This paper fits into a tradition of prosodic analyses of discourse in French, but it proposes among the first multilayer multi-parametric descriptions. The study presented here is based on the analysis of a corpus of narrations from the comic strip Titeuf by six French natives. Discourse annotation was carried out, and pitch, intensity, duration and spectral parameters were automatically extracted from the recordings at different levels of the linguistic structure. Our results confirm and further illustrate previous studies on the prosodic marking of discourse structure in general, particularly concerning pitch reset at the beginning of new topics; but we also provide new elements regarding the discursive roles of intensity and speech rate, which somewhat challenge previous work in the field, and favour less strictly hierarchical models of discourse structure.

Index Terms: discourse prosody, discourse structure, French