On the Socio-Indexicality of a Parisian French Intonation Contour

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study examines how intonation contours prevalent in a Parisian French urban youth vernacular (Conein and Gadet, 1998; Fagyal 2003, 2005) index sociolinguistic meanings for Parisian French listeners. In a web-based experiment, listeners placed recordings with stress patterns ranging from clearly penultimate (‘non-standard’) to clear phrase-final (‘standard’) in cities whose linguistic correctness they had previously evaluated. Stimuli with the most numerous and strongest cues to penultimate prominence were reliably identified with cities low in linguistic prestige. Sociolinguistic experience was shown to predict stimulus evaluations. The conclusions reached speak to the socio-indexicality of certain Parisian intonation contour types and the methodology used herein may lend itself to future studies of socially sensitive language variation.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.