Journée de séminaire à l’occasion de la soutenance HDR de Cristel Portes

Programme

10h Brechtje Post (University of Cambridge, England)

10h Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (Université de Nantes & LLING)

11h Coffee break

11h30 Stefan Baumann (University of Cologne, Germany)

12h15 Lunch ILCB

14h Soutenance HDR, Cristel Portes (Aix-Marseille University & CNRS/LPL)

Présentation de Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (Université de Nantes & LLING)

Title: Faisceau d’indices phonétiques fins  et interprétation : le cas des questions non-canoniques

Abstract: En m’appuyant sur les résultats de différentes études menées dans le but de caractériser la prosodie associée à des formes particulières de questions (questions alternatives (Delais-Roussarie & Turco 2019), questions rhétoriques (Beyssade & Delais-Roussarie 2022), questions non-canoniques de surprise (Celle & Pélissier 2022)), je tenterai de montrer que l’interprétation d’un énoncé, notamment d’une question non-canonique, est le résultat d’une convergence d’indices de nature diverse (grammaticaux, mais aussi phonétiques, gestuels, situationnels). Au plan simplement prosodique, des détails phonétiques fins tels que le débit, le registre, les trajectoires des mouvements mélodiques ou la qualité vocale interviennent sans doute davantage que la forme et la distribution des contours intonatifs nucléaires.

Présentation de Stefan Baumann (Université de Cologne, Allemagne)

Title: Head movements and pitch accents as cues to information status in (L1 and L2) French

Abstract: Languages differ in the way prosodic prominence is implemented to mark information status or focus (e.g. Kügler & Calhoun, 2020). At a parallel level of description, gestures have been found to occur more frequently with new and inferable referents than with given ones (e.g. Debreslioska & Gullberg 2020). For foreign languages, previous research has shown that deaccenting given information may be challenging for speakers of languages which use this strategy less (e.g. Rasier & Hiligsmann 2007). As for gestures, there is evidence that learners tend to over-explicitly mark referring expressions such as pronouns (Yoshioka 2008). To our knowledge, an analysis of information status expressed through both prosodic and gestural prominence (here: head movements) in L2 speech has not been carried out so far. In the present study, 25 Catalan learners of French were video recorded giving a short description of their best friend in French. The recordings were annotated in terms of information status (RefLex Scheme, Riester & Baumann 2017), pitch accents (F_ToBI, Delais- Roussarie et al. 2015), perceived prominence (DIMA, Kügler et al. 2022) and head movement types and apexes (M3D, Rohrer et al. 2020). Results show that Catalan learners of French marked new and inferable information more than given information either with pitch accents alone or with a combination of pitch accents and gestures. Given information was generally marked as less prominent than new(er) information (more initial accents, fewer rises, lower level of perceived prominence, fewer head movements) but still received a large proportion of pitch accents. However, no difference between the types of accent and only slight differences between the types of head movement were found in non-given categories. The results of an analysis of the same task by 7 French native speakers are compared with the learners’ results. L1 French speakers mark the extreme values of information status (i.e. given and new) in a more pronounced way using more fine-grained differences in pitch accent type.

References: Debreslioska, S., & Gullberg, M. (2020). What’s New? Gestures accompany inferable rather than brand-new referents in discourse. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1935.

Delais-Roussarie et al. (2015) Intonational Phonology of French: Developing a ToBI system for French In S. Frota & P. Prieto (Eds.), Intonation in Romance. OUP.

Kügler, F., Baumann, S. & Röhr, C.T. (2022). Deutsche Intonation, Modellierung und Annotation (DIMA) – Richtlinien zur prosodischen Annotation des Deutschen. In: Schwarze, C. & Grawunder, S. (Eds.),

Transkription und Annotation gesprochener Sprache und multimodaler Interaktion (pp. 23–54). Narr. Kügler, F. & Calhoun, S. (2020). Prosodic encoding of information structure: A typological perspective. The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody (pp. 454–467). Oxford Academic.

Rasier, L. & Hiligsmann, P. (2007). Prosodic transfer from L1 to L2. Theoretical and methodological issues. Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française, 28, 41–66.

Riester, A. & Baumann S. (2017). The RefLex Scheme – Annotation Guidelines. SinSpeC. Working Papers of the SFB 732, vol. 14. University of Stuttgart.

Rohrer, P., Vilà-Giménez, I, Florit-Pons, J., Esteve-Gibert, N., Ren, A., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Prieto, P. (2020).

The MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling system. Yoshioka, K. (2008). Gesture and information structure in first and second language. Gesture, 8, 236–255.

Présentation HDR Cristel Portes

Titre : De la prosodie du discours au sens de l’intonation en dialogue(s)

Résumé : Même s’il est aujourd’hui moins controversé que cela ne le fut que l’intonation fait partie de la grammaire des langues, définir quelles sont les primitives de l’analyse intonative et comment elles contribuent au sens d’un énoncé reste un défi et un enjeu majeur. Mes recherches défendent l’idée de la ‘normalité linguistique’ de l’intonation et du sens de l’intonation en essayant d’en identifier la spécificité. Je défends l’idée d’une ‘double articulation’ des configurations intonatives en unités porteuses de sens (les accents mélodiques et les tons de frontière), elles-mêmes décomposables en unités sans signification (les tons). Je défends la thèse que le sens de l’intonation reflète la dimension intimement dialogique et interactionnelle du langage à plusieurs égards : 1) il indique quelles parties de l’énoncé font référence aux connaissances partagées par les interlocuteurs versus à l’enjeu spécifique de l’énoncé ; 2) il indique comment le locuteur assume et/ou attribue à l’interlocuteur les connaissances ou les croyances mises en jeu par la situation évoquée par l’énoncé ; 3) il suggère les attentes du locuteur concernant la forme que l’énoncé suivant devrait avoir, sa source et ses relations potentielles avec l’énoncé en cours.

Title: From the prosody of discourse to intonational meaning in dialogue(s)

Abstract: Even if it is less controversial today than it used to be that intonation is part of the grammar of languages, it is still a challenge and a major issue to define what the primitives of intonational analysis are and how they contribute to the meaning of the utterance. My research defends the idea of the ‘linguistic normality’ of intonation and intonational meaning by attempting to identify its specificity. I defend the ‘double articulation’ of intonational patterns into meaning-carrying units (pitch accents and boundary tones), which can themselves be broken down into meaningless units (tones). I argue that the meaning of intonation reflects the intimately dialogical and interactional dimension of language in several respects: 1) it indicates which parts of the utterance refer to the knowledge shared by the interlocutors versus to the specific issue at stake in the utterance; 2) it indicates how the speaker assumes and/or attributes to the addressee the knowledge and beliefs brought into play by the situation evoked by the utterance; 3) it suggests speakers’ expectations about the form that the following utterance should take, its source and its potential relations with the utterance in progress.

Jury/committee: Stefan Baumann, Claire Beyssade, Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie, Mariapaola D’Imperio, Martine Grice, Brechtje Post, Michael Wagner.