Accentual Transfer from Swiss-German to French. A Study of "Français Fédéral"

This study aims at examining the accentual and phrasing properties of a variety of L2 French commonly called “Français Fédéral”, a variety of French spoken in Switzerland by speakers who have a Swiss-German dialect as a mother tongue. For this, we compared the data of 4 groups of 4 speakers: 2 groups of 4 native French speakers from Neuchâtel and from Paris, and 2 groups of 4 Swiss-German French speakers from Bern and Zürich. The data are semi-automatically processed, and three main prosodic features relating to accentuation and phrasing are examined: prominence distribution and metrical weight of the Phonological Phrase, respect of Phonological Phrase formation constraints (Align-XP and No-clash), and realizations of sandhis phenomena within and across the Phonological Phrases boundaries. Our findings suggest that “Français Fédéral” share several features with a lexical accentuation system rather than with a supra-lexical accentuation system.