On the role of glottal stop : from boundary marker to correlate of focus
Résumé
Cross-linguistically, word-initial or word-final glottalisation is commonly used to mark prosodic boundaries. In Italian and French glottal stops can occur in the presence of boundaries or pauses, and some authors have also stated that they are common before prosodically prominent words. This latter observation suggests a link between informative prominence (linguistic focus) and glottalisation: the aim of our study is to test this hypothesis, by systematically comparing utterances produced in two situations, focus vs background. The analysis is conducted on a corpus of task-elicited speech produced by two groups, Italian and French (15+15 speakers and 2069 observations in total). We identified the presence of word-initial and word-final glottalisation, and then counted its occurrence in two different informative contexts, focus vs. background. Our data confirmed that glottalisation is much more likely to happen when the phrase is under narrow focus, both in Italian and French.
Domaines
LinguistiqueOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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