Intonation of parentheses in spontaneous French sentences
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0040/000099Keywords:
intonation, parenthesis, prosodic structure, macrosyntaxAbstract
Traditionally, parentheses have been described by phoneticians as speech segments with lower intensity, restrained pitch variation, and a speech rate faster than the rest of the sentence. This iconic coding may be found in some examples of read (prepared) speech, but spontaneous speech data tend to show that specific prosodic mechanisms do exist to either: 1) integrate the syntactic parenthesis into the overall prosodic structure of the sentence, or 2) isolate it with an independent prosodic structure. The realizations chosen by speakers appear to be dictated by the interaction of semantic, syntactic, and prosodic markers to ensure the parentheses will be identified as such by listeners.
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Debaisieux, J.-M. and Martin, Ph. 2008. Les parenthèses : étude macrosyntaxique et prosodique sur corpus. In M. J. Beguelin and M. Avanzi (eds.), Actes du I° Colloque international de macro-syntaxe “La parataxe” (Neuchâtel 12-15 février 2007). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
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Martin, Ph. 2006. Intonation du français: parole spontanée et parole lue. Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 15, 133-162.
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Copyright (c) 2008 Philippe Martin (Author)

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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.