Contrastive marking in French dialogue: Why and how

This experiment studies French-speaking adults' preferences for prosodic marking (focal accent) or morphosyntactic marking (clefting) to express information contrasts in dialogue. Our goal is to determine what syntactic and conceptual factors might contribute to these preferences, by examining for the former, the grammatical function of the item bearing the contrastive mark (subject vs complement) and, for the latter, the size of the class to which the contrasted item belongs (two members vs more than two members). The subjects' responses on a forced-choice judgment task showed that when only one device was used for contrast, subjects clearly preferred clefting for grammatical subjects and focal accent for complements. When both devices were used (prosodic and morphosyntactic), contrasted subjects were preferred over contrasted complements. Response times were longer when the contrasted item belonged to a two-member class. These results demonstrate that subjects' judgments of the suitability of linguistic devices for expressing information contrasts in French are more highly affected by syntactic factors than conceptual ones.