Falling Yes/No Questions in Corsican French and Corsican: Evidence for a Prosodic Transfer

Abstract

To distinguish between questions and statements, the use of high pitch has been claimed to prevail cross-linguistically. However, the implementation of the high pitch feature may differ across languages and dialects. Terminal rises for questions are probably the most widespread (and French is no exception), but initial high tones and final falls may also be observed in the French variety spoken in Corsica as well as in the Corsican language. This chapter investigates to what extent these patterns can be measured, perceived and interpreted as a prosodic transfer from Corsican to Corsican French. A corpus of transparent sentences (i.e. similar, easily intercomprehensible sentences) such as la touriste trouve la caserne (French) or a turista trova a caserna (Corsican) was designed and the productions of bilingual speakers, recorded in Corsica, were compared with the French counterparts of Parisian reference speakers. Two perception experiments were conducted. The first one, using delexicalisation, focused on the comparison between Corsican, Corsican French and Parisian French question prosodies: it revealed a significant bias of Corsican French question prosody towards Corsican prosody. The second experiment focused on question/statement discrimination: it showed, in particular, that Corsican French questions are often misidentified as statements by Parisian listeners but accurately identified by Corsican listeners. Several (socio)linguistic hypotheses are finally put forth to account for these results.