Pidin Anne Riipan kanssa esitelmän JRE-RIICLAS 2022 -konferenssissa Tahitilla marraskuussa 2022. Kirjoitimme esitelmän pohjalta artikkelin, joka julkaistaan kesäkuussa 2024 Contextes et Didactiques -lehdessä. Artikkelin otsikko on “L’interprétation prosodique des points d’exclamation dans la parole des apprenants finnophones du français” (‘Huutomerkkien prosodinen tulkinta suomenkielisten ranskanoppijoiden puheessa’). Alla on artikkelin englanninkielinen tiivistelmä.

“Each language has its own intonation system (Hirst et Di Cristo, 1998). French is characterised by large pitch movements (e.g. Di Cristo, 1998; Mertens, 2008; Morel et Danon-Boileau, 1998; Rossi, 1999), whereas the intonation of Finnish is characterised by a certain monotony created by a narrow variation range of fundamental frequency (Iivonen, 1998). In this article, we compare the prosodic interpretation of exclamation marks by Finnish-speaking learners of French and by a control group consisting of native speakers of French. Our results show that in 64% of cases, native speakers of French interpret exclamation marks with a final ‘rising-falling’ pitch movement. This is not surprising, because according to previous studies (Delais-Roussarie et al., 2015; Di Cristo, 2016), this type of pitch contour is typical of exclamations of French. In the speech of the Finnish-speaking learners of French, this type of pitch contour is more rare: it occurs only in 30.7% of cases. In addition, the falling part of the pitch movement is shorter in the speech of the Finnish-speaking learners than in the speech of the native speakers. Most often, the Finnish-speaking learners mark the presence of an exclamation mark by a pitch fall (37.3%). This type also occurs in the speech of the native speakers, but more rarely (20%). The exclamation marks can also lead to a pitch rise both in the speech of the native speakers (16%) and in the speech of the Finnish-speaking learners (22.7%), but this is not very frequent. Out data consist of recordings where 15 Finnish-speaking learners of French and five native speakers of French read aloud an extract of a dialogue drawn from the play Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1952). The Finnish-speaking informants are university students who attended a French course at the Language Centre of the University of Helsinki (Finland). Their proficiency level of spoken French is A1-A2 (CEFR, 2022). The native speakers of French are Erasmus students at the University of Helsinki.”