Alignment of high tones in regional French

Svetlana Kaminskaïa

In regional French, tonal alignment has been understudied and remains an important empirical question. In this paper, samples of text readings from two historically related dialects - Quebec and Vendée varieties - are examined to determine whether these dialects exhibit differences in alignment of stress group initial and final peaks with respect to vowel boundaries. The results of this preliminary analysis showed that although in both varieties the peaks are more stable with respect to vowel end, when it comes to vowel onset Canadian speakers realize the peaks significantly later than the European participants.

intonation, tonal alignment, dialectal variation, Ontario French