundary lengthening is generally found within the lowest level (the Accentual Phrase or AP). A question that still remains to be answered is whether this source of variability is merely due to speech rate fluctuations or to the existence of an additional level of phrasing ranked between the AP and the Intonation Phrase. This paper examines the effect of syntactic boundary strength on two phonetic correlates of boundary marking in French, for the AP level. Specifically, preboundary lengthening and tonal cues associated to four boundary levels are investigated through duration and f0 measures. Results show that the alignment of the AP boundary with a major syntactic break significantly modifies the degree of preboundary lengthening associated with the boundary. More precisely, AP-final syllables aligned with a NP/VP break are longer than AP-final syllables contained within a complex NP, though they are not marked by a stronger tonal boundary. Effects of speech rate on the tonal composition of the AP are also reported. We discuss the implications in the light of current models of French prosodic structure and the syntax/prosody interface.
... First, we manipulated the length and syntactic structure of subject NPs to obtain target phrases whose final syllable is predicted, in an unmarked discourse context, to coincide with either an AP-, ip-, or IP-level boundary. Second, we induced specific patterns of focus (all focus vs. narrow focus) by manipulating answers located before and after target answers in series of three (see also German & D'Imperio, 2010). 24 native speakers of French took part in the experiment as interviewees. ...
In contrast with stress-accent languages, French does not signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it largely exploits phrasing (Féry, 2001; D'Imperio et al. 2012). In this study, we used a new experimental paradigm to collect semi-spontaneous data and test the strength of the prosodic boundary located at the right edge of focused elements. In line with our minimum prosodic size domain hypothesis for contrastive focus in French, the results indicated that an ip-boundary is required at the right edge of a contrastively focused constituent.
... Jun and Fougeron 2000; Welby 2002) does not appear to be restricted to the left edge of a Maximal Projection, but can occur towards the left edge of an argument that is part of a complex syntactic constituent, when focus is restricted to a single lexical item. Specifically, recent evidence (German and D'Imperio 2010) suggests that initial LHi rises mark the left edge of contrastive focus regions in French (see LHi on marron in upper panel of Figure 2), but that the probability of LHi also increases with phrase length. In other words, both phrase length and focus scope appear to be the relevant, additive factors for the appearance of an initial rise, and thus it is unlikely that LHi is a focus marker in the traditional sense. ...
... On the other hand, a phrasing or edge-based approach that emphasizes the comparative lack of intonational "marking" in French as compared with Germanic languages, for example, has too little to say about the role of post-focal deaccenting on the one hand, and the complex distribution of LHi on the other. The point we wish to highlight here is that the type of data that will eventually lead to an adequate model of prosody and information structure in French will need to take into account both issues simultaneously by, for example, establishing the relative effect size of factors from different levels of description within the same study, following the precedent of Astésano et al. (2007), German and D'Imperio (2010), and others. Moving forward, then, our approach seeks an integrated model that takes into account both types of descriptions, as well as any additional interdepencies that they bring to the problem. ...
Much recent work on German and English intonation has addressed the impact of information structure on prosodic patterns in terms of the focus/background partition. In contrast with stress-accent languages such as Italian, Spanish or English, French does not appear to signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it appears to mainly exploit prosodic edge marking for the same purposes. The fact that prosodic phrasing is highly sensitive to focus structure is not only true for French, but also for pitch accent languages such as Japanese and Basque (see Gussenhoven 2004 for a discussion), as well as for stress-accent languages (Beckmann & Pierrehumbert 1986). A previous analysis (Féry 2001) has proposed that French largely exploits phrasing in order to signal focus, and that narrow and contrastive focus "lead to an initial boundary tone, usually high". Here we attempt to build on Féry's insight by showing that, while phrasing is one of the strategies that French adopts in order to signal focus, phrasing cues are different when either the left or the right edge of the focal domain are taken into account. Our findings show that initial LHi rises are associated with the left edge of contrastive focus regions in French, and may therefore serve an important marking function. Crucially, phrase length also contributed to the distribution of LHi, suggesting a probabilistic integration of factors from different levels.
Background/aims:
In French, the size of a focus constituent is not reliably marked through pitch accent assignment as in many stress accent languages. While it has been argued that the distribution of lower-level prosodic boundaries plays a role, this is at best a weak cue to focus, leaving open the question of whether other marking strategies are available. In this study, we assess whether the right edge of a contrastive focus constituent is marked by differences in prosodic boundary strength.
Methods:
We elicited utterances with target words in six combinations of focus and syntactic contexts using an interactive production task.
Results:
The results show that if a given location is realized as an accentual phrase boundary in an all-focus context, then it is realized as an intermediate phrase boundary when it coincides with the right edge of a narrow-focus constituent. A location that is an intermediate phrase boundary in an all-focus context, however, remains unchanged under narrow focus.
Conclusion:
These findings suggest that focus constituents are constrained to align with a minimum prosodic domain size in French (i.e., the intermediate phrase), and that French does not rely on a general strategy of prosodic enhancement for marking focus.
