Distribution syntaxique, discursive et interactionnelle des contours intonatifs du français dans un corpus de conversation

This paper aims at acquiring a more comprehensive overview about the role of French intonational contours observed in a conversational corpus. We study their distribution with regards to syntactical structure, discourse and conversational organisation. Our results show that the minor contour is functionally underspecified compared to major contours. Among the latter, a set of different terminal contours appear to form a paradigm, sharing the same distribution as well as the same semantism. By contrast the major continuation contour appears to have a quite different semantic and interactional value, even when it occurs at the same syntactical distribution.