<i>Pourquoi</i>in Spoken French: Corpus-based function-form mapping

Myers, Lindsy L.; Pellet, Stéphanie

doi:10.1075/pbns.244.08mye

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This was to ensure that all participants, particularly the low-proficiency L2 speakers, understood the content words in the stimuli. Participants were also shown a list of 10 decontextualized sentences typical of informal spoken French (Myers, 2007), such as Où que tu vas? “Where are you going?” Y a le téléphone qui sonne “The phone’s ringing,” and T’as mal au genou?…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing Focus Structure in L1 and L2 French

Reichle

Birdsong

2013

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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This study examined the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by focus processing among first language (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners of French. Participants read wh-questions containing explicit focus marking, followed by responses instantiating contrastive and informational focus. We hypothesized that L2 proficiency would modulate nativelikeness in L2 processing. For the L1 and L2 groups, widespread word-long positive shifts reflected the processing of nouns receiving informational and contrastive focus. Nouns receiving contrastive focus showed an increased anterior negativity compared to informational focus for both groups. Second language proficiency modulated the amplitude of this negativity effect, and subgroup analyses of low- and high-proficiency L2 learners showed no significant effect of focus condition among low-proficiency learners. This modulatory relationship between L2 proficiency and nativelikeness of processing is consistent with the dynamic sequence of L2 ERPs observed for morphosyntactic processing and extends those findings to the syntax-pragmatics interface phenomenon of focus processing.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…F red . ); however, such pairings of focus structures are attested and are predicted to be felicitous by virtue of their corresponding focus structures (e.g., Lambrecht, 1994; Myers, 2007), and judgment data from native and L2 speakers support their felicity (Reichle, 2010a).…”

Section: Literature Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Focus Structure in L1 and L2 French

Reichle

Birdsong

2013

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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“…Wh -in-situ questions as in (1b) can be used as regular requests for new information [3] . They are not part of the prescriptive grammar, but are frequently attested, often but not exclusively in an informal register (Quillard 2000, Myers 2007). Questions of this form also occur as echo questions, ‘echoing’ the previous utterance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The prosody of Frenchwh-in-situ questions: Echo vs. non-echo

2020

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This study compares the prosodic properties of French wh-in-situ echo questions and string-identical information seeking questions in relation to focus. Thirty-six (12 $\times$ 3) wh-in-situ questions were embedded in dialogues designed to elicit (A) echo questions expressing auditory failure, (B) information seeking questions with broad focus or (C) information seeking questions with narrow focus on the wh-phrase, i.e. a focus structure similar to the one of echo questions. Analyses regarding the F0, duration and intensity of the utterances produced by 20 native speakers of French show clear prosodic differences between the three conditions. Our results indicate that part of the prosodic properties of echo questions can be attributed to the presence of narrow focus (A and C vs. B) while another part is truly characteristic of echo questions themselves (A vs. B and C). In combination with known differences regarding their pragmatics, semantics and syntax, this sets echo questions apart as a separate question type. At the same time, our results offer evidence for prosodic encoding of focus in French wh-in-situ questions, confirming and adding to existing claims regarding the prosody of focus marking in French on the one hand and the presence of focus marking in wh-interrogatives on the other.

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“…Massot (2008) catalogues numerous areas of variation, including for example the negation particle ‘ ne ’, which absence in speech is an extremely familiar aspect of colloquial French. Most relevant to the studies presented in this article is the complex system of interrogative forms, which different forms are governed by an intricate web of factors (see Myers, 2007), one of them being formality (Quillard, 2001; Coveney, 2002; Myers, 2007). Indeed, it is typically assumed that, for partial questions that include a wh-word and question only a portion of the proposition, an inverted form (i.e., wh -fronting with subject-verb-inversion) is restricted to StF and is still prevalent, for better or worse, in foreign language textbooks (Etienne and Sax, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account

Destruel

2015

French Language Studies

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This article investigates the grammatical realization of the notion of focus in Colloquial French and Standard French. Based on two production experiments, the article reveals three findings: (i) focus marking is not as categorical as previously acknowledged, (ii) focus marking asymmetry for subjects vs. non-subjects is only supported in CoF and (iii) there is no strict relationship between focus realization and interpretation in either variety. I develop a stochastic optimality-theory analysis, which explains the canonical-cleft sentence alternation in terms of prosody and expands on past literature by accounting for the variation observed both within and across language variety.

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Pourquoiin Spoken French: Corpus-based function-form mapping

Cited by 11 publications

References 15 publications

Processing Focus Structure in L1 and L2 French

Processing Focus Structure in L1 and L2 French

The prosody of Frenchwh-in-situ questions: Echo vs. non-echo

Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account

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