Revue semestrielle de linguistique et littératures romanes

Écho des études romanes 2012, 8(1):151-165 | DOI: 10.32725/eer.2012.012

Prosodie et structure informationelle : la mobilité des noyaux prosodiques en français et en tchèqueFrench

Tomá¹ DUBÌDA
Université Charles de Prague

Prosody and information structure : the mobility of prosodic nuclei in French and Czech

The present article examines the part played by prosody in the information structure of the utterance. Proceeding from the framework of the Functional Sentence Perspective, as proposed by Vilém Mathesius in the 1920s and developed by other Czech linguists, we first study the mutual relationships between word order, information structure (theme vs. rheme), and nucleus position (final vs. non-final). In the subsequent analysis of a text sample (parallel French and Czech translation), we identify and categorise all cases where the prosodic nucleus is shifted from its unmarked position (i.e. final). Despite a comparable overall frequency in both languages, the distribution of non-final nuclei is different (apart from the category of direct address): in French nucleus shifts mostly occur in grammaticalised structures (such as syntactic dislocation), while in Czech they are more likely to signal information structure.

Keywords: French; Czech; Functional Sentence Perspective; prosody; prosodic nucleus; information structure; prosodic plasticity

Published: June 11, 2012  Show citation

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DUBÌDA, T. (2012). Prosodie et structure informationelle : la mobilité des noyaux prosodiques en français et en tchèque. Écho des études romanes, 8(1), 151-165. doi: 10.32725/eer.2012.012
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