Discourse properties of French clitic left dislocated NPs and their effect on prosody
Résumé
The present paper investigates the relationship between the variation in prosodic boundary strength at the right edge of a clitic left dislocated (ClLDed) NP in French and its discourse properties. A ClLDed element in French is known to be followed by a major prosodic break; however, scholars have noticed that the degree of boundary strength can greatly vary. There is an ongoing debate on what factors are responsible for this variation. The goal of our paper is to provide a quantitative as well as a qualitative analysis based on a pragmatic and a prosodic annotation of utterances collected from two spontaneous spoken corpora. In the pragmatic annotation, each ClLDed constituent of our dataset is annotated according to its topic continuity, its discourse status, and its contrastive function. In the prosodic annotation, a score indicating the degree of prosodic boundary strength at the right edge of each constituent is assigned in a semi-automatic fashion, on the basis of the computation of 4 acoustic features. The main result of the interaction of the two annotations is that the boundary strength is significantly higher in dislocated elements that are discourse given but are not (not yet, or not anymore) active topics, namely, referents that need to be promoted to topic status. An effect of contrast is also found in a subset of the data.
Domaines
Linguistique
Origine :
Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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