Week 10: Rhythmic Groups

Due to our in-class work that focused on thought groups and prominence last week, I wanted to do the same for my practice on the blog. I began doing some more research and discovered that French has "rhythmic groups" instead of more specific intonation patterns.

This was an informative video regarding French rhymthic groups, where the woman broke them down into 7 different groups; these included:

1. subject PN + (obj PN +) verb
2. preposition + object of the preposition
3. (long) noun phrase as subject
• depends on speed of speech
4. (long) adjectival noun phrase
5. (long) adverb or adverbial phrase
6. (long) DO & infinitive phrases
7.  parenthetical expressions

This helped me make more sense of my archetype and also explained her frequent pauses--besides just being thought groups, they are also her rhythmic groups! I originally wanted to say that it's because she talks slower but I'm not sure that's so true. It seems that she sometimes has rhythmic groups in order to create greater dramatic emphasis for her story, which she definitely achieves. 

I decided to practice these this week and split up the rhythmic groups accordingly:

C’était le matin  

Winnie l’ourson et tigrou

se réveillaient

et vu que ces (que ces) bébés singes étaient partis

et en puis

les bébés singes ils étaient perdus

dans les arbres.

Ils avaient vu de chauves-souris.

Ils avaient vu des crocodiles,

z’hippopotame,

le girafe.

Ils avaient un très long voyage.

Ils ont même pas peut le train.

Et ils ont vu

un crocodile.

Ils avaient vu des grenouilles,

des boites avec des animaux qui sont pauvres,

qui trouver pas leur chemin,

des gens qui voulaient en prison les animaux qui sont pauvres,
qui n'a pas manger.

Ils ne pas payer.

Ils étaient dans en arbres terrible. 

Listen to my recording here.