The Glottal Stop in French

Abstract

Abstract This article, the fifth in a series of reports on the results of a computer-assisted analysis of a surreptitiously recorded corpus representing 50 half-hour conversations with members of the Paris ‘establishment’, deals with the glottal stop. Two types are described: The first, a towel - releasing articulation, occurs in utterance-initial and -internal positions. It serves in both positions as a stress marker. The second is an arresting articulation, occurring internally and in utterance-final position. It serves to call attention to a preceding or following element, to abort an unwanted utterance, or to terminate an utterance as quickly as possible in order to get on with the next. It also terminates words repeated in hesitation. The overall frequency of occurrence of the glottal stop in French varies as a function of sex, age, occupation, speaker’s intent, voice level, type of articulation and utterance length. Its pertinent acoustic features are deduced from measurements of spectrograms and synthetic patterns.