Contraintes phonologiques de l'intonation de la phrase réinterprétées à la lumière des recherches récentes en neurophysiologie

Abstract

Far from the Autosegmental-Metrical formalizations describing sentence intonation, the so-called Functional-Cognitive approach is based on the dynamic temporal aspects linked to the perception of sentence intonation by listeners in order to reconstitute the prosodic structure encoded by the speaker. This prosodic structure, a priori independent from the other structures organizing the sentence, is constrained by specific rules largely explained by recent neurocognitive research. This research suggests for example that cortex Delta waves synchronize stress (temporal) groups and that Theta waves are linked to the perception of syllables. This hypothesis gives a proper account of the specific constrains that govern the prosodic structure, such as the maximal number of syllables included in a stress group, stress clash, syntactic clash and eurhythmy. It may also explain the sequential, non-concurrently and simultaneous character of the various hierarchical structures that organize sentence units, informational, syntactic and prosodic, which have already been observed in spontaneous speech by C. Blanche-Benveniste.