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

Prosodic Regularities in the Surface Structure of French Questions

Albert Di Cristo, Daniel Hirst

Institut de Phonétique, Laboratoire "Parole et Langage" URA 261, University de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France

This paper is concerned with the description of the tonal patterning of questions in French. The results are based both on the analysis of interviews recorded from broadcast programes and on an experimental study of simulated dialogues which constitute an intermediate level between read-aloud decontextualised utterances and truly spontaneous speech. Special attention is paid to the recurrent downstepping pitch pattern which appears to constitute an important feature common to most of the basic types of questions analysed here.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cristo, Albert Di / Hirst, Daniel (1993): "Prosodic regularities in the surface structure of French questions", In Prosody-1993, 268-271.