The Discourse Function of Final Rises in French Dialogues

In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study which aims at describing the discourse meaning of rises at right edge intonation boundaries in French dialogues. According to most French speakers, it is possible to turn an assertion into a question in French solely by pronouncing it with a rising intonation. While existing empirical studies [8, 7] confirm that there is some correlation between rising and falling contours, and questions and assertions, respectively, they also show that rising intonation does not always go hand in hand with question intonation. Leaving aside the problem of question identification, one can thus legitimately raise the issue: What is the meaning of final rises in French? Clearly, an answer to this question cannot be given without a proper empirical study of the use of rises in natural speech but a corpus study of this sort is currently lacking for French (for other languages, see [13], for Glasgow English, or [6] for Australian English). An initial study has been performed on Post’s Map Task corpus [16] with two speakers and two dialogues (for a total of 301 speech turns); its goal was to resolve a number of annotation issues, such as the definition of intonation phrase boundary, its automatic assingment, the reliability of the employed algorithm and alphabet for intonation transcription, as well as the contribution of different kinds of dialog act and discourse structure taxonomies. The tested methodology is used for the study of the Caelen corpus [2], which is currently in progress.