Gradient prosodic correlates of phrasing in French

In its modest scale, the present paper advances theoretical claims about the prosodic structure of French, and, at the same time, shows how far these claims are corroborated by empirical results. Crucially, the experiments presented below show that prosodic structure is sensitive to several factors and is subject to variation, and that, ultimately, the grammar of prosody is to be conceived in a way that takes variation into account. French uses a combination of segmental and tonal cues to signal prosodic phrases, and differs in this respect from a language like English, which relies almost exclusively on tonal boundaries (Pierrehumbert 1980, Gussenhoven 1984). This paper studies the segmental aspects of phrasing and largely ignores the tonal ones (see e.g. Di Cristo 1998, Di Cristo & Hirst 1996, Fery 2001, Fougeron & Jun 1998, Jun & Fougeron 1998 Mertens 1993 and Rossi 1980 for a review of the tonal correlates of phrasing in French). It reports the results of an experimental study of three segmental correlates of phrasing: obstruent voicing assimilation (OVA), nasal-obstruent simplification (NOS) and liaison. It is shown first that these processes regularly take place inside a prosodic domain of the size of a phonological phrase (PhP or simply P), but two of them obstruent voicing assimilation and nasal-obstruent simplification are blocked across PhP boundaries, at least when this boundary originates from the presence of narrow focus (see below).