The phonology and phonetics of prenuclear and nuclear accents in French

Abstract

The goal of this paper was to determine whether there is a formal difference between high-ending nuclear (IP-final) and prenuclear accents in French. After transcribing the relevant items, we then compared the different accentual and phrasal categories by analyzing, among the other things, the tonal and temporal characteristics of their tonal targets as well as durational characteristics of the target syllables. The hypothesis tested is that nuclear accents differ from prenuclear ones in terms of formal characteristics of the contour which cannot be explained, for instance, by invoking the presence or absence of an upcoming tone. We show that both alignment and scaling differences can be found between the two accents types, thus motivating a contrastive phonological analysis.