Investigating phrasing levels in French : Is there a difference between nuclear and prenuclear accents?

The goal of this paper is to determine whether there is a formal difference between high-ending nuclear (IP-final) and prenuclear accents in French. We compared the different accentual and phrasal categories by analyzing, among the other things, the tonal and temporal characteristics of their tonal targets as well as durational characteristics of the target syllables. The hypothesis tested is that nuclear accents differ from prenuclear ones in terms of formal characteristics of the tonal movement which cannot be explained, for instance, by invoking the presence or absence of an upcoming tone. We show that both alignment and scaling differences can be found between the two accents types, thus motivating a contrastive phonological analysis. The implications for a hierarchy of prosodic levels will also be discussed