Cet article présente deux ressources récemment développées pour explorer l’interface prosodie-syntaxe en pidgin nigérian, une langue à faibles ressources d’Afrique de l’Ouest. La première est un treebank intonosyntaxique dans laquelle chaque token est associé à une série de caractéristiques prosodiques au niveau de la syllabe, ce qui permet d’analyser diverses structures syntaxiques et prosodiques en utilisant une même interface. La seconde est un système de synthèse de la parole entraîné sur le même ensemble de données, conçu pour permettre un contrôle direct sur les contours intonatifs de la parole générée. Cet outil a été développé pour nous permettre de tester les hypothèses formulées à partir de l’exploration du treebank. Cet article est largement une adaptation de deux publications récentes présentant chaque outil, avec un accent sur leur interconnexion dans notre recherche en cours.

This paper presents a new phonetic resource for Nigerian Pidgin, a low-resource language of West Africa. Aiming to provide a new tool for research on intonosyntax, we have augmented an existing syntactic treebank of Nigerian Pidgin, associating each orthographically transcribed token with a series of syllable-level alignments and phonetizations. Syllables are further described using a set of continuous and discrete prosodic features. This new approach provides a simple tool for researchers to explore the prosodic characteristics of various syntactic phenomena. In this paper, we present the format of the corpus, the various features added, and several explorations that can be performed using an online interface. We also present a prosodically specified lexicon extracted using this resource. In it, each orthographic form is accompanied by the frequency of its phoneme-level variants, as well as the suprasegmental features that most frequently accompany each syllable. Finally, we present several additional case studies on how this corpus can used in the study of the language’s prosody.

The main objective of the Rhapsodie project (ANR Rhapsodie 07 Corp-030-01) was to define rich, explicit, and reproducible schemes for the annotation of prosody and syntax in different genres (± spontaneous, ± planned, face-to-face interviews vs. broadcast, etc.), in order to study the prosody/syntax/discourse interface in spoken French, and their roles in the segmentation of speech into discourse units (Lacheret, Kahane, & Pietrandrea forthcoming). We here describe the deliverable, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French, composed of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and 33000 words), orthographically and phonetically transcribed. The transcriptions and the annotations are all aligned on the speech signal: phonemes, syllables, words, speakers, overlaps. This resource is freely available at www.projet-rhapsodie.fr. The sound samples (wav/mp3), the acoustic analysis (original F0 curve manually corrected and automatic stylized F0, pitch format), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the microsyntactic annotations (tabular format), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt, tabular format), the prosodic annotations (xml, textgrid, tabular format), and the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France. The metadata are encoded in the IMDI-CMFI format and can be parsed on line.