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In:Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 30, Frankfurt
Edited by Ingo Feldhausen, Martin Elsig, Imme Kuchenbrandt and Mareike Neuhaus
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15] 2019
► pp. 157–176

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Chapter 8
Compression in French

Effect of length and information status on the prosody of post-verbal sequences

 | University of Iowa
 | Goethe University Frankfurt
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.15.08des
Abstract
This paper sheds light on the conditions for post-focal and post-verbal compression in French canonical sentences. We report on a production experiment, which results suggest that arguments and adjuncts are phrased differently, and that length and information structure only exert a significant influence on the realization of adjuncts. We formalize these results in terms of phrasing, arguing that French, as opposed to English for instance, does not allow compression at any prosodic level, but only in syntactically motivated prosodic phrases. We motivate the variation in our data via optional phrasing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background on French prosody
  • 3.The production experiment
    • 3.1Hypotheses
      • Hypothesis 1.Arguments and adjuncts are phrased differently
      • Hypothesis 2.Long and short constituents are phrased differently
      • Hypothesis 3.Given and new/focused constituents are realized differently
      • Hypothesis 4.In French, if a given element is not at least the size of a Φ-phrase, it cannot be compressed
    • 3.2Participants
    • 3.3Materials and procedure
    • 3.4Data treatment & analysis
      • Prosodic transcription and measurements
      • Statistics
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Post-verbal constituent
    • 4.2Prosodic length
    • 4.3Information Status
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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