Introduction

The preceding chapters dealt mainly with the study of the articulation of the sounds (or segments) which make up words in French and in English. But an utterance in any language does not simply consist of a succession of various articulations. Loudness and pitch are other parameters which inherently enter into the pronunciation of every utterance, and their own modulations play extremely important linguistic roles. Because variations in loudness and pitch are superimposed upon the spoken chain of sounds (or segmental chain), the term suprasegmentals (‘traits suprasegmentaux’) is used to refer to the linguistic manifestations of these particular parameters. The same concepts are also designated by the term ‘prosody’ (‘la prosodie’), a word borrowed from poetics.

Two specific cases of suprasegmental phenomena were mentioned in previous chapters. In Chapter 2 (Section 2.3.2), we spoke briefly of intonation (‘l'intonation’). Recall that intonation is determined by pitch variations (which are themselves dependent on the rate of vibration of the vocal cords), and that such pitch variations give sentences various melodic profiles which allow, for instance, to distinguish between a declarative sentence such as Le petit chat est mort ‘The little cat is dead’ (with a descending intonation) and a question made up of the same sequence of sounds, but with a rising intonation (Le petit chat est mort? ‘Is the little cat dead?’). There is a multitude of possible intonation variations that natural languages can use to express a multitude of nuances of meaning which go well beyond the expression of simple declarative sentences or questions.