CONTRASTIVE MARKING IN FRENCH DIALOGUE - WHY AND HOW

This experiment studies French-speaking adults' preferences for prosod ic marking (focal accent) or morphosyntactic marking (clefting) to exp ress 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 be aring the contrastive mark (subject vs complement) and, for the latter , the size of the class to which the contrasted item belongs (two memb ers vs more than two members). The subjects' responses on a forced-cho ice judgment task showed that when only one device was used for contra st, subjects clearly preferred clefting for grammatical subjects and f ocal 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 belon ged to a two-member class. These results demonstrate that subjects' ju dgments of the suitability of linguistic devices for expressing inform ation contrasts in French are more highly affected by syntactic factor s than conceptual ones.