The French foot revisited

Abstract

This article aims to re-evaluate the relevance of the foot in French. After a critical review of the literature on the subject, with reference to both adult and child language, we argue that the prosodic structure of French is best understood within a grid-only framework. The model is couched in Stratal Optimality Theory and illustrated with naturalistic data drawn from southern French and Swiss French. Particular attention is paid to phenomena such as the loi de position and optional penultimate pitch accent, for which we show that syntagmatic constituency is unnecessary.