Combining syntax and prosody to signal information structure: the case of French

Abstract

The work on informational structure (IS) in French highlights two types of markers: syntactic constructions and prosody, but often without looking at their interactions. The only studies that focus on both aspects have studied the prosody of syntactic constructions themselves without conceiving the complementarity of syntax and prosody. Our perspective is different and shows that syntax and prosody operate both independently and jointly to shape the informational structure of French. This paper relies on the extensive analysis of a 45 min radio debate, entirely annotated for IS, syntax and prosody. For IS, we used an annotation procedure that retrieves the implicit question under discussion (QUD) for each utterance, and defines its focus, focus domain, potential contrastive topic, topic and not-at-issue contents [1]. For syntax, we identified the constructions that have been proposed to encode IS: clefts, left and right dislocation, presentationals and subject-verb inversion [2]. For prosody, we used a phonological approach and the French ToBI framework [3]. The intersection of syntactic, prosodic and QUD analyses show that, indeed the syntactic constructions cited above encode topic, focus and background, that prosody alone encodes IS in sentences without these constructions, but crucially, that syntax and prosody interplay in conveying more subtle IS organization.