The Prosody of French Interrogatives
Résumé
Our aim is the study of the intonation of interrogatives in French. Interrogatives refer to a clause type, defined independently of illocutionary forces or actual speech act values in context. We restrict ourselves to wh-interrogatives and polar interrogatives, and we want to show that the theory proposed for declaratives by Beyssade et al. 2004a among others) readily extends to interrogatives. The localization of nuclear contours in declarative and interrogative utterances involves the same sensitivity to the partition of semantic content in both types. Moreover, the anchoring of nuclear contours exploits the pitch accent in declaratives, which gives prominence to the right edge of the nuclear domain, whereas it exploits the phrasal tone in interrogatives, which gives prominence to the left edge – identified with the lexical mark of the clause type.
Domaines
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