Stress in French?

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Permalink Reply by Erwan on October 26, 2011 at 3:44pm

We don't really put stress on words or syllables.

The only reason we sometimes put some stress is to emphasize the word or the meaning.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 26, 2011 at 5:24pm

N.B. This is true of lexical stress but, as I outline below, French still has phrase-level stress.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 26, 2011 at 5:01pm

Both English and French have in some broad sense the notion of "stressed" syllables, but they do it in different ways.

 

English has what is sometimes called lexical stress, i.e. the location of stress can be inherent in a particular word root and/or prefix/suffix. So, for example, the word "impotent" has a stress on the first syllable whereas "important" has a stress on the second syllable, and the position of this stress is essentially what defines the difference between these two words.

 

French to all intents and purposes doesn't have this phenomenon of lexical stress.

 

In French, syllable stress essentially works at the phrase level: an utterance is divided up into 'phrases' of a few words in length, and the first and last syllable of each 'phrase' carry a stress. (Phonetically, there are differences in how precisely the first vs last syllable stress is realised, but I would suggest that's not so vital at this stage.)

 

In addition, there are a few "function" words (e.g. "à", "de", "me", "le" etc) which don't ordinarily carry stress. So when an utterance is being divided into phrases, these words cannot occur at the boundary of a phrase. For example:

 

  Jean et Marie sont venus à huit heures moins le quart.

 

might be divided up as follows:

 

  Jean et Marie sont venues | à | huit heures moins le quart.

 

where the syllables in bold carry a stress (and where "à" effectively sits outside any phrase).

 

There's no hard-and-fast rule as to how the division into phrases is made, but as a general rule, more rapid speech will have fewer of these intonation "phrases". In more careful speech, you may end up with further division, e.g.:

 

  Jean et Marie | sont venues | à | huit heures moins le quart.

 

Obviously, I'm glossing over a lot of details, but that's a basic outline. If your library has or can get hold of it, check out the chapter on French in "Intonation Systems" by Hirst & Di Cristo for one way of modelling French intonation.

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EducatorPermalink Reply by stu harris on October 26, 2011 at 5:44pm

Neil, am I right in thinking that in normal 2-syllable words, French tends to stress the first syllable whereas American English stresses the second?

 

Croissant

Jambon

Musée

 

It drives me slightly crazy to hear Americans doing their croisSANT, filET stuff.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 26, 2011 at 9:59pm

Actually, what usually happens when a 2-syllable word is spoken in isolation is that the pattern I mentioned above still applies. In other words, the isolated word forms its own "phrase", and both syllables will actually carry a type of "stress".

 

I didn't go into all the details above, but basically a phrase-initial stress usually involves a lengthening of the syllable onset (i.e. the consonant(s) that make up the start of the syllable), whereas a phrase-final stress usually involves a lengthening of the syllable coda (i.e. the vowel and any syllable-final consonant(s)). And of the two stress types, the phrase-final is arguably more prominent and typically involves a more pronounced rise in pitch. [*]

 

So if anything, to an English ear, it may actually sound as though a French person is "stressing" the final syllable rather than the initial syllable. For this reason, you may even see textbooks stating that French speakers "put the stress on the final syllable", although as I say, if you take actual measurements, the situation really appears to be phonetically more complex than that.

 

In words such as those you mention in English, there seems to be a difference between UK and US usage. UK speakers would tend to apply usual English stress patterns, so e.g. stress the first syllable of garage and croissant. Whereas I think it's more common in the US to have the stress pattern you mention, possibly imitating how they hear these words in French, of e.g. garage, croissant.

 

[*] I should also say that not all the details of how speakers realise stress, or if indeed all speakers realise stress in the same way, are entirely clear.

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Permalink Reply by Jervon Voltage on October 26, 2011 at 6:44pm

Thanks a lot, Neil! I asked my French teacher about this, but he somehow tried to evade it with an implausible explanation... I will try to get hold of that book and read more on this. :-)

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