The suprasegmental feature of English phonology that can be said to be the least problematic
to French EFL learners is intonation. Roach (2009: 3) defines it as “the use of the pitch of the
voice to convey meaning”. Halliday’s (1967) analysis of intonation is quite relevant and has
been taken up many times in the literature. The author divides it into “the three T’s”:
Tonality (the chunking of speech into intonational phrases, or tone-units), Tonicity (nucleus
placement), and Tone (mainly, but not only: fall, rise, and fall-rise). There are some
similarities between the French and English intonational systems, especially concerning
tones and tone meanings. In a nutshell, a rising tone indicates incompleteness, non-finality,
sometimes friendliness and positivity, while a falling tone usually means completeness,
finality, and seriousness (Cruttenden, 1997; Deschamps et al., 2004; Wells, 2006). Nonetheless,
French learners do have a problem with the realization of the English fall-rise tone, probably
out of embarrassment to produce such a different tone from those of their L1. As far as
tonality is concerned, both French and English have “tone-units”, or intonational phrases
(abbreviated IP). The only problem that can be mentioned, though, is the placing of tone-unit
boundaries (| and || for longer pauses) where punctuation is absent. Commas usually align
with tone-unit boundaries, but there can be a tone-unit boundary where there is no
punctuation, e.g. after a long subject or in sentences like: Would you like tea | or coffee?.
The most problematic component of intonation for French EFL learners is tonicity, or the
placement of the nucleus (also called nuclear stress, nuclear accent, tonic accent, or primary
accent), i.e. which word/syllable receives main prominence. The nucleus represents the focus
domain of the intonational phrase, where the information can be new or contrastive.
Vallduví (1991, cited in Rasier & Hiligsmann, 2007: 49) categorizes the accentuation of
Germanic languages as “plastic”, which means that prominence serves to show information
focus, while Romance languages have “non-plastic” accentuation. Contrary to English, the
most prominent syllable in a French IP is the last syllable, regardless of the word. That is
why Vaissière (2002: 11) points out: “In French, focusing, topicalisation and the theme-rheme
distinction are all related to word order and phrasing (there is morpho-syntactically marked
focus), not to differences in prominence”. If French relies on morpho-syntactic devices to
mark information that is in focus, it is understandable that French EFL learners misplace
nuclei when they speak English. The nucleus in the latter language can even be the first
syllable of an IP; such a sentence as C’est moi qui l’ai fait (literally: it is I who did it) is the direct
equivalent of I did it, with oral emphasis, i.e. the nucleus, on I. Besides the recurrent error of
stressing given information instead of new, it is just as common to hear a French speaker
misplace the nucleus in so-called “event sentences”, where the tonicity is unexpected. For
example, in The phone’s ringing(5), the place of the nucleus is unexpected, but possibly
explained by the fact that the event is seen as a whole, and therefore the noun bears the
nucleus (Deschamps et al., 2004; Wells, 2006). As is specified in Rasier and Hiligsmann (2007),
it is easier for a speaker of a language with “plastic” accentuation like English, to produce a
language with non-plastic accentuation like French, than the other way round, hence the
difficulties that French learners have with English tonicity.
Mennen (2006: 1) alleges that “impressions based on intonation may lead to ill-founded
stereotypes about national or linguistic groups”. The contribution of intonation to foreignaccentedness
and the intelligibility of a message is indeed undeniable. As was said above, the
placement of the nuclear syllable is one of the most significant elements in the realization of
English intonation. While any syllable in French can be prominent and bear the nucleus
provided it is in phrase-final position, in English it is first and foremost bound to word stress
patterns. That is why in order to make sure that native speakers will understand the message
and produce correct tonicity, it is necessary to be aware of the notion of lexical stress:
“Prerequisite for the description of intonation, we have to know which syllables are stressed
in words so that we then know which syllables are potentially accentable in utterances”
(Cruttenden, 1997: 15). Di Cristo (2004: 88) says that nuclear accent is in fact at the interface
of the notions of intonation and lexical stress. Consequently, the latter can be regarded as a
basis for intonation, and the problems that French speakers have with it are of paramount
importance in the understanding of the intonational difficulties.