Prosodic phrasing of SVO sentences in French

Avanzi, Mathieu [UCL] Christodoulides, George [UCL] Delais-Roussarie, Elisabeth [Université Paris Diderot]

In the literature on prosody/syntax interface, syntactic information is usually considered as playing an important role in deriving the prosodic phrasing of an utterance. NP subjects, for instance, have often been claimed to phrase independently from the VP. It has nevertheless been shown that metrical factors could have an impact on phrasing, and that NPs could be phrased in the same prosodic phrase as the VP, or that the verb could be phrased with the subject. Several methods were used to measure metrical weight: number of syllables, of prosodic words, syntactic branchingness, etc. In order to determine which factors are more important, and how the all interact, we evaluate the weight that different metrical predictors have on prosodic phrasing. This is done by analyzing the phrasing of SVO structures in 200 sentences extracted from various French corpora. From the observation of the data that were semi-automatically annotated, it appears that subjects can be phrased independently or in the same prosodic phrase as the VP, and that objects are rarely isolated from the verb. The analysis reveals interesting results regarding the effect of articulation rate and number of syllables, whereas syntactic-branchingness didn’t show any effect.