Unveiling convergence: Prosody and speech rhythms of the tu vois discourse marker across French regions

Résumé

This paper outlines an approach to determine the prosodic characteristics of a discursive marker (tu vois ‘you see’ and its past tensed variant t’as vu ‘you saw’) commonly used in different non-standard French variations, and the eventual dialectal similarities or differences between authentic speakers from the suburbs of Paris and Marseille. This study consists of a descriptive and a comparative analysis leaning on spontaneous speech samples. These samples provide a rich source of data, enabling us to make two key assertions. Firstly, our examination of the prosodic features of the discourse marker reveals a notable consistency among them. Secondly, our comparative analysis highlights an intriguing finding: despite examining two distinct dialects, we observed no significant difference between the suprasegmental features present in each. This implies a level of similarity or convergence in the overarching suprasegmental aspects of speech between the two dialects under investigation.