French additive aussi: does prosody matter ?
Résumé
The goal of this study is to determine whether prosody contributes to the discrimination of meaning in sentences with the French additive particle aussi (‘also’). Previous research has highlighted the frequent use of this particle in structurally ambiguous positions, especially in spoken data, while authors diverge on their views as to the possible contribution of prosody to their disambiguation. In order to verify the role of prosody, we have run an experimental study based on a reading task: 20 native speakers were recorded while reading a set of contextualized sentences with aussi placed in both structurally ambiguous and non-ambiguous positions. The results show the presence of different types of prosodic correlates associated with aussi, but also that they are not exploited in a systematic way.