Metrical structure, tonal association and focus in French
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Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to show that focus is a pivot in tune-text association, which plays a central role for the anchoring of intonational tones. This paper also presents the main characteristics of the French prosodic system. The first section provides an overview of French metrical structure. The second section introduces intonational tones and profiles. Any utterance has a "Nuclear Contour" made up of three elements (T* T* T%), where T = H or L tone. It is the ‘center’ of the intonational profile and the source of copying processes. The third section concerns focus and intonation. It shows how the Nuclear Contour is mapped from right to left from the right edge of the focus domain. A sub-section is devoted to two types of cleft sentences: i) canonical clefts, and ii) broad-focus clefts. We argue in favor of a model in which the metrical grid provides prominent points for tonal association while focus divides the text into domains with specific intonational characteristics.
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to show that focus is a pivot in tune-text association, which plays a central role for the anchoring of intonational tones. This paper also presents the main characteristics of the French prosodic system. The first section provides an overview of French metrical structure. The second section introduces intonational tones and profiles. Any utterance has a "Nuclear Contour" made up of three elements (T* T* T%), where T = H or L tone. It is the ‘center’ of the intonational profile and the source of copying processes. The third section concerns focus and intonation. It shows how the Nuclear Contour is mapped from right to left from the right edge of the focus domain. A sub-section is devoted to two types of cleft sentences: i) canonical clefts, and ii) broad-focus clefts. We argue in favor of a model in which the metrical grid provides prominent points for tonal association while focus divides the text into domains with specific intonational characteristics.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Foreword v
- Table of contents vii
- The quirky case of participial clauses 1
- Answering strategies: A view from acquisition 19
- Transfer in periphrastic causatives in L2 English and L2 Spanish 39
- Clitic omission, null objects or both in the acquisition of European Portuguese? 59
- Metrical structure, tonal association and focus in French 73
- On affixal scope and affix-root ordering in Italian 99
- Scope economy in positive polarity: Extreme degree quantification 115
- The acquisition of aspect in L2 Portuguese and Spanish. Exploring native / non-native performance differences 131
- Mechanisms of scope resolution in child Italian 149
- When scope meets modality: The scope of indefinites in subjunctive environments 165
- Listen to the sound of salience: Multichannel syntax of Q particles 185
- Instability and age effects at the lexicon-syntax interface 201
- On the ambiguity of N-words in French 213
- Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: The case of dislocation 229
- Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan 259
- Mismatches between phonology and syntax in French DP acquisition 281
- Pragmatic solutions for syntactic problems: Understanding some L2 syntactic errors in terms of discourse-pragmatic deficits 299
- A poverty-of-the-stimulus argument for the innateness of the identification conditions on VP ellipsis 321
- Index 335
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Foreword v
- Table of contents vii
- The quirky case of participial clauses 1
- Answering strategies: A view from acquisition 19
- Transfer in periphrastic causatives in L2 English and L2 Spanish 39
- Clitic omission, null objects or both in the acquisition of European Portuguese? 59
- Metrical structure, tonal association and focus in French 73
- On affixal scope and affix-root ordering in Italian 99
- Scope economy in positive polarity: Extreme degree quantification 115
- The acquisition of aspect in L2 Portuguese and Spanish. Exploring native / non-native performance differences 131
- Mechanisms of scope resolution in child Italian 149
- When scope meets modality: The scope of indefinites in subjunctive environments 165
- Listen to the sound of salience: Multichannel syntax of Q particles 185
- Instability and age effects at the lexicon-syntax interface 201
- On the ambiguity of N-words in French 213
- Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children: The case of dislocation 229
- Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan 259
- Mismatches between phonology and syntax in French DP acquisition 281
- Pragmatic solutions for syntactic problems: Understanding some L2 syntactic errors in terms of discourse-pragmatic deficits 299
- A poverty-of-the-stimulus argument for the innateness of the identification conditions on VP ellipsis 321
- Index 335
