TY  - JOUR
A1  - Destruel, Emilie
A1  - Féry, Caroline
T1  - Prominence in french dual focus
T2  - Language and speech
N2  - This paper investigates how French signals prominence in prosody in the post-verbal domain of sentences with two objects or two adjuncts that vary in information status and prosodic length. The information status of particular interest here is dual focus, defined as the presence of two foci in a mono-clausal sentence, but other information states are investigated as well. The controlled production experiment we report on allows for a detailed examination of prosodic prominence. High boundary tones at the end of non-final prosodic phrases are pervasive, as has been documented in many studies before the present one. An important but less documented result is the variation in different prosodic curs, in particular in the number and position of high tones, as well as the particular scaling relationship between them, providing a powerful tool for the expression of (dual) focus. We also report on a perception experiment with our data, showing a clear tendency for French listeners to select the intended context question, recognizing dual focus better than other information states. Overall, this article provides elements of answers as to why French prosody is so difficult to pin down, and why contradictory results and analyses have been proposed for this language.
KW  - adjuncts
KW  - French
KW  - dual focus
KW  - objects
KW  - prominence
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62325
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-623253
SN  - 1756-6053
N1  - Dieser Beitrag ist aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.
N1  - This publication is freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.
VL  - 64
IS  - 2
SP  - 319
EP  - 345
PB  - Sage Publications
CY  - Thousand Oaks, Calif.
ER  -