Pre-focal Rephrasing, Focal Enhancement and Post-focal Deaccentuation in French Marion Dohen & Hélène Lœvenbruck Institut de la Communication Parlée UMR CNRS 5009, INPG, Univ. Stendhal, Grenoble, France {dohen; loeven}@icp.inpg.fr Abstract This study aims at better describing the acoustic correlates of contrastive focus in French. A corpus was recorded from a male native speaker of French. It consisted of sentences with a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure under four conditions: focus on each phrase (S,V,O) and broad focus. The focal, pre-focal and post-focal constituents were studied separately. The acoustic analysis showed that: a) the pitch of the focal constituent rises, b) that of the surrounding constituents decreases, c) the duration of the focal syllables and of the pre-focal syllable increases, the onset of the focal constituent increasing the most, d) the pre-focal sequence is rephrased, e) the post-focal sequence is deaccented. 1. Introduction 1.1. Aim Different types of focus have been described in the literature. The present study deals with contrastive focus and the way it is conveyed by prosody in French. In a recent investigation, we studied visible articulatory correlates of prosodic contrastive focus for one speaker. Some acoustic characteristics of the focused constituents were examined in parallel. They were in agreement with other reports in the literature. The present paper aims at providing a more detailed description of the melodic, rhythmic and phrasing correlates of prosodic contrastive focus for this same speaker. More specifically, this study puts forward a number of newly observed phenomena especially on the pre-focal constituent. 1.2. Background 1.2.1. What is contrastive focus? By contrastive focus we mean the selection by the speaker of a given constituent of the message to be underlined as opposed to another constituent in a paradigmatic comparison (for references see 2.). Contrastive focus is one type of narrow focus. In French, contrastive focus can either be signaled syntactically (the prominent word or phrase is put forward through a syntactic focus construction: a cleft sentence) or prosodically (the prominent word or phrase is put forward through prosodic features such as fundamental frequency (F0), duration and/or intensity). These two ways of signaling focus can be combined, as put forward by Féry in [1]. 1.2.2. Description of the model of prosody used This study was conducted using a phonological model of French prosody. Many phonological models of the prosodic structure of French have been proposed ([2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] inter alia). Jun & Fougeron’s model was used in the present study ([5, 6]). This model agrees with most descriptions of French intonation and uses a transcription system consistent with the widely used ToBI framework ([11]). It features two hierarchical prosodic units. The lower is the Accentual Phrase (AP, right demarcated by the primary stress (H*) and sometimes marked by an initial LHi (Low- High) tonal sequence called the secondary accent). The default tonal pattern of the AP is /LHiLH*/ as realized on the second AP of Figure1a). The higher prosodic unit is the Intonational Phrase (IP) which can preempt the AP level. E.g., if an AP is IP-final, H* is replaced by the boundary tone of the IP (L% or H%) as shown in the last AP of Figure 1. Pitch (Hz) Figure 1: F0 trace for an IP including 3 APs. The utterance was {[Romain] AP [ranima] AP [la jolie maman] AP } IP (‘Romain revived the good-looking mother.’). 2. Description of the acoustic correlates of contrastive focus in French in the literature Previous studies of contrastive focus in French have reported several effects on the acoustic characteristics of the focused constituent and its neighbors (e.g. [3, 5, 9, 12, 13, 14]). We will summarize some of the findings. First, as concerns F0, it has been shown that the focused constituent is marked by a sharp F0 rise followed by a fall. The F0 peak is often aligned with the first syllable but not always. The post-focal constituent has been described as deaccented, i.e. displaying a reduced pitch range with no F0 peaks. Fewer studies have examined the acoustic consequences of focus on the pre-focal constituent. In [14] it is suggested that F0 peaks in this position are lowered. As concerns rhythmic correlates, it has been reported that duration increases on the focused constituent as a whole. More locally, the duration of the syllable bearing the focus usually increases and the onset consonant of the focused constituent is often longer. Contrary to what is found for F0, the duration of the post-focused constituent does not seem to be affected (the post-focused constituent is not dephrased). INTERSPEECH 2004 - ICSLP 8 th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing ICC Jeju, Jeju Island, Korea October 4-8, 2004 ISCA Archive http://www.isca-speech.org/archive 10.21437/Interspeech.2004-296