Abstract
This study investigates intonational properties related to the marking of boundaries of different kinds of constituents of a French variety spoken in the South Pacific. Lifou French represents an understudied regional variety from New Caledonia and is spoken by bilingual speakers of French and Drehu, an Oceanic language. Within autosegmental metrical phonology the status of the intermediate phrase (ip) in French has been subject to debate. This study focuses on right boundary marking to examine whether phonetic cues can be related to the realisation of different types of prosodic breaks, namely the Accentual Phrase (AP) and the ip. Pitch scaling patterns within and across APs support the existence of the ip based on data from this largely undocumented variety. Interestingly, the phonetic realisation of right boundary marking shows differences from the Standard variety of French.
Torres Orjuela, Catalina