We are happy to announce a talk by Fatima Hamlaoui in the Phonology Colloquium.
Title: Prosodic Transfer in Contact Varieties: Vocative calls in Metropolitan and in Basaá-Cameroonian French
Date: Wednesday, 01.06.2022
Time: 16-18
Location: Hybrid – Zoom and IG 4.301
If you want to participate via Zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Abstract:
The effect of context on the prosody of vocative calls has been a topic of growing interest (a.o., Borràs-Comes et al. 2015, Huttenlauch et al. 2016, Arvaniti et al. 2016, Kubozono & Mizoguchi 2019). In Metropolitan French, just as in a variety of intonation languages, sweet and friendly contexts are typically associated with a chanting contour, while urgent contexts have been described to elicit a rising-falling contour (a.o., Ladd 2008, Jun & Fougeron 1995, Fagyal 1997, Delais-Roussarie et al. 2015, Di Cristo 2016). Little is known however as to the extent of this form-meaning association and the effect of context on the prosodic realization of the different contours. What is also unknown is whether varieties of French in contact with tone languages showing little evidence of intonation display similar associations and pragmatic effects on prosody. In the present talk, we present the results of a Discourse Completion Task involving a routine and an urgent context (Arvaniti et al. 2016, Quiroz & Żygis 2017). We investigated vocative calls in Metropolitan French and Cameroonian French as spoken by L1 speakers of a tone language, Basaá (a.o., Hyman 2003, Makasso et al. 2016). In Metropolitan French, our results confirm the previously described form-meaning associations. In contrast, they show that in Basaá-Cameroonian French, a contour consisting of a sequence of lexical tones (ending in a fall) is favored in both contexts. Finally, our results also show that, except for loudness (RMS amplitude), context does not significantly affect contour realization (F0 height, F0 range and duration) in either of the two varieties. We offer an interpretation of these findings and in particular of the lack of pragmatic effect on the prosody of vocative calls in the light of prosodic transfer from the L1 and universal markedness constraints on L2 intonation learning (a.o., Eckmann 1987, Rasier & Hiligsmann 2007, Mennen 2015, Zerbian 2015).