On the phraseology of spoken French: initial salience, prominence and lexicogrammatical recurrence in a prosodic-syntactic treebank Rhapsodie

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This paper focuses on specific quantitative characteristics of spoken language phraseology in the Rhapsodie speech database (ANR Rhapsodie 07 Corp-030-01). A recent study (Zimina & Ballier, 2017) has shown that prosodic segmentation into IPE: Intonational PEriods (segments of speech with distinctive pitch and rhythm contours) available within the Rhapsodie database offers new insights for the observation of the functions of formulaic expressions in speech. Recurrent lexicogrammatical patterns at the beginning of Intonational PEriods (IPE) are strongly related to spoken formulaic language. These variations of initial salience depend upon several factors (interactional needs, social context, genres, etc.). Further experiments have shown that initially salient patterns also have specific prosodic characteristics in terms of prominence (prosodic stress) across major speech genres of the Rhapsodie dataset (oratory, narrative, description, argumentation, procedural) and corresponding speaking tasks. These specific prosodic characteristics are likely to reflect communicative needs of speakers and listeners (interactions, uptakes, speaking turns, etc.).