The aim of the chapter is to propose a ToBI transcription system for French, F_ToBI. The system is designed in such a way as to (i) be (surface) transparent and easily learnable by researchers working in different theoretical frameworks; and to (ii) make the exchange of data more feasible. It is couched in the Autosegmental Metrical framework and follows the usual ToBI conventions. This is to facilitate research in prosodic typology in particular within Romance, for which ToBI-style systems are often used. F_ToBI is designed to transcribe distinct intonation contours that are generally accepted in the literature on French intonation and which are supported by the analysis of empirical data. While it is inspired by existing theoretical accounts of French phrasing and intonation, it does not follow one single precursor, since its primary goal is to allow for an adequate and comprehensive transcription of French prosody in a cross-dialectal perspective.

Occitan is a threatened Gallo-Romance language in a diglossic contact situation with French in Southern France. To examine the extent of prosodic interference we proceeded to a comparative analysis of semi-spontaneous speech recorded with bilingual speakers in both languages and monolingual northern French speakers. The higher frequency of schwa syllables gives southern French rhythmic properties that recall Occitan. Both languages display Accentual Phrases, a prosodic unit that may contain more than one lexical word but only one final pitch accent, and an optional initial rise. However, in the bilinguals’ prosody, AP-internal rhythmic prominences denote a tendency to maintain remainders of Occitan lexical accent in their French, whereas they correspond to a weakening of word accent in Occitan under French influence.

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This chapter gives the first overall description of the prosodic organization of Occitan, a Gallo-Romance minority language spoken mainly in southern France. It presents the relevant units of the prosodic hierarchy and the main intonational contours associated with their semantic-pragmatic value, and proposes a transcription system for Occitan prosody (Oc_ToBI). The results stem mainly from the analysis of data in the central Lengadocian dialect, but dialectal variation is also taken into account thanks to the data of the Atlàs interactiu de l’intonacion de l’occitan (Prieto and Sichel-Bazin 2007-). In most of its territory, Occitan is in contact with French, with which it shares many prosodic properties, mainly the relevance of the Accentual Phrase and some intonational features such as preaccentual rises in nuclear accents. However, two subdialects show different interference phenomena: Aranese, which is in contact with Catalan and Spanish; and Cisalpine, with Piedmontese and Italian.