An Introduction to French Pronunciation

The Rhythmic Group 37
shall call ‘groups’, and that the groups arrived at on one basis
may or may not coincide with those arrived at on one or more
of the other bases. In what follows, we shall choose relatively
simple examples for the sake of clarity. Our definitions of
the three types of group, arrived at on the basis of different
approaches, are deliberately left somewhat vague – any attempt
to be rigorously precise would take us into very deep waters,
and in any case is not necessary for our purposes.
7.2.2 The breath group corresponds to everything that is
said between two intakes of breath; in fact, the breath group
could be longer than the sentence, as in ‘Come tomorrow. I’ll
be glad to see you’, if spoken without taking a breath between
‘tomorrow’ and ‘I’ll’.
7.2.3 The sense group can be taken, for our purposes, as
corresponding to grammatical subdivisions within the sentence
– but there could well be differences of opinion as to where
these fall: for example, while there could be little doubt that
the sentence ‘Every Saturday morning, provided it’s not raining,
he goes swimming’ consists of three sense groups, there
could well be a measure of disagreement as to how many
groups, up to a maximum of five, a sentence like ‘He takes
the children for a swim in the town pool every Saturday during
the holidays’ falls into. What is quite clear, however, is that
there are very frequently, though not of course by any means
always, a number of sense groups within the same breath group.
7.2.4 The rhythmic group is, as we shall see (7.3), of particular
importance for French, whereas, for English or many other
languages, an analysis based on breath groups and sense groups
alone might well suffice.
7.3 The Rhythmic Group
7.3.1 In what follows, | is used to indicate a division between
rhythmic groups (note that this is not a standard IPA symbol).