A comparative prosodic study of questions in French in contact with Occitan and Catalan

Philippe Boula de Mareüil (1) , Albert Rilliard (1) , Fanny Ivent (2) , V. Kozhevina

1 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur
2 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

In the south of France, the French language has developed in contact with Occitan in Provence and Languedoc, in contact with Catalan in Roussillon. This study reports on a first analysis of data collected in these regions, during a field survey carried out among speakers of Occitan and Catalan, in addition to French. In particular, we compared the prosody of yes/no questions ending in a word stressed on the penultimate syllable (e.g caserna ‘barracks’ in Occitan or Catalan, caserne with a pronounced final schwa in southern French). On the last two syllables of questions, it turns out that the rising-rising pitch pattern is the most common and, according to a perception experiment using prosody modification/resynthesis, that it is preferred to a falling-rising pattern by southern French listeners (without significant differences between Provence and Languedoc). A falling-rising pattern was also observed in Roussillon, possibly resulting from a prosodic transfer from Catalan to French. It was not associated with that region by southern French listeners who took part in a second perceptual experiment. Yet, the intonation patterns found may have different functions: the rising-rising pattern, especially, is most often interpreted as a confirmation query.

Mots clés: Prosodia; French; Occitan; Catalan

Domaines: Linguistique

Philippe Boula de Mareüil, Albert Rilliard, Fanny Ivent, V. Kozhevina. A comparative prosodic study of questions in French in contact with Occitan and Catalan. Journal of Speech Sciences, 2014, 4 (2), pp.59-72. ⟨halshs-01423072⟩