Typological Variations in the Realization of the French Accentual Phrase

In this paper, we examine certain aspects of the French Accentual Phrase (AP) produced by monolingual Parisian and L2 speakers of French and discuss the implications language contact may have on our knowledge about the French prosodic system. We study the same text read by four monolingual Parisian speakers and two groups of different L2 speakers: four Central Africans and four Swiss Germans. The data are semiautomatically processed, and three prosodic features are analyzed: metrical weight of the realized APs, respect of AP-restructuring rules and distribution of sandhi phenomena. Our findings suggest that the prosodic systems of L2 speakers of French are closer to word prosodic systems than the system of Parisian French speakers: the former produce shorter APs than the latter, tend to allow accentual clashes and to avoid sandhi phenomena beyond their APs boundaries.