Stress in French, a multi-dimensional phenomenon

L’accent en français est un phénomène largement étudié, mais qui ne cesse de donner lieu à des hypothèses multiples, et dont la présence en français contemporain est même mise en question par de nombreux chercheurs. Ainsi subsiste-t-il dans ce domaine un important champ de travail scientifique, permettant d’élaborer et d’appliquer de nouvelles méthodes pour l'examen des données relevant de cette problématique avec l'objectif d’en tirer des conclusions novatrices. L'objectif est donc ici d'abord de bien délimiter le champ de travail, mais aussi en même temps d'étudier ce phénomène en corrélation ou en opposition avec l'ensemble de son contexte, c'est-à-dire ce qui est indissociable de l'accent aux niveaux aussi bien linguistique, physique, psychologique, culturel, social, pragmatique et cognitif – ce choix faisant l'originalité de la présente recherche.This PhD thesis is dedicated to stress in French.At the onset of our research work, we made the hypothesis that stress in French had a multi-dimensional nature, and were tied in with psychological, social, cultural, physiological, pragmatic, cognitive and linguistic factors. This hypothesis was challenged and validated after studying the corpus which we had pieced together.The scientific aim of this work was to seek new approaches and methods, and use them in the study of stress in the French language with correlation to or in opposition with its context.40 individuals representative by their physiological, social, cultural, linguistic, and psychological features took 5 different tests, which brought to light their speech patterns in various discursive situations. As anticipated by the initial hypothesis, the following came out of the study:4. there is a correlation between an individual’s psychological profile and the stress;5. there is a correlation between an individual’s social and economic background and the stress;6. there is a correlation between an individual’s linguistic background and the stress.The new discovery which came out of our studies shows a correlation between the individual’s psychological profile and the substance of the stress that he produces. It opens up new scientific field which wasn’t exploited before now and enables us to define an individual’s psychological profile based on his/her employed stress nature, as well as to define a stress substance using the individual’s psychological profile.The results obtained as part of our scientific research open up new possibilities in linguistics, pragmatic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic