Keywords
Southern accents in french
Endangered languages
How to Cite
Abstract
In the south of France, the French language has developed in contact with Occitan in Provence and Languedoc, in contact with Catalan in Roussillon. This study reports on a first analysis of data collected in these regions, during a field survey carried out among speakers of Occitan and Catalan, in addition to French. In particular, we compared the prosody of yes/no questions ending in a word stressed on the penultimate syllable (e.g caserna ‘barracks’ in Occitan or Catalan, caserne with a pronounced final schwa in southern French). On the last two syllables of questions, it turns out that the rising-rising pitch pattern is the most common and, according to a perception experiment using prosody modification/resynthesis, that it is preferred to a falling-rising pattern by southern French listeners (without significant differences between Provence and Languedoc). A falling-rising pattern was also observed in Roussillon, possibly resulting from a prosodic transfer from Catalan to French. It was not associated with that region by southern French listeners who took part in a second perceptual experiment. Yet, the intonation patterns found may have different functions: the rising-rising pattern, especially, is most often interpreted as a confirmation query.
References
BLANCHET, P. (2004). L’identification sociolinguistique des langues et des variétés linguistiques : pour une analyse complexe du processus de catégorisation fonctionnelle. Workshop MIDL, Paris, 31–36.
BOERSMA, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5(9/10): 341–345.
BOULA DE MAREÜIL, P., RILLIARD,A., MAIRANO, P., LAI, J.-P. (2012). Corsican French questions: is there a prosodic transfer from Corsican to French and how to highlight it? 6 th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Shanghai, 418–421.
BOULA DE MAREÜIL, P., RILLIARD, A., LEHKA-LEMARCHAND, I., IVENT, F. (2013). Regional accents and languages in France: a contrastive prosodic analysis of Romance varieties. ISCA Workshop on Phonetics, Phonology and Languages in Contact (PPLC), Paris, 72–75.
BOULA DE MAREÜIL, P., RILLIARD, A., LEHKA-LEMARCHAND, I., MAIRANO, P., LAI, J.-P. (2015). Falling yes/no questions in Corsican French and Corsican: evidence for a prosodic transfer. In Delais-Roussarie, É., Avanzi, A., Herment, S. (Eds.), Prosody and languages in contact. L2 acquisition, attrition, languages in multilingual situations, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 101–122.
BOYER, H. (2004). Langue et nation : le modèle catalan de nationalisme linguistique. Mots, 74, 26–41. CONTINI, M., LAI, J.-P., ROMANO, A., ROULLET, S., DE CASTRO MOUTINHO, L., COIMBRA, R. L., PEREIRA BENDIHA, U., SECCA RUIVO, S. M. (2002). Un projet d’Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman. 1 st International Conference on Speech Prosody, Aixen- Provence, 227–230.
COQUILLON, A. (2005). Caractérisation prosodique du parler de la région marseillaise, Phd thesis, Université de Provence. DELATTRE, P. (1966). Les dix intonations de base du français. The French Review, 401: 1–14.
DI CRISTO, A. (1998). Intonation in French. In Hirst, D. J. & Di Cristo, A. (Eds.), Intonation systems: A survey of twenty languages, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 195–218.
FISHMAN, J. A. (1991), Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages, Multilingual Matters,Clevedon.
FÓNAGY, I. (2003). Des fonctions de l’intonation : Essai de synthèse. Flambeau, 29: 1– 20.
FONTANEY, L. (1991). À la lumière de la question. In Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (Ed.), La question, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, Lyon.
GAUVAIN, J.-L., ADDA, G., ADDA-DECKER, M., ALLAUZEN, A., GENDNER, V., LAMEL, L., SCHWENK, H. (2005). Where are we in transcribing French broadcast news? 9 th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Lisbon, 1665–1668.
GRUNDSTROM, A. & LÉON, P. (1973). Interrogation et intonation, Didier, Montreal. HÉRAN, F., FILLON, A., DEPREZ, C. (2002). La dynamique des langues en France au fil du XXe siècle. Population et Sociétés, 376: 1–4.
HUALDE, J. I. (2003). Remarks on the diachronic reconstruction of intonational patterns in Romance with special attention to Occitan as a bridge language. Catalan Journal ofLinguistics, 2: 181–205.
MARTINET, A. (1970). Éléments de linguistique générale, Armand Colin, Paris.
MARTÍNEZ CELDRÁN, E., FERNÁNDEZ PLANAS, A. M., CARRERA SABATÉ, J., ESPUNY MONSERRAT, J. (2005). Approche de la carte prosodique dialectale de la langue catalane en Catalogne. Géolinguistique — Hors série 3: 103–151.
MEISENBURG, T. (2011). Prosodic phrasing in the spontaneous speech of an Occitan French bilingual. In Gabriel, C. & Lleó, C. (Ed.), Intonational phrasing in Romance and Germanic, Cross-linguistic and bilingual studies, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 127–151.
PIERREHUMBERT, J. (1981). Synthesizing intonation. Journal of the Acoustical Society ofAmerica, 70: 985–995.
PRIETO, P. (2001). L’entonació dialectal del català: el cas de les frases interrogatives absolutes. In Bover, A., Lloret, M. R., Vidal-Tibbits, M. (Ed.), Actes del Novè Col·loqui de la North American Catalan Society, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, Barcelona, 347–377.
SAVINO, M. (2012). The intonation of polar questions in Italian: Where is the rise? Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 42(1): 23–48.
SICHEL-BAZIN, R. & ROSEANO, P. (2013). Català septentrional. In Prieto, P. & Cabré, T. (Eds.), L’entonació dels dialectes catalans, Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, Barcelona,102–123.
SICHEL-BAZIN, R., BUTHKE, C., MEISENBURG, T. (2012). La prosodie du français parlé à Lacaune : influences du substrat occitan. In Simon, C. (Ed.), La variation prosodique régionale en français, De Boeck, Brussels, 137–157.
SICHEL-BAZIN, R., MEISENBURG, T., PRIETO. P. (2015). Intonational phonology of Occitan: Towards a prosodic transcription system. In Frota, S., & Prieto, P. (Eds.), Intonational variation in Romance. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 198–234.
TUAILLON, G. (1996). Le domaine gallo-roman. In Tuaillon, G. & Contini, M. (Eds.), Atlas Linguistique Roman (AliR), Volume I présentation, Istituto poligrafico e zecca dello stato, Roma, 53–84.
VANRELL, M. M., MASCARÓ, I, TORRES-TAMARIT, F., PRIETO, P. (2013). Intonation as an encoder of speaker certainty: information and confirmation yes-no questions in Catalan. Language and Speech, 56(3): 163–190.
WOEHRLING, C. & BOULA DE MAREÜIL, P. (2006). Identification d’accents régionaux en français : perception et analyse. Revue Parole, 37: 25–65.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2014 Philippe Boula de Mareüil, Albert Rilliard, Fanny Ivent, Varvara Kozhevina
