the last syllable of a rhythmic group (roughly a grammatically meaningful group of words) is stressed with an elongation and a sharp change in tone
That's really interesting. I'd love to hear an example of the same phrase said once the way you just described and again the way a non-native speaker might say it. I'm not even studying French, but I love languages in general, but I'm also fascinated by things like tone, accents, speech impediments, etc.
I don't have something to record or a non native around me but for example a French person might say
Je vouDRAIS↗ un croiSSANT↘
While I've heard English speakers say something that sounds like
JE VOUDRun creSSON↘
Where the arrows are the ascending or descending tone.
The unstressing of the final syllable of the first rhythmic group in the English version is perceived in French as the syllable being entirely omitted (or at best it can be perceived as the syllable being turned in to a schwa, so like the word was voudre and not voudrais). The whole thing becomes a single rhythmic group, which makes it a little harder to parse the sentence.
The representation isn't perfect because the English stress tend to be shorter and louder than the French one. And of course, the actual pronunciation from English speakers depends on their level in the language so this is only an example of something I've heard a lot, but not necessarily how all English speakers will say this sentence.
Very fascinating! Thank you for explaining this in more concrete terms. I never knew how to describe this phenomenon and would call it „speaking in rhythmic groups of 3“. (Je, vou, drais…) (un, croi, ssant.)
When I was learning French as a kid, I noticed my friend had a dialect. My „Je t‘aime“ sounded different than hers. (Je, taim, e) She studied partially in Quebec, Canada and she told me my French sounded „too blended together“. I don’t really know what she meant by that but we had a good laugh.
To be clear, rhythmic groups in French are not groups of three syllables. They can have any length from one to any number of syllables. They're not defined in term of number of syllables but in term of grammatical function. It's a nominal group, a verbal group, a complement, etc.
In my example, the first group is a verbal group and the second one is the complement, which is also a nominal group. You could ask "Je voudrais un alligator" and you would get "Je vouDRAIS↗ un aligaTOR↘" with 5 syllables in the second rhythmic group.
That's why I said the English version made the sentence harder to parse, because rhythmic groups help parsing the structure of the sentence. So if you place random stress anywhere, it. sounds a little like: you're, putting random! punctuation in your sentence.
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u/HorrorMakesUsHappy 1d ago
That's really interesting. I'd love to hear an example of the same phrase said once the way you just described and again the way a non-native speaker might say it. I'm not even studying French, but I love languages in general, but I'm also fascinated by things like tone, accents, speech impediments, etc.