Fundamental Frequency and Regional Variation in Lifou French

Abstract

This study presents two experiments aimed at investigating tune-to-text alignment and pitch scaling in Lifou French, a variety spoken by bilingual speakers of French and Drehu. Descriptions of New Caledonian French have focussed on language use of European descendants or the variety spoken in the urban region, neglecting emergent varieties spoken by the indigenous population in rural areas, like the island Lifou. Due to the reduced inventory of pitch accents, dialectal variation in French intonation has proved to be difficult to detect, which has led to the assumption that French has a relatively homogeneous intonation system across its varieties. This study shows that fine-grained phonetic differences in speaking tempo and at the level of tonal alignment as well as in the scaling of AP-final peaks can be attributed to dialectal variation.

Prominence marking in an edge-prominent language - the case of Drehu

“…This means that apart from optional Drehu language classes all other subjects are taught in French and pupils follow the metropolitan school curriculum. Field work observations suggest that today almost all speakers, especially younger generations, are bilingual in French and Drehu (Torres, Fletcher & Wigglesworth 2020).…”

Weight sensitivity and prominence in Laurentian French

“…French additionally includes an optional phrase-initial pitch peak, often realised on the first syllable of the leftmost lexical word (for variation in initial pitch peak alignment, see e.g. Jun & Fougeron 2002;Welby 2006;Torres, Fletcher & Wigglesworth 2020). If no more than one pitch peak can be realised, as in shorter phrases, it is the final one that is preserved (Jun & Fougeron 2002).…”

Pitch range modulations in an edge-marking language

“…Figure 1 shows a schematic representation of two F0 contours, one displaying continuous downstep (solid line), while the other shows downstep blocking (dashed line). For example, it has been shown that in Hexagonal and Lifou French, an intermediate phrase (ip) boundary is triggered when there is a major syntactic break between a noun and a verb phrase, leading to a blocking of downstep [4,11,12]. Similarly, studies about Tokyo Japanese have shown that a syntactic (left-)boundary blocks downstep [13,14].…”