ESCA Workshop on Prosody Lund, Sweden September 27-29, 1993

The Prediction of Prosodic Timing: Rules for Final Syllable Lengthening in French

Eric Keller, Brigitte Zellner, Stefan Werner, Nicole Blanchoud

LAIP - Lettres, Universite de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Timing is an essential part of prosody, since it contributes to the semantic and syntactic modulations of speech conveyed by accent and intonation. Theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that temporal organization takes two main forms. First, it is a necessary corollary of accent placement and intonational modification. Second, it manifests itself in prolongations, pauses and hesitations related to sentence structure. A set of rules for the second set of temporal modulations is presented. In contrast to previous work, such rules depend only minimally on syntactic structures and can be formulated nearly entirely in simple phonological terms.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Keller, Eric / Zellner, Brigitte / Werner, Stefan / Blanchoud, Nicole (1993): "The prediction of prosodic timing: rules for final syllable lengthening in French", In Prosody-1993, 212-215.