Rhythm, accentuation and final lengthening in French

Abstract

Following tradition and for the sake of convenience in contrasting French with other languages, much of the research and theory have assumed that French has a stress located on the last full syllable of every lexical word, an “accent de mot intrinsèque” (Rousselot, 1924). Lexical words are opposed to function words, such as articles and auxiliaries, which do not have a potentially stressable final syllable (Garde, 1968). In continuous speech, the “accent de mot” or word accent of a number of lexical words is often not fully realized, or not realized at all, due to modifications dictated by the larger patterns of the speech measure or phrase (a phenomenon not particular to French, Heffner, 1950:228). Only the last syllable of the last word in a group of words, lengthened and often superimposed with a fundamental frequency (Fo) rise or a Fo peak as the expression of continuation, is regularly perceived as prominent, giving rise to the so-called “accent de groupe” (Delattre, 1966:75). There is no clear cut definition of this “groupe”. A group generally constitutes a unit of meaning, a sense-group. The same sentence can be chunked into more or less units of meaning, depending on the rate of speaking and on the speaker (Grammont, 1914; Coustenoble and Armstrong, 1934; Delattre, 1966:65; Vaissière, 1974:216; Vaissière, 1989; see also Hirst & Di Cristo, 1984). Prominence can be perceived also at the beginning of the word, as a consequence of emphasis (Grammont, 1914), of the “accent intellectuel” (Marouzeau, 1934; Roudet, 1910), as a regular characteristic of professional announcers (Leon, 1971; Fonagy & Fonagy, 1976), and in certain dialects (Fouché, 1936; Carton, 1976).