Accent and metre in French

Abstract

There is currently no generally accepted theory of metre in French such as the one available for English. Students of French verse-texts look to linguists in vain for a clear decision-procedure for the metrical description of French verse. This essay attempts to derive such a decision-procedure from a historical testing of the hypothesis that the word in French has a prosodic identity and that metre in French can be seen as a structure which orders that identity.

Quantitative verse in a Quantity-Insensitive language: Baïf's vers mesurés

“…This analysis lends support toPensom's (1993) claims that the matching of accent and ictus is normal throughout the history of French verse texts.…”

“…Thus, many of Baif's vers mesures were intended to be set to music in a strict fashion where a long syllable is always interpreted as a minim, or half note, and a short is set as a crochet, or quarter note (cf. Pensom, 1993). This rigidity of form and its characteristic homophony (where all voices sang the same syllable at the same time) was indeed revolutionary in French Renaissance music and many scholars of the Renaissance focus on his chansons mesurees a Vantique as Baif's principal contribution to the history of French verse (Walker, 1948;Le Hir, 1956;Terry, 1966).…”

Vers une modélisation de l'accentuation du français: première partie

“…Mais il y a mieux encore. Les recherches effectuees par Pensom (1993) revelent une presence tres ancienne de l'accentuation initiale dans la metrique du francais, qui remonte a vrai dire bien au-dela du xix c siecle, puisque l'auteur cite, outre TAlceste' de Lully et 'Phedre' de Racine, des textes plus anciens encore comme 'Le Roi de Navarre' et 'La Chanson de Rolland'. On serait tente d'en conclure que l'accent initial a toujours ete present en francais, sous une forme plus ou moins marquee.…”

“…Pour quelques chercheurs (Pasdeloup, 1990;Di Cristo et Hirst, 1993), l'accent initial est envisage comme un accent secondaire dont la fonction majeure est de participer a la regulation du rythme des enonces et dont l'occurrence peut etre predite sur la base de regies 'rythmo-tactiques' qui devraient egalement prendre en compte, dans le cadre d'une approche eurythmique unificatrice, l'accentuation nucleaire et l'accentuation finale de syntagme. Cette maniere de concevoir l'accent initial serait a rapprocher de celle qu'adoptent d'autres auteurs qui preferent parler en ce cas de contretonique (Pope, 1934;Pensom, 1993) ou de contre-accent (Garde, 1968, Milner et Regnault, 1984. En fait, le probleme que soulevent ces travaux concerne principalement l'existence d'un accent secondaire en francais (Rigault, 1976) et son interpretation phonologique (Hirst et Di Cristo, 1984;Verluyten, 1984;Milner et Regnault, 1987;Lyche et Girard, 1995).…”

A Prosodic Model for Text-to-speech Synthesis in French

“…This traditional conception must be reexamined in the light of new findings indicating that French has evolved considerably and is still in an ongoing state of change. The two most noticeable manifestations of this evolution, so clearly demonstrated by F6nagy (1980), concern the loss of strict word-final accent and the generalization of word-initial accent, a tendency which is particularly pronounced today but is probably very old (Pensom, 1993). The combined occurrence of these two tendencies can lead to the realization of "accentual bridges" in which only the first syllable of the first word and the last syllable of the last word are accented, as in "la majeure paTtie" (the major part), "politique erranger( e)" (foreign politics), etc.…”