"Non-conclusive" Slopes in French: First Results
Résumé
Delattre's famous discussion on the French intonation patterns (1966) still remains a reference work and is taken up in various papers (e.g. Autesserre & Di Cristo 1972, Di Cristo 2004, 2010, Martin 1987, 2009, Portes et al. 2007, Rossi 1999, Roméas 1992). We report here relevant observations for studying minor continuation (mC) and major continuation (MC) in French, in Delattre's terms. These observations were obtained in an ongoing project about non-conclusive prosodic patterns in French and in English. We specifically discuss slope variations in semitones concerning two kinds of non-conclusive configurations, at the syntactic and discourse levels respectively: (i) the final segment of a subject NP in an assertive sentence, followed (CIA) or not (CIS) by another sentence; (ii) the final segment of A, in a two clause utterance AB, where A and B are assertive clauses connected by an discourse relation, marked (CAO) or not (CAP) with a conjunction.