1 Correlates of phrasing in French and German from an experiment with semi-spontaneous speech 1 Caroline Féry, Robin Hörnig and Serge Pahaut Abstract Correlates of prosodic phrasing are examined in a comparative study between two languages, German and French. The material was elicited in a production experiment with 30 speakers of German and 20 speakers of French, who were asked to describe orally the spatial arrangement of toy animals on a table. Prosodic phrasing clearly correlates to syntactic structure in both languages, but tonal excursions correspond to pitch accents plus boundaries in German, and have a demarcative function in French. This difference is explained by the presence vs. absence of lexical stresses in the two languages. It is reflected in the position of tones, which are peripheral in the French prosodic phrases, but are associated with metrical heads in German, and also with final lengthening, which is systematic in French, but not in German. A final difference between the two languages is deaccenting, used in German, but not in French. 1. Introduction In this paper, we examine prosodic phrasing in two languages, French and German, from the perspective of the phonetic and phonological correlates without neglecting theoretical aspects. The material consists of pseudo-spontaneous speech, elicited in an experiment conducted in the same way in both languages. In this 1 This paper is part of the SFB 632 on information structure (projects C1 and D2). Many thanks to Kristin Irsig and Loïc Le Feur for conducting the experiment in Paris, and to Fabian Schubö and Verena Thießen for technical help. We are grateful to Kirsten Brock for checking our English. We also would like to express our gratitude to two reviewers, Klaus Kohler, and an anonymous one, as well as to the editors, Conxita Leo and Christoph Gabriel. Their thoughtful comments helped us to eliminate some shortcomings and to express the main points of the paper with more clarity.