Spoken language

  • Martine ADDA-DECKER (Paris)
    French ‘liaison’ in casually spoken French, as investigated in a large corpus of casual French speech
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 113-128

    In this paper, the realisation of the French Liaison is investigated in a large corpus of casual speech. Considering that casual speech gives rise to a large range of pronunciation variants and that overall temporal reduction increases, one may hypothesize that French liaison tends to be less productive in this speaking style. We made use of automatic processing such as automatic speech alignments to evaluate when liaison is realized in the NCCFr corpus. Realized liaisons were examined and measured for the most frequent liaison consonants (/z/, /n/ and /t/) as a function of a liaison sites classified as mandatory, optional or forbidden. The relation between speech rate and liaison realization is also examined.


  • Odile BAGOU (Genève, Suisse)
    Lexical alignment and segmentation in speech recognition
    2002, Vol. VII-1, pp. 67-82

    How do listeners segment the continuous speech input into words? This paper addresses this important question by reviewing current views of lexical segmentation. After providing some background to the more general problem of spoken word recognition, we examine the different cues - including phonetic, phonological, prosodic, and lexical cues - that have been shown to play a role in speech segmentation. We then analyze how these cues are used to locate alignment points in the continuous speech signal. These points serve to define what parts of the signal are matched with which representations in the mental lexicon. Several solutions to the alignment problem are discussed in light of existing experimental evidence.


  • Rabia BELRHALI (INPG-Grenoble)
    BdPholex: a phonetical and lexical database of spoken French
    1999, Vol. IV-1, pp. 75-78
  • Mireille BILGER (Perpignan)
    Some thoughts on spontaneous spoken French
    1999, Vol. IV-2, pp. 21-30

    After reviewing certain customary considerations concerning the written-spoken division, the present paper attempts to demonstrate that when we take into account the data provided by French corpora we are obliged to qualify the terms of the contrast and to considerer in a new light the relations between language users and their language.


  • Hélène BLONDEAU (Floride, Etats-Unis)
    No salvation outside THE norm ? The Montreal study of variations in hypothetical si-clauses
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 55-66

    Through the panel study of twelve Montrealers from 1971 to 1995, this article examines the variation between the conditional and the imperfect morphology in hypothetical si-clauses. The two variants, well in place in the spoken French implicit norms system, are in opposition when given values in the normative debate. The analysis indicates the influence of the distance and the event potentiality. Due to vacillations in usage frequency according to the year, the study cannot confirm the hypothesis of a change in favor of the conditional morphology. This case study documents the individual variation across the lifespan and its connection to community change.


  • Philippe BOULA DE MAREÜIL (Paris Sud)
    Diachronic variation in the prosody of French news announcer speech: changes in word initial accent
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 97-111

    This study addresses prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically, focusing on word-initial stress, which may give an impression of emphatic style. Objective measurements suggest that the following features have decreased since the forties: mean pitch, pitch rise associated with initial stress, and vowel duration characterising an emphatic initial stress. The onsets of stressed initial syllables have become longer while speech rate (measured at the phonemic level) has not changed. This puzzling outcome raises interesting questions for research on French prosody, suggesting that the durational correlates of word-initial stress have changed over time, in the French news announcer style.


  • Suzanne BURGER (Munich, Allemagne)
    RVG1 - A prototype for the collection of current spoken German
    1998, Vol. III-1, pp. 67-79

    This article describes ideas of the project "Collection of Currently Spoken German". This project is presently planned at the Institute of Phonetics at Munich University. The aim of the project is to collect aspects of currently spoken German by means of a static network of recording stations distributed all over the German speaking area. The RVG1 (Regional Variants of German) corpus serves as a prototype for regionally covered speech data. It can be seen as a first small database of regionally covered recordings of German representing the most common dialectal regions or at least all those regions which could be important for categorizing regional variants into broader classes. RVG1 contains read numbers, phonetically rich sentences and computer commands as well as spontaneous speech. Some features of this corpus will be introduced and discussed.


  • Paul CAPPEAU (Poitiers)
    The sociolinguistic exploitation of large corpora. Key-word and stone of wisdom
    2007, Vol. XII-1, pp. 99-110

    The desire to make use of large collections of oral data is nowadays largely shared by linguists. At a time when such tools are becoming increasingly available for French, it is important to make sure that there is sensitivity to all of those factors which guarantee reliability in the different stages of obtaining data: clarification of the term ‘corpus’; reflection on approaches to the field and to orality, and on representativeness (both in terms of genres and numbers of speakers); data elicitation practices and transcription.


  • Sylvain DETEY (Tokyo, Japon)
    Learners of French and pronunciation norms in the FL : what input do we need to reach what results
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 81-96

    In the field of French language education, the developments of corpus linguistics have spurred a reassessment of the importance of pedagogical norms and linguistic variation in teaching curricula. In this article, we focus on the phonetic-phonological dimension of the teaching/learning process and, after a short glance at pronunciation models in French, we examine the impact of sociolinguistic descriptions of varieties of French on pronunciation education. Referring to the notions of 'errors' and 'accents' among non-native speakers, we point out the need for broad and systematic corpus-based studies, comparable with native databases. Finally, we introduce the InterPhonologie du français contemporain project and look at the notion of non-native norms, both from theoretical and applied perspectives.


  • Jacques DURAND (Toulouse)
    Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structures
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 25-37

    The PAC project (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure) aims at giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and its geographical, social and stylistic diversity. Based on Labovian methods, the project seeks to describe both rhotic and non rhotic accents of English, from traditional standards to more recent postcolonial varieties. This large corpus enables researchers to analyse and compare intervarietal features such as rhoticity as well as more specific phenomena such as vocalic length in Australian English or variable rhoticity in New Zealand English. Today LVTI, a collaborative project aiming at an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic survey of great urban centres such as Manchester and Toulouse is being set up following the PAC/PFC classical protocol.


  • Julien EYCHENNE (Groningue, Pays-Bas)
    The Phonology of Contemporary French program: results and perspective
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 7-24

    This paper offers an overview of the work that has been done within the Phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés, structure (PFC) research programme. We first critically assess the relation between phonological research and data. We then move on to describe PFC's methodology and the coding schemes that have been devised for the analysis of schwa and liaison. We finish off by showing how the PFC programme makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phonology of French, by widening the scope and breadth of empirical descriptions and by offering new insights into theoretical problems such as the analysis of liaison or the role of usage frequency in grammar.


  • Françoise GADET (Paris Ouest)
    A large corpus of spoken French : CIEL-F. Epistemological choices and empirical outcome
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 39-54

    This article presents the structure of the Corpus International Ecologique de la Langue Française, an extensive corpus of spoken French that will soon be available on the Internet, from both an epistemological and empirical perspective. Explanations are given with regard to the ideas that guided the data collection (ecological approach, comparability of the different areas of the Francophonie and communication situations) and to the choices made ("communicative spaces" and "activity types") with a view to relevant analyses in various research fields (variation, interaction, multimodality, French in contact, oral syntax) and an attempt is made to fill existing gaps in the current corpus. The article further addresses the issue of building up a network of experts, problems that had to be solved during fieldwork in the different areas and questions concerning standardisation, archiving and publication of the collected data (audio and video recordings, transcriptions, metadata), whereupon several examples are presented for comparative analyses.


  • Juana GIL FERNÁNDEZ (Madrid, Espagne)
    The teaching of pronunciation: the widening gap between fundamental research and classroom practice
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 67-80

    In recent times, in the academic field related to the training of L2 pronunciation teachers, the already existing gap between fundamental research and the application of its results in the classroom has widened. In some degree, this has been a consequence of that training being focused on methodological aspects more than on the intrinsic knowledge of the subject to be taught. In this article, on the basis of two concrete examples, the need for keeping pronunciation teachers permanently informed about the findings of the basic research in phonetics / phonology is defended as a means to achieve a very fruitful interaction between the two sides, theoretical ad applied, of the discipline.


  • Berthille PALLAUD (Aix-en-Provence)
    Methods for evaluating speech production in children
    2001, Vol. VI-1, pp. 121-135

    One of the main problems in establishing linguistic dysfunctioning resides in the definition of the 'comparison group'. The numerous studies today in the domain of oral proficiency, have shown that comparing oral with written language production can seriously bias the outcome. As for children's speech, the evaluation is sometimes even more seriously biased by what may be called 'adultocentrism', which allows to conclude too hastily and/or erroneously for language dysfunctioning. In this article we want to show what can be considered as common errors in oral language proficiency of children, and what might be indicative of more specific problems.


  • Sandrine WACHS (Paris 10)
    The influence of age on the pronunciation of French in Ile de France
    1998, Vol. III-1, pp. 57-66

    Does the way a language is spoken vary with the age of the speakers of that language? In this paper we want to discuss different forms of articulatory relaxation in the Ile-de-France area in relation to the age of the speakers of those forms. The study shows that everybody relaxes his or her pronunciation in informal sttings. Only the reduction of "speach markers", such as 'écoute', 'je ne dis pas', seems to be specific to 18-45 year-old speakers.


  • Brigitte ZELLNER (Lausanne, Suisse)
    Temporal and prosodic structures in French reading
    1996, Vol. I-1, pp. 7-23

    Although the prosodic component has been integrated in speech synthesis systems for many years, one temporal dimension, namely fluency of speech, has much less been considered. Fluent speech is characterized by easy verbal production, smooth onsets and transitions, and an adequate speech rate. It will be argued that for French, the current lack of fluency in speech synthesis can be explained by the fact that temporal structuring is inadequate for achieving this, as this structure is considered to be congruent with the accent structure. In this article a new approach of temporal organisation will be presented.