Chers collègues,

Le 30 octobre prochain se tiendra la première édition de la journée d'étude intitulée “French Prosody in Contact”. Ce workshop rassemblera des jeunes chercheurs et chercheurs confirmés travaillant sur les contacts entre la prosodie française et la prosodie de langues germaniques (allemand, néerlandais, anglais), romanes (espagnol, italien) et africaines (swahili, lingala, kirundi). Les thèmes abordés seront les transferts prosodiques entre langue première (L1) et langue seconde (L2) dans la production de phénomènes intonatifs et accentuels d'apprenants, la perception de la prosodie native, régionale ou non-native ou encore la fluence.

La participation à cette journée d'étude est totalement gratuite. L'inscription via le site web est néanmoins obligatoire. N'hésitez pas à transmettre l'information aux étudiants intéressés afin qu'ils assistent à (une partie de) cette journée.

Lieu : Salle du Conseil, faculté FIAL, Collège Erasme, Université catholique de Louvain, Place Blaise Pascal 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique
Date : 30 octobre 2014, 9h30-18h30
Site web : www.prosodyincontact.org

Descriptif thématique de la journée (en anglais) :

French Prosody in Contact

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on the prosody of French in contact with other languages, and the prosody of other languages in contact with French. The notion of two languages being in contact is deliberately understood in its broadest sense, including the phenomena observed in areas where French is spoken concurrently with other languages and the interaction between an individual speaker’s L1 and L2 during language learning.

The French prosodic system is typologically idiosyncratic because primary stress is not a lexically distinctive property, but is supra-lexically constrained. Distinguishing between stress, accentuation, phrasing and intonation is thus more difficult in French than in several other Indo-European and African languages. Previous studies have shown that the specificities of the French prosodic system are difficult to acquire for learners of French, and, conversely, have an impact on the second language learning performance of French native speakers. Furthermore, they are a source of regional variation in areas where French and other languages co-exist.

During the workshop, specialists and young researchers will come together to present the results of studies on prosody when French is found in contact with:

-                  African languages (Swahili, Lingala, Kirundi);

-                  Germanic languages (Norwegian, German, Dutch, English);

-                  Romance languages (Italian, Spanish).

The workshop highlights corpus-based approaches, with authentic speaker productions from L1 and L2/learner corpora, while many of the presentations focus on perceptual experiments to assess issues such as the perception of regional accent, stress deafness and fluency.

We hope that the workshop will foster a fruitful debate on aspects of the French prosodic system (such as initial stress, prosodic contours, rhythm etc.) and will highlight the theoretical and methodological issues inherent in the study of prosody in contact (e.g. the effects of the typological distance between source and target language, difficulties in assessing the existence of prosodic transfer etc.).

Bien cordialement,

La comité d’organisation : George Christodoulides, Marie-Catherine Michaux, Mathieu Avanzi et Anne Catherine Simon