Prosody in contact in French: A case study from a heritage variety in the USA

This article focuses on the prosody of heritage speakers of a minority variety of French, spoken in Frenchville, Pennsylvania, since the 1830s. Specifically, this case study focuses on three distinct supra-segmental phenomena: (i) penultimate prominence, (ii) focus via prominence in situ, and (iii) the prosody of left dislocation. Although all three phenomena appear to be convergent with the speakers’ dominant language, American English, I argue that penultimate prominence cannot be unambiguously attributed to English influence but may instead be an inheritance from the 19th-century source dialect for Frenchville. Prominence at the higher discourse levels, for the expression of information structure, can much more clearly be interpreted as contact induced. As is demonstrated here, these bilinguals use pitch accents and tonal contours for a variety of pragmatic and discursive functions in ways that are very similar to English but impossible in any attested variety of French. Despite the influence of the structure of the dominant language on the heritage language, these data cannot be easily interpreted as evidence of attrition since the usual syntactic means for the expression of information structure in French are still very much intact in this variety. This implies that contact-influenced prosodic innovations among heritage speakers may serve as additional communication resources for the expression of discourse-pragmatic distinctions rather than as mere replacement strategies.