Prosodic style-shifting as audience design

This chapter focuses on a female speaker of Swiss French from the Vaud canton, whose speech was studied in three contextual styles: formal, informal, and very informal. A positive correlation between the magnitude of pitch range and informality of style was found in this context, with great variation occurring when the subject switched interlocutors, indicating possible prosodic style-shifting. In this study we also briefly investigate phrase-final rise-fall intonation contours that seem to be characteristic of Vaudois spontaneous speech, and that were observed more frequently when the speaker was conversing with a close relative than when she was addressing the investigator.