Séminaire de M. Emmanuel-Moselly MAKASSO, doctorant du LPL - Date : 29 mai 2008, 15h00 - Lieu : Centre MICA
Intervenant :
M. Emmanuel-Moselly MAKASSO
étudiant doctorant du Laboratoire Parole et Langage (LPL) d'Aix en Provence, France, invité au Centre MICA
Date : 29 mai, 2008, 15h00
Lieu : Centre MICA, Salle polyvalente, Bâtiment C10, 4ème étage
Interprète traducteur : le séminaire est présenté en français avec les transparents rédigés en anglais
Résumé/abstract :
This work, grounded on the prosody of Bàsàa, a tone Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, draws on a long tradition of the Form-Functions of prosody developed in the Laboratoire Parole et Langage, in Aix-en-Provence, France since a long time now.
The prosodic phenomenon in question here is called melism, a word borrowed from the domain of singing and proposed in linguistics by Caelen-Haumont and Bel (2000). It stands for a large melodic excursion over the course of a whole word or a string of words. Adapted to Bàsàa language, melisms are higher in pitch than the normal register of high tones.
From a corpus of spoken radio interviews of 6 bàsàa speakers (1 female and 5 males), we applied the Momel-Melism script, running under the Praat software (Boersma and Weenick). This specific tool provided us with a segmentation of human voice into 9 levels, acute, Superior, High, elevated, mean, central, low, inferior, grave. Melisms are concerned only with the first three ones, which are the highest. The melisms gathered from this corpus were treated in two ways: first a phonological description and then a semantic and pragmatic description.
The phonological description consisted of bringing out the tonal correlates, provided the Momel model sorts out tonal syllables, understood as sequences of two tonal targets, automatically fixed by the script, which are different from lexical ones. Also the phonological description focused on the direction of the melodic slope, which can be upward or downward, or steady in a plateau. The third part of this description was concerned with the types of melism structures in phrases. The results showed that the A and S tonal categories are marginal while the H category is largely dominant. Likewise, the melodic slope is mostly unsteady, and there is a majority of downward movements. Plateaus represent less than 18%. The most dominant structure is the melism M, which is not constrained by any phonological, syntactic or semantic phenomenon.
After that description, the other part of the work was concerned with semantic and pragmatic analysis. From the logical distribution of words into two broad classes, lexical items and grammatical items, we considered the way grammatical melisms act in discourse structure, by marking coherence relations. Then the lexical items were examined in terms of lexical networks comprising isotopies, lexical fields and sub-fields. Likewise, lexical melisms were treated from two points of view: the first one is information structure, and the other is lexical subjectivity.
From a corpus of spoken radio interviews of 6 bàsàa speakers (1 female and 5 males), we applied the Momel-Melism script, running under the Praat software (Boersma and Weenick). This specific tool provided us with a segmentation of human voice into 9 levels, acute, Superior, High, elevated, mean, central, low, inferior, grave. Melisms are concerned only with the first three ones, which are the highest. The melisms gathered from this corpus were treated in two ways: first a phonological description and then a semantic and pragmatic description.
The phonological description consisted of bringing out the tonal correlates, provided the Momel model sorts out tonal syllables, understood as sequences of two tonal targets, automatically fixed by the script, which are different from lexical ones. Also the phonological description focused on the direction of the melodic slope, which can be upward or downward, or steady in a plateau. The third part of this description was concerned with the types of melism structures in phrases. The results showed that the A and S tonal categories are marginal while the H category is largely dominant. Likewise, the melodic slope is mostly unsteady, and there is a majority of downward movements. Plateaus represent less than 18%. The most dominant structure is the melism M, which is not constrained by any phonological, syntactic or semantic phenomenon.
After that description, the other part of the work was concerned with semantic and pragmatic analysis. From the logical distribution of words into two broad classes, lexical items and grammatical items, we considered the way grammatical melisms act in discourse structure, by marking coherence relations. Then the lexical items were examined in terms of lexical networks comprising isotopies, lexical fields and sub-fields. Likewise, lexical melisms were treated from two points of view: the first one is information structure, and the other is lexical subjectivity.
