Perceived phrasing in French

Abstract

Studies of prosodic structure in French have tended to concentrate on production in order to identify what levels of phrasing speakers differentiate. But what are listeners hearing? The chapter details the examination of some specific structures (dislocations and focused phrases) to see whether listeners’ perceptions align with the prosodic structures that have been proposed. The approach used is Rapid Prosody Transcription, in which untrained listeners are asked to identify words they perceive as prominent or places where they perceive a break in the flow of speech (phrasal boundary). Descriptions of French agree that prominences occur either initially or finally in the smallest-sized phrase. While the majority of locations where listeners marked boundaries were perceived as preceded by a prominent word, because more prominences than boundaries were marked these did not necessarily co-occur with boundaries. Dislocated words were perceived as both prominent and separated from the main clause by a boundary.