How many levels in French? Focus marking as evidence for prosodic hierarchy

In contrast with stress-accent languages, French does not signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it largely exploits phrasing (Féry, 2001; D'Imperio et al. 2012). In this study, we used a new experimental paradigm to collect semi-spontaneous data and test the strength of the prosodic boundary located at the right edge of focused elements. In line with our minimum prosodic size domain hypothesis for contrastive focus in French, the results indicated that an ip-boundary is required at the right edge of a contrastively focused constituent