La prosodie au Laboratoire Parole et Langage : histoire, recherches actuelles et perspectives

Abstract

1/ Question(s) raised and problematicThe aim of this article is to show how research at the Speech and Language Laboratory (Laboratoire Parole et Langage, hereafter LPL) contributes in a significant way to the renewal of knowledge on the prosody of language and languages. It shows how the work of LPL members attempts to address the following questions: from a theoretical point of view, how can prosody be conceived as an integral part of the linguistic system and what relations does it have with other levels (e.g. syntax, semantics/pragmatics)? What relations does the prosodic system have within the general architecture of language and what are the more general constraints affecting it (especially physiological, cognitive, social and situational)? Regarding method, to what extent have the development and availability of corpora of conversational data and new experimental investigation tools changed research practices in prosody?First a history of the work that has been carried out in prosody in the laboratory since its origins will be given. Then the prosodic system and its interfaces will be dealt with. The renewal of the methods used and the new questions they raise will be addressed. Finally, more recent work will be detailed, that considers prosody in its physiological and cognitive aspects as well as in its interactional, social and situational (notably didactic) context.2/ History and state of the artWhile Martinet (1962) defended a paralinguistic approach to prosody, which according to him could in no way be part of grammar, Faure (1962) already promoted a grammatical approach to prosodic facts when he founded the Institute of general and applied phonetics (Institut de Phonétique Générale et Appliquée) at the University of Provence. This grammatical approach was taken up again when the research team ERA351, the forerunner of the present lab, already associated with the French national center for research (CNRS), was founded in 1972, with the suggestive name intonation structures and intelligibility of speech. Since then, the laboratory has continued to maintain an important and rich research in prosody, which has contributed and still does today to the description, explanation and promotion of the major role played by prosody in the scientific understanding of language and languages.3/ Description of the content of the articleIn order to highlight this significant and internationally reputed contribution of the LPL to prosodic research, this article is divided into four parts: the first one deals with the history of prosody in Aix, the second one is about prosody as a grammatical system, the third one focusses on the methods and data for prosodic studies, and the fourth one addresses the integration of the prosodic system in its physiological, cognitive, interactive, social and situational context.Through a brief history, the first part of the article shows how important prosody has always been for the research carried out at LPL and presents the evolution of the different aspects of this research over the last sixty years. The seminal book by Rossi et al (1981), which disseminates the first results of the Aix prosody school, contains the foundations of the models of perception and production of intonation most contemporary research is still based on, and an important discussion of the relations between prosody, syntax and semantics. The opening up to world languages is attested by the creation of the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SProSIG), who organised the first edition of the Speech Prosody international conference in 2002 in Aix-en-Provence. From the 2000s onwards, prosodic research at the lab has also developed within the framework of autosegmental metrical phonology.The question of prosody as a grammatical system is the subject of the second part of the article. The first issue at stake concerns the boundary/articulation between phonetics and phonology for the prosodic dimension: how to conceive a prosodic phonology, which aspects of prosody form a system, which other aspects can be treated as phonetic variation without major impact on the organisation of the system and the transmission of content? The way research articulates prosody and syntax on the one hand, and prosody and semantics/pragmatics on the other, plays a major role in understanding this articulation. The second part presents the contributions of LPL prosodists to these issues.The third part deals with the methods and data that researchers need to acquire in order to carry out the scientific study of prosody. It addresses the question of technological advances (particularly in terms of automatic detection of f0, to which the laboratory has made a significant contribution) which allow the production of new data and new observations, in particular conversational corpora which were previously more difficult to access. The contemporary complementarity of previously dissociated practices of experimentation and corpus analysis plays an important role in the LPL’s contribution to the field, in particular through the production of conversational databases such as the CID, but also through the constitution of new types of prosodic data, such as those which accompany fragments and feedbacks, or which inform disfluency phenomena. The application of these new approaches to the description of linguistic variety and to the prosodic typology of languages is also discussed.The fourth and last part of the article presents the contemporary issue of the integration of the prosodic system in its physiological, cognitive, interactive, social and situational context, which LPL researchers are in a position to make very significant contributions to. The understanding of the physiological mechanisms underlying the production and perception of prosody, the very recent exploration of the cognitive processes underlying the prosodic organisation of language, the contribution of prosody to dialogue and the role it plays in the joint management of conversational interaction by its participants have become major topics for prosodic research at LPL. Socio-phonetic approaches are not to be outdone and several innovative works at the laboratory advocate the idea of the plasticity of phonological representations of intonation to explain sensitivity to contextual variations. Finally, other works are devoted to rethinking the contribution of prosodic studies to language didactics in the light of the rapid advances in the field.

Keywords

• prosody
• interfaces
• analysis methods
• data
• modeling
• context