Discourse Marking in French: C Accents and Discourse Moves

Abstract

It is currently assumed that the prosodic realization of utterances is sensitive to the Ground/ Focus articulation. However, the discourse thematic organization also plays a crucial role : in German and English, a specific category of pitch accent does play a role in marking discourse move (see [11] and the analysis of B accents in [5]). In this paper, we investigate how discourse moves are expressed in French, in particular prosodically