Contrastive marking in French dialogue: Why and how

Abstract

This experiment studies French-speaking adults ' preferencesfor prosodic marking (focal accent)

Focus marking asymmetries in Colloquial and Standard French: A stochastic optimality-theoretic account

“…Non-subject focus, on the other hand, is generally realized in its default position. This apparent argument asymmetry is empirically documented in a few studies: Vion and Colas (1995) report on a forced-choice task where native speakers judge clefts as more natural with subjects than with objects, Reichle (2014) provides data from a quantitative study in the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) demonstrating that subject clefts are significantly more frequent than object clefts, and more recently Féry (2013) presents a production task in which participants never produce clefts with object focus 3 . Two questions arise: (i) what is the strategy used in CoF to cope with the apparent restriction on grammatical subjects?…”

“…While English can shift prosodic prominence to match the position of focus, French is considered a less plastic language and is assumed to require the use of special syntactic constructions such as the c’est- cleft; a bi-clausal structure that expresses a single proposition into two separate clauses: a matrix clause and a relative-like clause (Lambrecht, 2001). This requirement is, moreover, argued to be mandatory under two specific contexts, illustrating two focus asymmetries: if the focus element is a grammatical subject (1), but not if it is a non-subject ( argument asymmetry), and if the focus element conveys a strong interpretation such as a correction or a contrast (2), but not if it simply provides information to a wh-question ( focus type asymmetry) (Vion and Colas, 1995; Katz, 1997; Hamlaoui, 2009; Skopeteas and Fanselow, 2010; Belletti, 2012). 1 Context: Qui est-ce-qui a ri?…”

“…To account for these marking patterns, many scholars have offered a categorical treatment of focus realization in French, treating the competition between canonical and cleft sentences as producing a single best output form given the grammatical function of the focused element and the focus-type being encoded (Lambrecht, 1987, 1994, 2001; Vion and Colas, 1995; Katz, 1997; Hamlaoui, 2009; Belletti, 2012), with Lambrecht even questioning whether SVO sentences do in fact constitute the canonical configuration in the language. Interestingly, the majority of these studies have either not used empirical methods to support their claims, or have used grammaticality judgements, and tend to restrict their examination to the colloquial (or spoken, demotic) variety of the language.…”

Phonology competes with syntax: experimental evidence for the interaction of word order and accent placement in the realization of Information Structure

“…Our aim is to integrate previous experimental work, which has either focussed on the phonological manifestation of Information Structure (e.g., Birch & Clifton, 1995), or on syntactic factors (e.g., clefting, Vion & Colas, 1995). We use magnitude estimation (Bard, Robertson, & Sorace, 1996;Cowart, 1997) to obtain acceptability judgments for contextualized sentences.…”