When syntax meets prosody: tonal and duration variability in French Accentual Phrases

International audienceThough two levels of phrasing are generally accepted for French, a large degree of intra-speaker variability in the amount of preboundary lengthening is generally found within the lowest level (the Accentual Phrase or AP). A question that still remains to be answered is whether this source of variability is merely due to speech rate fluctuations or to the existence of an additional level of phrasing ranked between the AP and the Intonation Phrase. This paper examines the effect of syntactic boundary strength on two phonetic correlates of boundary marking in French, for the AP level. Specifically, preboundary lengthening and tonal cues associated to four boundary levels are investigated through duration and f0 measures. Results show that the alignment of the AP boundary with a major syntactic break significantly modifies the degree of preboundary lengthening associated with the boundary. More precisely, AP-final syllables aligned with a NP/VP break are longer than AP-final syllables contained within a complex NP, though they are not marked by a stronger tonal boundary. Effects of speech rate on the tonal composition of the AP are also reported. We discuss the implications in the light of current models of French prosodic structure and the syntax/prosody interface