Perspective phonologique sur les pronoms

Abstract

The category of pronouns, which admittedly includes several heterogeneous subcategories, is notoriously difficult to delineate. This corpus-based article examines the phonetic and phonological characteristics of various types of pronouns in a spoken discourse context in order to identify their shared definitional traits. Two intertwined though distinct phonological phenomena, i.e. reduction and sentence-level stress, enable us to highlight some of the links between the phonetic form of pronouns and their semantic value. We then extract a number of general principles from our observations. For instance, we posit the existence of two main phonological kinds of pronouns – strong and weak – and suggest that their phonetic weight is closely correlated to their level of referentiality. We also hypothesise that there ultimately exists a close link between the phonetic bulk of pronouns and the mental accessibility of their referents.

Keywords

• phonology
• phonetics
• Pronouns
• phonetic weight
• referentiality