L'emploi de la focalisation prosodique dans le jeu d'acteur

A corpus of occurrences of prosodic highlighting was put together by three experts out of a sample recording from two theatrical performances. The experts classified the occurrences in several functions, and the corpus was analyzed phonetically for the presence of the prosodic features that literature associates with these functions. The main finding was that a significant percentage of occurrences classified in the function of “insisting” displayed some features associated with the function of narrow focus marking, especially deaccenting. Further research is needed to verify this result, which, if it were confirmed, would have important pragmatic implications, as well as shed light on some characteristics of actors’ speech.