Prosodic boundary strength and focus marking in French: the need of a minimal intermediate phrase boundary at the right edge of focus regions

Though it is widely accepted that French do not signal focus through pitch accent assignment, the relationship between information structure and prosody is not well understood in this language. Among the strategies available for French speakers, prosodic phrasing has been recently put forward as playing a crucial role in focus marking. In this paper, we examined the effect of contrastive focus on the prosodic boundary strength located at the right edge of focus regions in semi-spontaneous speech. Specifically, we investigated the acoustic properties (preboundary lengthening and tonal cues) of final syllables associated to three levels of prosodic boundaries (i.e. Accentual Phrase, intermediate phrase and Intonation Phrase) that could be either contained within all focus utterances or associated with the right edge of narrow foci. Results showed that, by the way of narrow focus, an Accentual Phrase boundary was replaced by an intermediate phrase boundary while intermediate and intonation phrase boundaries were not affected by focus manipulation. The findings provide quantitative support for the view that contrastive focus is associated with a minimum prosodic size in French