Prosodic phrasing in the spontaneous speech of an Occitan/French bilingual

The aim of this paper is to present a research project on the effects language contact has had on the intonation of Occitan and French, and especially on Southern varieties of the latter, which differ substantially from the Northern standard. The main hypothesis sees Occitan as a link between the Southern Romance languages on the one hand, which display lexical accents, and French on the other, which has replaced this type of prosodic marking by phrase-final prominences and optional phrase-initial rises. After analyzing preliminary recordings of an Occitan/French bilingual, we first report on the difficulties involved in working with spontaneous speech and then suggest similarities and differences in the prosodic organization of these two languages.