Abstract
Occitan and French are two Gallo-Romance languages that have been in a diglossic situation in southern France for centuries. This close contact has led to interference at all levels, including prosody. This chapter presents results from a research project on prosodic structure and intonation in this contact situation. On one hand, Occitan has adopted the Accentual Phrase (AP), the basic phrasing unit of French, which may contain more than one lexical word and is characterized by a tonal bipolarity: it obligatorily ends in a (pitch) accent, and an initial rise may optionally mark its left edge. On the other hand, southern French recalls Occitan in its rhythmic patterns and relics of lexical stress. As far as intonation is concerned, most contours are common to both languages in statements and questions. However, statements of the obvious show different nuclear configurations in Occitan and in northern French; in southern French, the Occitan contour is also used, but when contact with Occitan is lost, northern-like contours may appear. Yes–no questions are mainly rising in both languages, but overt interrogative markers may license the use of falling contours. In wh-questions, while Occitan uses mainly falling contours, northern French has both rising and falling ones; southern French shows an intermediate situation, tending to one or the other pole as a function of the intensity of contact with Occitan. After describing the language contact situation and offering some background information about Occitan and French prosody, this chapter presents our findings on the prosodic structure and intonation of both languages, highlighting in particular the consequences of their mutual contact.
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Notes
- 1.
This map gives the names of the locales in Occitan. In this chapter we will use the official French names Lacaune for La Cauna and Toulouse for Tolosa (as well as Mussidan for Moissídan, which is located 35 km West of Peirigús/Périgueux).
- 2.
Still, the Cisalpine and (non-standard) Aranese peripheral dialects do have proparoxytones (Pojada 2010).
- 3.
- 4.
Exceptionally, data from Sichel-Bazin’s (2009) corpus have been included for demonstration.
- 5.
Most of the contexts used in the French and Occitan intonation questionnaires and part of the data can be consulted online on the website of the Interactive Atlas of Romance Intonation (Prieto et al. 2010-2014): <http://prosodia.upf.edu/iari>.
- 6.
The survey points in the Occitan-speaking territory are circled in Fig. 4.1.
- 7.
Since the concept of lexical stress does not fit the prosodic system of French (see Sect. 4.2.1), all final syllables of lexical words and multisyllabic function words whose nucleus was not schwa were also regarded as potentially stressed for comparison purposes.
- 8.
For the PP we followed the definition proposed by Selkirk (1981: 126), for the ip/IP we took into account the possibilities of internal restructuring put forth by Nespor & Vogel (1986/2007: 197). ±
- 9.
We thank Philippe Martin for explaining that it is not optimal to calculate differences in mean intensity in decibels and mean F0 in semitones since both are measured on a logarithmic scale. These values constitute thus an approximation to variations in intensity and F0.
- 10.
Some speakers did not respond to all situations and some gave more than one response for the same context; that is why the number of utterances is not exactly 200.
- 11.
The figures contain waveform, spectrogram and F0 contour of the utterances, as well as a ToBI annotation mainly following the principles of Sichel-Bazin et al. (2014) for Occitan and Delais-Roussarie et al. (2014) for French, with tonal labels, phonetic transcription by syllables (lexical stress is annotated even if not realized), orthographic transcription by APs and phrasing break indices (0 corresponds to the end of a function word, 1 an unstressed lexical word, 2 an AP, 3 an ip, and 4 an IP).
- 12.
The notion of foot used here corresponds more to Di Cristo’s (2011) unité tonale (UT, Tonal Unit) than to Selkirk’s (1978) French foot, which generally consists of only one syllable. For the co-existence of left-headed and right-headed feet in French, see Goad & Buckley (2006).
- 13.
In this figure and the following ones, σs and σw stand for strong and weak syllables, respectively; parentheses indicate the edges of feet, square brackets the edges of APs and braces the edges of IPs; LHi represents an initial rise, LH*, H* and !H* AP-final pitch accents, and H% an IP-final boundary tone.
- 14.
Although Jun & Fougeron (2002) do not mention feet in their prosodic account of standard French, the variability we encountered is in line with their results, which show that in long words or long clitic sequences several rhythmic rises may appear AP-internally and align with different syllables.
- 15.
The concept of “stressed syllable” must be understood here as a lexical specification for stress, not a property of the surface realization.
- 16.
The only exception is IA_Oc, where the effect was less significant for F0 [F(3,264)=4.958, p<.01] and not significant for intensity [F(3,264)=1.833, p=.141].
- 17.
An exception is FA_SF for intensity.
- 18.
Sichel-Bazin (2009) uses the LH+L* L% label for this nuclear configuration in order to clarify the alignment of the rise with the preaccentual syllable. In the notation used here (HL* L%), we follow the proposition of Sichel-Bazin et al. (2014), leaving out the first L target: in all pitch accents whose first target is H, the rise starts regularly at the beginning of the preaccentual syllable. Sichel-Bazin (2009) already notes that when this nuclear pitch accent is preceded by an initial rise LHi, the first L target of the nuclear rise is not realized, suggesting that it may be considered an artifact of the spreading of a default initial low tone.
- 19.
This example is extracted from the corpus of Sichel-Bazin (2009). The context provided in order to induce speakers to make disapproval statements was as follows: “You and your wife are invited for dinner. You want to take something to give to your hosts, but you are not sure what. Your wife proposes that you take some wine from Germany, but you feel that it would not please your hosts. Tell your wife that you are not going to bring them wine from Germany.”
- 20.
This notation differs from that used in Delais-Roussarie et al. (2014) and Sichel-Bazin et al. (2014), where the pitch accent is labeled H+H*. The H*L notation, however, denotes more clearly that statements of the obvious as well as disapproval statements present rising-falling configurations and that the difference is a matter of alignment rather than height of the accented syllable.
- 21.
The context provided to induce speakers to make statements of the obvious was as follows: “You are talking with your neighbor and you have just explained that a mutual friend is pregnant. Your neighbor asks you who the father is. You are astonished that she would ask you, since everybody knows the father is Jòrdi (Occitan) / Julien (French), your friend’s husband/boyfriend. How do you reply to your neighbor’s question?”
- 22.
More precisely, in Occitan wh-words may appear in situ in echo questions only. Nevertheless, we detected instances of information-seeking questions with wh-words in situ in the spontaneous speech of children who have (southern) French as their first language and learn Occitan in a bilingual primary school.
- 23.
It should be borne in mind that subjects from Lacaune show a higher mean age (73.4 years for La_Oc, 63.8 years for La_SF) than those from Toulouse (20.4 years) or Lille (27 years), which could also be an explanation for this conservative tendency.
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Sichel-Bazin, R., Buthke, C., Meisenburg, T. (2015). Prosody in Language Contact: Occitan and French. In: Delais-Roussarie, E., Avanzi, M., Herment, S. (eds) Prosody and Language in Contact. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45168-7_5
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