Contrast is a fundamental linguistic mechanism that structures communication and is typically expressed through prosodic, syntactic, and lexical cues. In the following example, the subjects Marie and Paul are contrasted:
(1) Marie dévore les romans policiers, par contre Paul ne lit que des essais scientifiques. ‘Marie devours detective novels, by contrast Paul reads only scientific essays.’ (lit.)
Although French has a rich inventory of such cues, little is known about how speakers select and combine them, or how these processes vary across regional varieties of French.
This project investigates how prosodic differences between five varieties of French spoken in Switzerland, Belgium and France influence the marking of contrastive subjects. We hypothesize that “prosodically richer” varieties, characterized by a wider pitch span and greater flexibility in the placement of prominence (e.g. in Neuchâtel and in Liège), rely more heavily on prosodic cues. By contrast, varieties that are prosodically more constrained, exhibiting a smaller pitch span and less flexible accentual patterns (e.g. in Paris), may compensate by making greater use of syntactic cues (such as left dislocation or cleft constructions) or lexical cues (such as mais ‘but’ or par contre ‘on the other hand’).
A controlled production experiment will examine how speakers from five cities (Paris, Brussels, Liège, Geneva and Neuchâtel) realize prosodic prominence on contrastive subjects across three syntactic configurations (preverbal, left-dislocated and clefted), with or without a lexical cue. A complementary corpus study will analyze the frequency and interaction of syntactic and lexical cues in spontaneous speech, as well as the relationship between their distribution and discourse-pragmatic functions.
By combining experimental and corpus-based data, this project will provide the first comprehensive account of how regional prosodic systems influence the marking of contrast in French and, more broadly, their impact on syntax and the lexicon.
