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Article Dans Une Revue Linguistics Vanguard : a Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences Année : 2022

Surprise questions in spoken French

Résumé

This paper offers a pragmatic account of two wh-questions in French used non-canonically - c’est quoi, ce N and qu’est-ce que constructions. It is claimed that in this non-canonical use, both constructions express surprise. As these constructions may be syntactically ambiguous between an information-seeking reading and a surprise reading, it is expected that the two readings differ in terms of prosody. This hypothesis is supported by the results of a production experiment. Experimental evidence shows significant prosodic differences between syntactically similar information-seeking questions and surprise questions. Surprise questions exhibit an increase in lengthening, slower speech rate and less frequent rising final contours.

Domaines

Linguistique

Dates et versions

hal-03133878 , version 1 (07-02-2021)

Identifiants

Citer

Agnès Celle, Maud Pélissier. Surprise questions in spoken French. Linguistics Vanguard : a Multimodal Journal for the Language Sciences, 2022, 8 (2), pp.287-302. ⟨10.1515/lingvan-2020-0109⟩. ⟨hal-03133878⟩
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