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Le rôle de la prosodie dans l’indication de la relation entre les propositions subordonnées circonstancielles et les propositions principales
Abstract
La subordination sera abordée ici d'un point de vue permettant à la fois la comparaison de l'écrit avec I'oral, ainsi que la mise en parallèle de la production et de la perception d'un texte sonore. Plus précisément, l'étude portera sur les traits prosodiques apparaissant d la frontière syntaxique d'une proposition subordonnée circonstancielle et d'une proposition principale. La position de la subordonnée par rapport à la principale (antéposition / postposition) ainsi que la présence éventuelle d'une virgule entre les propositions seront également prises en compte. Nous nous poserons la question de savoir si les traits prosodiques apparaissant à la frontière syntaxique différent selon la position de la subordonnée par rapport à la principale et selon la présence ou I'absence de la virgule. De plus, nous examinerons la perception du texte sonore du point de vue de la relation entre la prosodie et la ponctuation. Le corpus étudié se compose des cinq premières pages (écrites) de L'étranger d'Albert camus, du texte sonore correspondant et des résultats de deux tests de perception mettant en contraste le texte écrit et le texte sonore. Des méthodes de la phonétique instrumentale et expérimentale seront employées dans ce travail, qui relèvera théoriquement de la grammaire cognitive et de I'approche prédictive de l'étude de I'intonation du français.
... It is well established that prosody plays an important role in structuring spoken text (for example Chafe 1988;Fónagy & Fónagy 1983;Lehtinen 2007Lehtinen , 2008Mertens 1987Mertens , 2008Mertens , 2011Morel & Danon-Boileau 1998;Rossi 1999;Wiklund 2012Wiklund , 2013. For example, prosodic resources can be used to divide utterances into smaller phrases (tone groups) and to indicate the boundaries between spoken sentences (Wichmann 2000). ...
... Langacker (1991Langacker ( : 436, 2009 argues that a subordinate clause has no independent profile; its profile is overridden by that of the main clause, extending itself over the whole sentence. This article approaches the data from this latter perspective (see also Wiklund 2013). ...
... Findings presented here are partly based on a previous study for which I examined the prosodic interpretations of all 2,309 punctuation marks that occur in the first part of L'étranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus (Lehtinen 2007(Lehtinen , 2008Wiklund 2012). This paper will focus on the comma that occurs between a subordinate clause and the main clause of a sentence (see also Wiklund 2013). The total number of commas occurring in this position is 80. ...
This article examines the role of French prosody in indicating a subordinate relationship between the clauses in L'étranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus (1942) [1998]. More precisely, this article presents different prosodic realizations of the commas that occur between subordinate clauses and main clauses. The objective of the study is to determine if this particular syntactic position constrains the possible prosodic uses of the comma in French. This analysis has been conducted using the methods adopted in instrumental phonetics. Theoretically, this analysis is based on the predictive intonation theory proposed by Mertens (1987, 2008, 2011).
... Les virgules, quant à elles, étaient typiquement marquées avec une montée mélodique suivie d'une pause. Nos études ultérieures s'appuyant sur des tests de perception ont montré que ces prototypes oraux ne concernaient pas seulement la production orale du texte écrit mais aussi la perception du texte sonore (Wiklund, 2012(Wiklund, , 2013(Wiklund, , 2014. ...
... 1. Les résultats de ce test antérieur sont présentés dans Wiklund (2012). Les résultats des deux tests sont également abordés dans Wiklund (2013Wiklund ( , 2014. Ces deux dernières publications portent cependant sur la subordination, et les résultats des tests de perception n'y constituent qu'un élément secondaire. ...
Dans cet article, nous présenterons les résultats d’un test de perception où 28 informateurs finnophones ayant un niveau avancé en français ont entendu les cinq premières pages de L’étranger d’Albert Camus. Leur tâche a consisté à ajouter tous les points et les virgules au texte écrit correspondant sur la base des indices prosodiques. Les résultats montrent qu’un contour intonatif descendant, où l’intonation baisse jusqu’au plancher de la tessiture du locuteur, est fortement associé à la présence d’un point ; un contour descendant moins profond n’est pas aussi fortement associé au point. Les virgules sont performées des manières différentes, et elles sont interprétées en perception comme des virgules ou comme des continuatifs sans ponctuation.
This paper presents an approach to the analysis of prosody in French, based on a prediction of the unmarked default intonation matching the lexical and syntactic properties of utterances. By confronting this default intonation with the actual intonation used by the speaker, all marked intonation elements are identified unambiguously, and their contribution to verbal communication may be evaluated. The prediction of default intonation takes into account word stress, syllable count, syntactic dependency relations, as well as syntactic construction. In the process, syntactic and prosodic criteria are proposed for the definition of discourse units. Résumé. Cet article présente une approche pour l'analyse de la prosodie en français, basée sur une prédiction de l'intonation par défaut non marquée, qui reproduit les propriétés lexicales et syntaxiques de l'énoncé. La mise en regard des deux réalisations intonatives, l'intonation par défaut et celle réalisée par le locuteur, permet d'identifier de façon univoque les formes intonatives marquées utilisées par le locuteur, en vue d'examiner leur contribution au sens global du message. Le calcul de l'intonation par défaut tient compte de l'accent lexical, du nombre de syllabes, des relations de dépendance syntaxiques et des constructions syntaxiques. La procédure vise également la définition d'unités discursives à partir de critères syntaxiques et prosodiques.
This volume makes accessible a substantial range of recent research in Cognitive Grammar. From disparate sources, it brings together a dozen innovative papers, revised and integrated to form a coherent whole. This work continues the ongoing program of progressively articulating the theoretical framework and showing its descriptive application to varied grammatical phenomena. A number of major topics are examined in depth through multiple chapters viewing them from different perspectives: grammatical constructions (their general nature, their metonymic basis, their role in grammaticization), nominal grounding (quantifiers, possessives, impersonal it), clausal grounding (its relation to nominal grounding, an epistemic account of tense, a systemic view of the English auxiliary), the "control cycle" (an abstract cognitive model with many linguistic manifestations), finite clauses (their internal structure and external grammar), and complex sentences (complementation, subordination, coordination). In each case the presentation builds from fundamentals and introduces the background needed for comprehension. At the same time, by bringing fresh approaches and new descriptive insights to classic problems, it represents a significant advance in understanding grammar and indicates future directions of theory and research in the Cognitive Grammar framework. The book is of great interest to students and practitioners of cognitive linguistics and to scholars in related areas.
In general, study of the linguistic coding of discourse relations like foreground-background information has been limited by structure-dependent or intro-spection-dependent methods for information identification and by vagueness about what constitutes evidence for syntactic coding. This paper addresses these two persistent problems by considering one specific hypothesis about the syntactic coding of foreground-background information: independent clauses code foreground and pivotal information; dependent clauses code background information. Four types of narrative-discourse production were collected from four independent groups of English-speaking subjects using a videotaped cartoon as the primary elicitation stimulus. The resulting data are analyzed using a psychologically grounded, syntax-independent, and intro-spection-free method for identifying pivotal, foreground, and background propositions. Statistical analysis of the interaction of foreground-background information and the syntax of clause type shows that the hypothesis is correct, given an explicit definition of pragmatic coding and the pattern of evidence required to demonstrate it.
Narrative texts are distinguished from other representational texts in that their most fundamental organization system is temporal: all narrative texts contain (a reference to) some sequence of temporally ordered events. This basic ‘truism ‘ has been, of course, widely acknowledged in narrative studies, starting with Aristo, and it underlies, for example, the Russian Formalists’ discussion of fabula and sjuzhet or the French structuralists’ analysis of recit and histoire (or discourse). But it is only in recent discourse-oriented studies that narrative texts have been actually defined by properties of their temporal organization. Labov's (1972) analysis of the ‘narrative skeleton’ of the narrative text has found support in recent linguistic studies of foreground and background in language. As we shall see, the resulting picture within this approach is that the temporal sequences of the narrative text (which are defined in a particular way, to be discussed directly) form the foreground of the text. The questions which remain open in both the linguistic and the narrative studies are, first, in what sense such sequences are considered foreground (or what it means to call them so), and next, why the narrative text is organized (obligatorily, as we shall see) around this particular type of foreground. I propose, as an answer, that this type of organization is a temporal extension of the principles governing the spatial organization of the visual field into figure and ground, proposed by the gestalt theory, and that there is a striking correlation between the perceptual criteria determining the figure and those determining the narrative foreground.