ABSTRACT
This chapter examines combinations and interactions between French speech sounds; it looks at some aspects of how sounds behave in connected speech: elision, liaison and assimilation. It examines features of French pronunciation at the suprasegmental level, looking at how sounds interact with each other when combined in the chain of speech. The difference between a connected-speech feature such as liaison and suprasegmental features such as a stress or intonation pattern is that the latter may extend over a sequence of many individual segments or sounds, while liaison and assimilation and elision are concerned with what occurs at the juncture of two sounds. Stress and intonation dictate the musical quality of our speech, providing changes in volume and in the tune or melodic line. The chapter concludes with a short section on 'suprasegmental' features of French, namely stress and intonation. The term intonation refers to the patterns of variation in pitch, or 'tunes', that speakers employ in speech.
