Prosodic phrasing

This study presents two experiments aimed at investigating tune-to-text alignment and pitch scaling in Lifou French, a variety spoken by bilingual speakers of French and Drehu. Descriptions of New Caledonian French have focussed on language use of European descendants or the variety spoken in the urban region, neglecting emergent varieties spoken by the indigenous population in rural areas, like the island Lifou. Due to the reduced inventory of pitch accents, dialectal variation in French intonation has proved to be difficult to detect, which has led to the assumption that French has a relatively homogeneous intonation system across its varieties. This study shows that fine-grained phonetic differences in speaking tempo and at the level of tonal alignment as well as in the scaling of AP-final peaks can be attributed to dialectal variation.

This study advances a preliminary framework for conceptualising the prosodic nature and structure of Tiberian Hebrew (TH) represented by the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ through an analysis of an extant Ashkenazi cantillation tradition. The ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ (lit. "the senses of the reading [viz. Scripture]") are notations added by medieval scribes to the written text of the Hebrew Bible to preserve and transmit its oral performance. Modern prosodic theory and the musical concept of conjunct and disjunct melodic motion are used to demonstrate that the ṭaʿămê hammiqrāʾ have a highly structured iconic and intonational basis that organises the system and conforms substantially to Selkirk's (2000, 2009) cross-linguistic prosodic hierarchy. The intonation-based prosodic model proposed in this study offers a solution to the limitation Dresher (1994, 2013; see also Dresher and DeCaen 2018; DeCaen and Dresher 2020) encounters with the intonational phrase domain of his prosodic model, permitting an alternative analysis of so-called pausal forms as lengthened forms, which can occur at prosodic phrase boundaries regardless of pause. The intonation-based model is tested by assessing how accurately it reflects the cross-linguistic prosodic features of restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses. The results indicate that TH distinguishes three prosodic classes of relatives--prosodically marked restrictives, prosodically marked nonrestrictives, and prosodically undifferentiated relatives--findings that accord with Birkner's (2012) intonation-based study of the prosodic structure of German relative clauses.

Delais-Roussarie, Elisabeth; Post, Brechtje; Avanzi, Mathieu; Buthke, Carolin; Di Cristo, Albert; Feldhausen, Ingo; Jun, Sun-Ah; Martin, Philippe; Meisenburg, Trudel; Rialland, Annie; Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu & Yoo, Hi-Yon (to appear: 2014): “Developing a ToBI System for French”, in: Frota, Sónia and Prieto, Pilar (Eds.): Intonational variation in Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The aim of the chapter is to propose a ToBI transcription system for French, F_ToBI. The system is designed in such a way as to (i) be (surface) transparent and easily learnable by researchers working in different theoretical frameworks; and to (ii) make the exchange of data more feasible. It is couched in the Autosegmental Metrical framework and follows the usual ToBI conventions. This is to facilitate research in prosodic typology in particular within Romance, for which ToBI-style systems are often used.
F_ToBI is designed to transcribe distinct intonation contours that are generally accepted in the literature on French intonation and which are supported by the analysis of empirical data. While it is inspired by existing theoretical accounts of French phrasing and intonation – both within and outside the Autosegmental Metrical framework – it does not follow one single precursor, since its primary goal is to allow for an adequate and comprehensive transcription of French prosody in a cross-dialectal perspective.

"Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu; Buthke, Carolin & Meisenburg, Trudel (2012b): “The prosody of Occitan-French bilinguals”, in: Braunmüller, Kurt & Gabriel, Christoph (Eds.): Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 349-364.

Occitan is a threatened Gallo-Romance language in a diglossic contact situation with French in Southern France. To examine the extent of prosodic interference we proceeded to a comparative analysis of semi-spontaneous speech recorded with bilingual speakers in both languages and monolingual northern French speakers. The higher frequency of schwa syllables gives southern French rhythmic properties that recall Occitan. Both languages display Accentual Phrases, a prosodic unit that may contain more than one lexical word but only one final pitch accent, and an optional initial rise. However, in the bilinguals’ prosody, AP-internal rhythmic prominences denote a tendency to maintain remainders of Occitan lexical accent in their French, whereas they correspond to a weakening of word accent in Occitan under French influence."

"This dissertation explores the phonological representation and the phonetic realization of prosodic prominence in Persian. It comprises two related parts: the first part addresses prosodic phrasing in Persian sentences, while the second part deals with phonetic correlates of prosodic prominence by reporting conducted production and perception experiments. The phonological part is carried out within the framework of Prosodic Phonology, and aims at determining the prosodic structure of Persian from foot level, up to utterance level. By adopting Optimality Theory, it tries to explain how morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints together with prosodic markedness constraints form the prosodic structure of the language. It begins with foot level and suggests that in languages like Persian which have one non-iterative weight-insensitive edgemost stress per word, a single foot which is edge-aligned with the minimal Phonological Word best explains the prosodic pattern at word level. This part also focuses on prosodic differences between lexical words and weak function words (clitics) and shows that any attempt to describe the prosodic structure of Persian without addressing this crucial difference, will not be able to provide explanation for a wide range of phenomena. This study suggests that proclitics and enclitics behave asymmetrically in Persian: enclitics prosodize as affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. Next, it addresses the problem of weak function words which are not a part of their preceding or following XPs, and demonstrates how the phonological well-formedness constraints determine the direction of cliticization in these XP-external function words. It also deals with the issue of clitic clusters in Persian which was not explored in the previous works. Another contribution of this study is reclassification of so-called exceptionally initial-stressed words.
This dissertation also deals with the longstanding problem of Ezafe constructions and by reviewing previous proposals on the prosodic structure of these constructions, based on phonological evidence and phonetic observations suggests that each lexical word in an Ezafe construction maps onto a Phonological Phrase, and the Ezafe morpheme phrases with its preceding material to satisfy the phonological well-formedness constraint ONSET. The prosodic structure of XP-external clitics such as the Ezafe morpheme is explained by adopting a syntax-prosody interface constraint namely MAP-XP, that bans two sister XPs inside a single Phonological Phrase. This study proposes a ranking of OT constraints by which the prosodic structure of Ezafe constructions and other syntactic phrases such as DPs and VPs can be predicted and explained uniformly. It also proposes that the interaction between morphosyntax-phonology interface constraints and prosodic markedness constraints determine prosodic constituents of all levels and their heads, and other constraints require the heads of phonological phrases to be associated with audible accents. The rightmost Phonological Phrase in an Intonational Phrase is the head. This head associates with an accent which is perceived more prominently than the other accents. One further issue explored here is the fact that in lexicalized Ezafe constructions and also in the ones containing given/old information, some words may appear without audible accent.
The phonetic difference between final and non-final accents is the subject of the second half of this dissertation. Previous research on Persian has shown that the main acoustic correlate of prosodic prominence is f0. This study reports production and perception experiment results conducted in order to answer the question whether final (nuclear) accents are perceived more prominently than the other ones only because they are not followed by any other accent, or because they are phonetically different from the non-final (pre-nuclear) accents. The results of production experiments reveal that nuclear accented syllables have a lower f0 range, but a longer duration in comparison with pre-nuclear accented ones. Other parameters such as overall intensity, spectral tilt and vowel quality do not differ significantly in the two types of accents. Perception experiments reveal that native listeners can indeed distinguish the two types of accents without having access to the portion of the utterance that follows the final accent. This proves that the two types of accents are phonetically different. Perception tests also show that the difference between the shapes of f0 curves in the two types of accents is the main acoustic parameter that helps the listeners distinguish them from each other. In pre-nuclear accented words, the f0 peak is at the right edge of the metrically strong syllable, and the curve has a rising slope at this point. In these syllables, the peak may even occur on the initial syllable of the following word. However, in the syllables associated with nuclear accents, the f0 peak is located inside the syllable, and the curve has a falling slope at the right edge of the syllable.
If the f0 at the right edge of a nuclear accented syllable is manipulated and raised so that the f0 peak is moved to the right edge, the native listeners will perceive the word containing this syllable as a pre-nuclear accented word. This study also shows that duration alone cannot cue the difference between the two types of accents. However, when accompanied by f0 changes, it can help the listeners distinguish the two accents more easily and more efficiently.
Downloadable at: http://roa.rutgers.edu/content/article/files/1314_hosseini_1.pdf
"

A discussion of some of the problems arising during the course of attempting a 'musical' verse translation of Lermontov's early lyric poem 1831-go IYUNYA 11 DNYA is presented. A metrical analysis of the poem's prosodic features is carried out in accentual-syllabic, beat-prosodic and musical terms. In particular, the Russian poet's extensive use of enjambment and caesura to create rhythmic and syntactic tension between the levels of phrase and poetic line creates challenges for a translator who aims to preserve the rhythmic structure of the original while also using the phraseological resources of the target language to the fullest advantage. In the course of the analysis, it became apparent that some prosodic features, appearing both in the source text and the attempted translation, evade full description in accentual-syllabic, beat-prosodic and musical terms. Therefore, it also became necessary to introduce the concept of "flow", which is derived from contemporary rap music and may partially correspond to the Russian prosodic term zashagovaniye. Readers are invited to assess to what extent the translation strategies employed in this case are successful in maintaining fidelity to the source text in terms of its (i) signification, (ii) form, (iii) emotionality and (iv) singability.

Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu; Meisenburg, Trudel (to appear): “La prosodia de l’occitan: còrpus, analisis e primièrs resultats”, in: Alén Garabato, Carmen; Martel, Philippe; Torreilles, Claire & Verny, Marie-Jeanne (Eds.): Actes du Xe Congrès International de l’AIEO, Besièrs, June 12-19, 2011.

Las annadas 2000 marcan finalament l’aviada de l’estudi de la prosodia de l’occitan. Una primièra descripcion ne foguèt porgida per l’article de Hualde (2003) que lo qualifica de lenga pont entre las lengas romanicas del sud e lo francés. En occitan, la posicion de l’accent primari es lexicalament contrastiva coma dins las primièras, mentre que la preséncia d’accents inicials lo sarra del segond.
Al congrès precedent de l’AIEO ja presentèrem dos grands projèctes a mand d’espelir dins l’amira de melhor comprene la prosodia de l’occitan: l’Atlàs Interactiu de l’Intonacion de l’Occitan (AIIO) de l’UPF e Intonation im Sprachkontakt: Okzitanisch und Französisch (IntOcFr) de l’UOS. Las doas còlas avèm dempuèi amassat nòstres esfòrces per tal d’integrar l’occitan dins un projècte màger de descripcion de la prosodia de las lengas romanicas.
Mentre que las enquèstas de l’AIIO se basan sus un o dos locutors per localitat, IntOcFr, amb una metodologia plan similara, se concentra sus l’exploracion d’un airal determinat, lo canton de La Cauna (Tarn). Coma poguèrem constatar l’estiu de 2009, la lenga i es encara plan viva – e mai la calga cercar per l’ausir – de tant que i poguèrem realizar un collectatge massiu de donadas alprèp d’un quarantenat de locutors, que per lor granda majoritat tenián un occitan eiretat tre lo brèç. Lo còrpus aital reculhit compren de resumits d’una faula, d’enquèstas de situacions e de Map Tasks, mai d’enregistraments de parla espontanèa. A mai de constituir una mòstra d’occitan parlat, totes aqueles tipes de donadas nos servisson per estudiar diferents aspèctes de la prosodia d’aquesta lenga.
Per obténer de monològs corts e comparables, los locutors devián resumir dins lors pròpris mots la faula La cisampa e lo solelh aprèp n’aver escotat un enregistrament. Aquelas donadas nos permeton d’investigar lo frasatge, çò es l’estructuracion del discors en bocins marcats per d’accents e de frontièras prosodicas de diferents nivèls.
Dins las enquèstas de situacions, se demandava als locutors çò que dirián d’espereles dins tota una tièra de situacions que lor presentàvem, çò que permetèt d’obténer de frasas semiespontanèas amb determinadas valors semanticopragmaticas. Aquò, mai las donadas del Map Task, una tasca collaborativa entre dos locutors, servís per estudiar lo ligam entre semantica, pragmatica e intonacion a travèrs la paleta de patrons intonatius trobats en declarativas, interrogativas, imperativas e vocatius.
Aqueles estudis, que ne presentarem los primièrs resultats, permetràn, a tèrme, de rendre compte del sistèma prosodic de l’occitan, e de melhor determinar sa plaça al sen de las lengas romanicas. Tot aquel ric fons de donadas sonòras es, a mai, una contribucion al mantenement del patrimòni oral occitan.

This paper reports on a speech production experiment that explores whether the Accentual Phrase (AP) represents an abstract level of prosodic phrasing in Singapore English. Specifically, it tests whether the right edge of the AP is associated with phrase-final lengthening, the degree of which can be distinguished from lengthening associated with the Intonational Phrase (IP). Target words were produced in matched sentence contexts in three phrasal positions: AP-medial (word-final), AP-final, and IP-final. As predicted, target words in AP-final position were longer than those in AP-medial position and shorter than those in IP-final position. Analysis of target duration and f0 together shows that AP boundaries are well-discriminated from medial positions. Together, these results strongly support an AP level of phrasing for Singapore English and highlight its role in predicting timing variability.

Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu; Meisenburg, Trudel & Prieto, Pilar (to appear: 2014): “Intonational phonology of Occitan: towards a prosodic transcription system”, in: Frota, Sónia and Prieto, Pilar (Eds.): Intonational variation in Romance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This chapter gives the first overall description of the prosodic organisation of Occitan, a Gallo-Romance minority language spoken mainly in southern France. It presents the relevant units of the prosodic hierarchy and the main intonational contours associated with their semantic-pragmatic value, and proposes a transcription system for Occitan prosody (Oc_ToBI). The results stem mainly from the analysis of data in the central Lengadocian dialect, but dialectal variation is also taken into account on the basis of the Atlàs interactiu de l’intonacion de l’occitan (Prieto et al. 2007-2014). In most of its territory, Occitan is in contact with French, with which it shares many prosodic properties, mainly the relevance of the Accentual Phrase, with its tonal characteristics such as the initial rise hitting non-lexically accentable syllables, and some intonational features such as the use of nuclear pitch accents presenting a preaccentual rise. However, two subdialects show different interference phenomena: Aranese, which is in contact with Catalan and Spanish; and Cisalpine, with Piedmontese and Italian.

This study investigates factors that influence the interpretation of ambiguous sentences containing the word only. When only appears preverbally in simple SVO constructions, it can be interpreted as associating with the direct object, the verb, or the entire verb phrase. An auditory sentence completion task was used to probe native-speaking English listeners for overall biases in the interpretation of only, as well as for the influence of accentuation and individual differences on the extent of any such biases. Results show a strong preference for only to associate with the direct object overall, although this preference is reduced when the direct object is less (relatively) prominent. Finally, the effect of accentuation was itself modulated by individual differences related to cognitive processing style.

The article investigates the realization of adjacent
high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a
Southern Bantu language. The results show that
downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of
adjacent high tones, takes place across word
boundaries within the same phonological phrase.
Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase
boundaries. The study confirms an empirical
phenomenon and a phonological analysis previously
suggested for Southern Sotho for the Tswana variety
under consideration by providing quantitative details
on the phonetic implementation of this prosodic
phenomenon. Quantitative data is rarely presented
for tonal phenomena in Bantu languages.

It is commonly asserted that, cross-linguistically, there is a necessary correlation between the position of sentence stress (or prominence) and focus. In this paper, I present data from three different Southern Bantu languages and show that, while all have sentence stress (or prominence), the position of prominence is inflexible. It does not move to highlight a focused word or phrase. While word order is flexible, focused elements do not necessarily move to the position of sentence prominence. As a result, culminative prosodic prominence does not correlate with focus in these languages. Instead, the main prosodic cue to focus is prosodic (re-) phrasing. As the prosodic correlates of rephrasing are non-culminative, they are not equivalent to sentence stress or accent. The interest of these results for the typology of intonation is that they illustrate that intonation can play a limited role in some languages and that, notably, intonation (anchored to stress prominence) does not univ...

The article investigates the realization of adjacent high tones across word boundaries in Tswana, a Southern Bantu language. The results show that downstep, a lowering of the second in a series of adjacent high tones, takes place across word boundaries within the same phonological phrase. Downstep does not occur across phonological phrase boundaries. The study confirms an empirical phenomenon and a phonological analysis previously suggested for Southern Sotho for the Tswana variety under consideration by providing quantitative details on the phonetic implementation of this prosodic phenomenon. Quantitative data is rarely presented for tonal phenomena in Bantu languages.

A discussion of some of the problems arising during the course of attempting a ‘musical’ verse translation of Lermontov’s early lyric poem 1831-go IYUNYA 11 DNYA is presented. A metrical analysis of the poem’s prosodic features is carried out in accentualsyllabic, beat-prosodic and musical terms. In particular, the Russian poet’s extensive use of enjambment and caesura to create rhythmic and syntactic tension between the levels of phrase and poetic line creates challenges for a translator who aims to preserve the rhythmic structure of the original while also using the phraseological resources of the target language to the fullest advantage. In the course of the analysis, it became apparent that some prosodic features, appearing both in the source text and the attempted translation, evade full description in accentual-syllabic, beat-prosodic and musical terms. Therefore, it also became necessary to introduce the concept of “flow”, which is derived from contemporary rap music and may ...

This paper examines phonological phrasing in the Kwa language Akan. Regressive [+ATR] vowel harmony between words (RVH) serves as a hitherto unreported diagnostic of phonological phrasing. In this paper I discuss VP-internal and NP-internal structures, as well as SVO(O) and serial verb constructions. RVH is a general process in Akan grammar, although it is blocked in certain contexts. The analysis of phonological phrasing relies on universal syntax–phonology mapping constraints whereby lexically headed syntactic phrases are mapped onto phonological phrases. Blocking contexts call for a domain-sensitive analysis of RVH assuming recursive prosodic structure which makes reference to maximal and non-maximal phonological phrases. It is proposed (i) that phonological phrase structure is isomorphic to syntactic structure in Akan, and (ii) that the process of RVH is blocked at the edge of a maximal phonological phrase; this is formulated in terms of a domain-sensitive CrispEdgeconstraint.

"""This paper investigates the prosodic structure of weak (stressless) function words in Persian within the framework of Prosodic Phonology. Weak function words in Persian are prosodic clitics that form phrases with the material following them (proclitics) or preceding them (enclitics). So far, only the prosody of enclitics has been studied in the literature. The present study proposes that, in Persian, enclitics are affixal clitics, while proclitics are free clitics. These proposals contribute to the findings in Prosodic Phonology that prosodic categories can in fact be recursive and non-exhaustive.

Publisherʼs version downloadable at:
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:657354""""

Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu; Buthke, Carolin & Meisenburg, Trudel (2013): “Caracteristicas prosodicas de l’occitan dins son context galloromanic”, in: Casanova Herrero, Emili & Calvo Rigual, Cesáreo (Eds.): Actes del 26é Congrés de Lingüística i Filologia Romàniques, València, September 6-11, 2010, Section 1, Vol. I. Berlin: W. de Gruyter.

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.

Access to file: http://www.tdx.cat/handle/10803/321597?locale-attribute=en

Yongning Na is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in an area straddling the border between Yunnan and Sichuan. The Yongning Na tone system is based on three levels: L, M, and H. It comprises a host of rules that are specific to certain morphosyntactic contexts. These rules represent the bulk of what language learners must acquire to master the tone system. Different rules apply in the association of a verb with a subject or an object, the association of two nouns into a compound, that of a numeral and classifier, and that of a word and its affixes, for instance. The domain of tonal computation is referred to here as the tone group; tonal processes never apply across tone-group junctures. The present study investigates how utterances are divided into tone groups in Yongning Na, building on examples from narratives and elicited combinations. There is no hard-and-fast correspondence between syntactic structure and tone group divisions: several options are generally open for the division of an utterance into tone groups. The choice among these options depends on considerations of information structure. This study is intended as a stepping-stone towards the long-term goal of modelling the Na tonal system (its morpho-phonology and its phonetics), and placing the findings in a typological perspective.

Sichel-Bazin, Rafèu; Buthke, Carolin & Meisenburg, Trudel (to appear: 2014): “Prosody in language contact: Occitan and French”, in: Delais-Roussarie, Elisabeth & Avanzi, Mathieu (Eds.): Prosody and languages in contact: L2 acquisition, attrition, languages in multilingual situations. Series “Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics”, Springer Verlag.

The long-lasting contact between Occitan and French in Southern France has led to interference between these two Romance languages at all levels, also affecting prosody. Looking for possible transfers, we compared the prosodic features of Occitan and French in (semi-)spontaneous data: fable summaries after listening to a read version, for the study of phrasing and accentuation; and intonation questionnaires in which speakers where asked to react to everyday-life situations, which enable to investigate and systematically compare the intonational contours used in different pragmatic-semantic contexts.
While accent position – either on the last or on the penultimate syllable – is lexically contrastive in Occitan, it is not in French. The latter developed an accentuation system based not on the word level but on a higher ranked prosodic constituent: the Accentual Phrase (AP), which may contain more than one lexical word and is characterized by an obligatory final accent. Additionally, the AP may display a tonal rise on one of its first syllables, originally used to signal emphasis, but which nowadays tends to become a mere marker of its left edge. The basic pattern of French intonation stems from these two types of accents within the AP, which are mainly realized as rising movements.
In Ibero- and Italo-Romance languages, pitch accents anchor on lexically accentable syllables. As Occitan shares the distinctiveness of accent position with its southern neighbors, a similar intonational organization could be expected. However, Occitan displays initial rises comparable to those found in French, and some lexically accentable syllables are – at least partially – deaccented. Thus, the AP appears to have become a relevant unit in the prosodic system of this language. Nevertheless, AP-internal lexically accentable syllables – which are rather rare – still maintain a certain degree of prominence in form of a rhythmic beat. Southern French, which developed in contact with Occitan, also shows this kind of reminiscence of lexical accents. Moreover, Occitan and southern French both present a higher number of posttonic syllables than northern French. This makes clash situations less frequent and leads to a different distribution of accented syllables. All this contributes to the particularity of Occitan and southern French rhythmic and phrasing patterns as compared to those of northern French.
Whereas the Occitan influence on southern French is quite noticeable in rhythm and phrasing, intonational contours are often the same in Occitan and in French – a similarity between two typologically close languages that might have been reinforced by their age-long contact. Falling intonation (L* L%), for example, is general in broad focus statements, and yes-no questions mostly display rising patterns (LH* H%) in both languages. The only clear case where the same pragmatic meaning is expressed by means of definitely different intonational contours in Occitan and in northern French is statements of the obvious: a rising-falling nuclear configuration (H*L L%) in Occitan is opposed to a rising contour ending in a high plateau (H* !H%) in northern French. Southern French shows tendencies towards one or the other pole depending on the intensity of contact.
This shows that, although Occitan and French are two closely related languages, they display different prosodic properties, and contact has led to interference in both directions: on the one hand, southern French is easily identified by French speakers as a “chanting” accent, since it has adopted rhythmic and accentual aspects of Occitan; on the other hand, albeit its similarities with southern Romance languages, Occitan recalls French as they share intonational contours and the AP as a phrasing unit.