The Prosodic Characterization of Reference French
Résumé
After a brief overview of the phonological and physical parameters of prosody and its main functions in language, this chapter presents the French prosodic system and its specificities with regard to other languages. The French accentuation system, phonetic characteristics of accentuation, and prosodic phrasing are presented in a metrical-descriptive framework, with explicit reference to the tight relationship between accentuation and constituency. This chapter also addresses the issue of the phonological status of accentuation in French. Phonostylistic prosodic variation is discussed with reference to the PFC corpus and the chapter provides the reader with a simple technique to perceptually locate independent, relevant prosodic cues in the corpus. The chapter concludes that comparing laboratory speech models with more spontaneous speech styles is a necessary step to refining those prosodic primitives and applying speech technologies, such as tools for automatic detection of prosodic events, to large corpora.