In this paper, we study the intonational patterns observed in learners' productions in order to evaluate what motivates the deviations observed: systemic differences between the learners' L1 and the L2, differences in phonetic implementation, etc. The analysis consists of a crosscomparison of the intonation of yes-no questions in French, English and English as an L2. It is based on five informationseeking yes-no questions that were extracted from the AixOx corpus, which contains a set of 40 texts that were read by 10 native French speakers, 10 Native English speakers and 20 French learners of English. The analysis of the data showed that the differences between native and non-native speakers do not affect the form of the nuclear contour. It mostly shows that French speakers of English have a tendency to assign a rising pitch movement at the end of any prosodic words, which leads to a clear difference in rhythm.
This paper focuses on rising contours in English read speech. Our hypothesis is that they are very few in this particular speech style. This is confirmed by quantitative and qualitative analyses, conducted on a corpus of read speech by native English speakers with a standard British English accent. The main result of the quantitative analyses is that out of 1076 tone units, 82% (whether final or not) are uttered with a falling contour, which is much more than could be expected. The qualitative analyses consisted in a thorough examination of the intonation contours in relation with the syntactic characteristics of our data, as well as an analysis of the pragmatic functions of the contours. They allow us to revisit the generally accepted idea that falling contours are associated with final statements and rises with yes-no questions and continuation. We show that the tonal sequence fall plus fall is by far the most common in read speech, whatever the syntactic structure, except for enumerations. Contrary to what is stated in the literature, the main function of rising contours is not to indicate non-finality and continuation, but rather to convey attitudes, at least in read speech.
Les travaux sur la prosodie datent de bien avant la création d'un laboratoire CNRS en 1972. En 1962, Georges Faure, alors assistant de phonétique anglaise au département d'anglais de l'Université de Provence, est nommé professeur de phonétique et fonde l'Institut de Phonétique Générale et Appliquée. Georges Faure, qui venait de publier aux éditions Didier sa thèse d'état Recherches sur les caractères et le rôle des éléments musicaux dans la prononciation anglaise (Faure, 1962), avait fait un séjour dans les années 30 à University College London, auprès des professeurs D. Jones et J.L. Firth. A son retour en France, il publie un Manuel Pratique d 'Anglais Parlé (Faure, 1948), dans lequel il présente un nouveau système de transcription de l'intonation anglaise, système qu'il développera par la suite dans son travail de thèse. Dwight Bolinger, un des spécialistes de l'intonation les plus renommés du monde, consacrera, en 1966, vingt pages à un compte-rendu élogieux du livre de Faure dans la prestigieuse revue Language.
Les travaux sur la réduction vocalique sont nombreux mais les études du
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