Speaking style prosodic variation : an 8-hours 9-style corpus study

This paper presents the results of a prosodic and phonostylistic analysis based on C-PhonoGenre, an 8-hour-long spoken French corpus, consisting of 9 speaking situations and (on average) 10 speakers per situation. The corpus was automa- tically segmented at the phonetic, syllabic and word levels (EasyAlign), and in larger pause-separated units. Part-of- speech annotation (DisMo) and prominent syllable detection (ProsoProm) was added automatically. The corpus was also manually annotated at the syllabic level for stylistic variants, such as post-tonic schwas, liaisons, elisions, disfluencies, audible breaths and noises. Acoustic analyses (ProsoReport, DurationAnalyser) provide more than 100 micro- and macro- prosodic measures, which we correlate with the phonostylistic features and the linguistic annotation. This analysis results in a contrastive, fine-grained prosometric description of phono- stylistic and situational variation, over 4 situational, gradual dimensions: audience, media, preparation, and interactivity. Further statistical analysis was carried out to explore the discriminative and explanatory power of combinations of prosodic measures