Discours (Dec 2010)
The Recategorization of the Rheme and the Structure of the Oral Paragraph in French and in Finnish
Abstract
At first sight, the intonation systems of French and Finnish – which are typologically distant languages – seem completely different. This paper aims, however, at showing that the discourse-structuring role of the utterance-final pitch rises in spontaneous spoken Finnish is in many respects reminiscent of the final pitch rises that constitute an essential component of the French intonation system (Morel & Danon-Boileau, 1998). Indeed, in both cases, utterance-final pitch rises occurring inside a multi-unit turn seem to “recategorise the rheme as a preamble” for what will follow (Morel & Danon-Boileau, 1998). ‘Preamble’ and ‘rheme’ are the two main constituents of the so-called ‘oral paragraph’, which is the basic structural unit of French discourse according to their model. In addition to comparing the realization of the so-called ‘recategorization phenomenon’ in French and in Finnish, this paper aims at describing the structure of the ‘oral paragraph’ of Finnish within Morel and Danon-Boileau’s framework.
Keywords