Information Structure and the Alignment of Phrasal Features

It is generally accepted that utterances may be partitioned into information that is part of a background, in the sense of being shared by interlocutors, and information that is part of a focus, in the sense of being presented by the speaker as somehow novel. In French, the extent to which such a partition is reflected in the prosodic signal remains an open question. Jun & Fougeron (2000) showed that the region following a contrastively focused constituent may be marked by deaccentuation in both declaratives and polar interrogatives, while the region associated with contrastively focused material (henceforth the focal domain) is realized with a special prosodic contour (Hf) characterized by an f0 peak that is both higher and aligned later than a similar accent in a broad focus context. Féry (2001) further showed that the focal domain is typically phrased separately, while a syntactic subject is typically phrased separately regardless of its focus status. Finally, Dohen & Loevenbruck (2004) showed that the region preceding a focused constituent may be realized by a compression o the pitch range (or downstepping) in declaratives. It is not known, however, whether thèse findings generalize to wh-interrogatives, or whether the partitioning of information into background and focus is also marked by other prosodic features