Prosody in French: Accent, Intonation, and Rhythm(<Feature Articles>Current Trends in Intonational Research on Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, German and French)

Abstract

A brief survey of the main characteristics of French prosody is first presented. The intonation, accent rules, and rhythmic phenomena of French are described from the L2 leaner standpoint. The second section, which seeks to point out phonological transfer from LI to L2 during language acquisition, reviews typical errors for these characteristics made by Japanese learners of French and by French learners of Japanese. The last section is devoted to a concise discussion of the recent research trends and perspectives in French prosody.