Prosodic systems in contact: Occitan and French
Occitan and French are two Gallo-Romance languages that have been in a diglossic situation in Southern France for centuries. Couched in an Autosegmental-Metrical framework, the present thesis analyzes the prosody of Occitan-French bilinguals in their two languages, as compared to that of Northern Fr...
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| Formato: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2015 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/321597 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/321597 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Occitan French Prosody Occità Francès Prosòdia 81 |
| Resumo: | Occitan and French are two Gallo-Romance languages that have been in a diglossic situation in Southern France for centuries. Couched in an Autosegmental-Metrical framework, the present thesis analyzes the prosody of Occitan-French bilinguals in their two languages, as compared to that of Northern French monolinguals or bilinguals whose Occitan is in contact with other languages (with Piedmontese and Italian, punctually with Catalan and Spanish). The contribution of this thesis is twofold: on the one hand, it provides the first description of the prosodic system of Occitan, which was an urgent task to complete, since native speakers are becoming rare; on the other hand, it shows how language contact has led Occitan and Southern French to converge into an intermediate prosodic system between Northern (standard) French and the other Romance languages like Catalan, Spanish or Italian. The data analyzed for this thesis are of two types: intonation questionnaires including 29 situations and fable summaries produced after listening to a recording in the target variety. We analyzed the intonation questionnaires of 81 Northern French speakers, 70 Southern French speakers and 58 Occitan speakers to compare the intonational phonology of these varieties and give a first approximation to intonational dialectal variation in Occitan. Our model for the interplay of phrasing and metrical structure was refined thanks to the observation of 62 fable summaries and 15 summaries were then selected for a cross-linguistic acoustic analysis. As far as intonational phonology is concerned, Occitan appears to align with the dominant language with which it is in contact. While the particular contours of Occitan for statements of the obvious and vocatives have been transferred to Southern French, very few divergences have been observed in other sentence types in France. By contrast, the Occitan dialects spoken outside of France present some different intonational patterns, which align with Catalan and Spanish in the case of Aranese Occitan, and with Italian and Piedmontese in the case of Cisalpine Occitan. In respect to prosodic phrasing and metrical structure, quantitative analyses of the data show that Occitan has adopted the Accentual Phrase (AP) of French as a domain for pitch accent distribution: in both Occitan and French, the syllable that receives phrasal stress, at most one syllable away from the right edge of the AP, is obligatorily marked by an increase in F0 (in prenuclear position), intensity and duration; an AP-initial pitch rise may be associated with secondary stress on the first syllable of the leftmost lexical word in the AP. However, the internal organization of the Accentual Phrase (AP) is different in Northern French and in the southern varieties. In Northern French, word stress was completely lost: primary stress is assigned post-lexically to the rightmost full syllable in the AP and APinternal words show no prominence at all. By contrast, in Occitan and Southern French, AP-internal words may display pitch movements, aligned with the syllable that bears word stress in Occitan and with the last full syllable of the word in Southern French. These results highlight the status of Occitan and Southern French as a bridge prosodic system within the Romance languages, presenting the metrical system typical of languages such as Catalan, Spanish, or Italian, but in which the adoption of the Northern French AP as domain for pitch accent distribution has somewhat weakened word stress, since its acoustic marking is optional inside APs. As a conclusion, the intonational phonology of Occitan tends to align with the dominant language. By contrast, we hypothesize that historically, while word stress was lost in Northern French, the metrical structure of Occitan was transferred to Southern French, retaining the general Romance organization in syllables, feet and prosodic words. |
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