La prosodie de voilà en français dans le discours médiatique

Prosodic Correlates of Discourse Structure and Emotion in Discourse Markers that Preface Announcements of News

“…The variability in the choice of the phonological patterns might be linked to the multiple discourse functions conveyed by voilà donc. HiL* and HiL% could be linked to the function of 'topic conclusion' already found for the discourse marker voilà [10]; similarly, LHiL* could be linked to stronger topic conclusion [10][11] [12]. Indeed, topic conclusion is coherent with the placement of voilà donc at the end of the preface.…”

“…HiLH* pattern was not expected, because it didn't correspond to any of the previous phonological descriptions associated to the functions of voila and donc. A possible explanation for the occurrence of the early rise (L)Hi in the HiLH* pattern could be due to a need of highlighting the discourse marker [10]. The late rise LH* in the HiLH* pattern corresponds to the continuation rise described in the literature on French intonation [23] [24].…”

“…Our study focuses on two French discourse markers: voilà and donc when placed immediately before an announcement. In a corpus-based study, [10] found that when signaling topic conclusion, voilà is often produced with a falling f0. When signaling a strong topic conclusion (i.e., the speaker emphasizes the change to a new topic), voilà is characterized by a "bellshaped" f0 pattern (whose phonology will be discussed further along).…”

“…In a laboratory-recorded corpus of news announcements, we observed the realization of voilà and donc when combined into a larger two-part discourse marker. Based on [10], we hypothesize that speakers will more often use a bell-shaped pattern to signal emotional involvement on the matter discussed, i.e., when about to deliver emotional information (negative or positive news) compared to neutral news (i.e. "it's on the table").…”

“…Patterns ending with H* are the default but [14] assessed that when the H* part of the pitch accent cannot be realized due to following constraints, it is realized as L*, resulting in a LHiL* pattern. Thus, we assume the following patterns to be the transcriptions of the shapes described by [10]: HiL* (the falling pattern for topic conclusion), LHiL*(the bell-shaped pattern for stronger topic conclusion) and LH*(the rising pattern for persuasion). In our transcription, the marking of low tones differentiates between L1, the phrase-initial tone, and L2 the tone that precedes H*.…”