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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2012

Direct and Indirect Answers in French

Claire Beyssade
Cristel Portes

Résumé

It is currently assumed that intonation may be used to indicate information packaging. Lambrecht (1994) has shown that a same utterance may be associated with different information structures and he distinguished between three types of constructions, which he named (i) predicate-focus, (ii) argument-focus, and (iii) sentence-focus. They are exemplified in (1) with English and French utterances, in which the small caps indicate prosodic prominence. (1) a. [context: What happened to your car?] My car/It broke DOWN. predicate-focus structure (Ma voiture) elle est en PANNE. (1) b. [context: I heard your motorcycle broke down?] My CAR broke down. argument-focus structure C'est ma VOITURE qui est en panne. (1) c. [context: What happened?] My CAR broke down. sentence-focus structure J'ai ma VOITURE qui est en PANNE. To determine the information structure of an utterance, a possibility is to consider questionanswer pairs rather than utterances in isolation. The intonative difference between (1a-c) is identified with the difference between the three types of questions presented as a description of the context of (1). And it is currently assumed that the context of a question determines the form of the answer and in particular its prosody (a.o. Krifka 2001). Yet, different observations seem to contradict this thesis. For example, in his works on C-Accent and implicational answers, Büring showed that a speaker displays different answering strategies : he can simply answer to the question under discussion (QUD), or answer it and by the same token add a new QUD. In other words, Büring showed both the importance and the limitations of notions of congruence and congruent answer to account for prosody in dialogue. The aim of this paper is to challenge the role of question-answer pairs to study focus and prosody and to show the importance of the notion of discourse strategy, which has to do, not only with focus and QUD, but also with the way conveyed information is structured (at-issue content vs. projected content) and the way a topic may be promoted. We would like present the results of two experiments on the prosody of informational focus in French (a production experiment and a perception one) which show that even in the context of an explicit question, the speaker may choose between different answering strategies. 1. Design of the experiments Our study concerns the realisation and the interpretation of utterances replaced the context of an explicit question. We consider both All Focus answers (2a) and Narrow Focus ones (2b). (2) a. What happened? [Jean invited Marie to the party yesterday night]F b. Who did Jean invite? Jean invited [Marie]F to the party yesterday night In terms of prosody, we distinguish two types of markings : (i) the placement of the nuclear contour (NC), which is a tonal event (cf Di Cristo 1999), whose variations convey different pragmatic interpretations, and (ii) an initial accentuation (IA) which may form an “accentual arc” with the following rising accent, or triggers a high plateau up to the following accent. IA or high plateau are generally implemented quite high in the pitch range (cf Astesano et al. 2007) First experiment: production Participants were presented with question-answer pairs embedded in short contexts like (3). The contexts and the questions were presented visually and auditorily. The participants' task was to read aloud the answer as if they were actually participating in the dialogue. Two types of questions are presented to 14 subjects: wh-questions (bearing on the object) and what happened?-type questions. We recorded 112 answers. Second experiment: perception We ran a perception experiment in order to check whether the productions resulting from the first experiment are recognized as appropriate in context by native speakers. 24 participants had to listen to 20 utterances and to determine to what type of question (what happened?- question or wh-question) each utterance had been produced as an answer. The aim of this experiment was to check whether the constituent resolving a partial question has to be marked by NC placement or whether IA alone is recognized as a way of marking it. 2. Results: two types of markings In the case of answers to a broad question (i.e. what happened?-type), 69,2% of them involve the placement of NC at the end of the utterance, whereas only 30,8% involve it on the right edge of the object. As for answers to a partial questions, object NPs are distinguished in three different ways: (i) NC on object + IA (49%), (ii) NC on object and no IA (11%), (iii) IA on object and NC at the end of the utterance (23,6%). The perception experiment shows that participants clearly distinguished between answers to broad or partial questions, and that narrow focus are recognized when they bear an initial accent without being the exponents of the nuclear contour as well as when they are the exponents of the nuclear contour. Accordingly, we conclude that narrow focus can be brought out either by NC placement or by an initial accentuation. 3. Explanation: direct vs. indirect answering strategies The results presented above lead us to dissociate focus marking from question/answer congruence. The data show that even when a question is explicitly addressed, Speaker may answer by accommodating another question. The answer is then an indirect answer, it is not the answer to the explicitly addressed question, but an answer to an implicit question (Roberts 1996, Büring, 2004). Our claim is that Speaker may answer indirectly to broad and to partial questions: in the former case, Speaker accommodates a more specific question, a wh- one, and in the latter case she accommodates a what happened?- question. When Speaker answers to a partial question by placing the NC at the end of the utterance and by highlighting the object, she accommodates a broad question, and that when she answers to a broad question by placing the NC at the end of the object, she accommodates a partial question. Then, the core of our proposal is that NC placement always marks informational focus (the content that is specifically asserted, as defined by Jacobs (1991)) and that IA plays a discursive role : or it indicates that the answer is an indirect one, or it indicates a “topic promotion”, when it appears inside the constituent with the NC. In each case, it triggers the accommodation of the implicit question : "What about XP?". References: Astésano, C.; Bard, E.; Turk, A. 2007. Structural influences on Initial Accent placement in French. Language and Speech, 50. Büring, D. 1997. The Meaning of Topic and Focus: The 59th Street Bridge Accent. London: Routledge. Büring, D. 2003. On D-Trees, Beans, and B-Accents, Linguistics & Philosophy. Di Cristo, A. 1999. Le cadre accentuel du français contemporain. Langues. Jacobs, J.1991. Focus ambiguities, Journal of semantics.Krifka, M. 2001. For a structured meaning account of questions and answers, in C. Fery & W. Sternefeld (eds.), Audiatur Vox Sapientia. A Festschrift for Arnim von Stechow. Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge U.P. Roberts, C. 1996. Information structure in discourse: towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. Yvon et al. (eds.). OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 49
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hal-01510680 , version 1 (19-04-2017)

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Claire Beyssade, Jean-Marie Marandin, Barbara Hemforth, Cristel Portes. Direct and Indirect Answers in French. Information, discourse structure and levels of meaning (IDL) 12, Oct 2012, Barcelona, Spain. non paginé. ⟨hal-01510680⟩
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