Prosodie et structure informationelle : La mobilité des noyaux prosodiques en français et en tchèque

Abstract

The present article examines the part played by prosody in the information structure of the utterance. Proceeding from the framework of the Functional Sentence Perspective, as proposed by Vilém Mathesius in the 1920s and developed by other Czech linguists, we first study the mutual relationships between word order, information structure (theme vs. rheme), and nucleus position (final vs. non-final). In the subsequent analysis of a text sample (parallel French and Czech translation), we identify and categorise all cases where the prosodic nucleus is shifted from its unmarked position (i.e. final). Despite a comparable overall frequency in both languages, the distribution of non-final nuclei is different (apart from the category of direct address): in French nucleus shifts mostly occur in grammaticalised structures (such as syntactic dislocation), while in Czech they are more likely to signal information structure.

Keywords

• French
• Czech
• Functional Sentence Perspective
• prosody
• prosodic nucleus
• information structure
• prosodic plasticity