An Introduction to French Pronunciation

Stress 49
word is sometimes stressed and sometimes not, depending
on its position in the utterance, e.g. je l’ai vu | pendant les
vacances /le vake:s/, but les vacances d’été /le vakes dete/.
As we shall see (12.2–12.7), this is a factor of crucial importance
in determining whether or not a vowel is long.
9.4.4 We have seen (8.5) that French is a syllable-timed
language, i.e. that each syllable, whatever its degree of stress,
takes up more or less the same amount of time, whereas
English is a stress-timed language. This means (to take an
example from Abercrombie, 1967: 97) that in an English
utterance such as which is the train for Crewe, please? the
stressed syllables (1 – which, 2 – train, 3 – Crewe, 4 – please)are
equally spaced out and, in consequence, that the two-syllable
phrase for Crewe and the three-syllable phrase is the train each
get the same amount of time as (and correspondingly less time
per syllable than) the monosyllabic phrases which and please.
In a syllable-timed French sentence, however, the intervals
between normally stressed syllables will be irregular, since
such syllables may be separated by any number of equally
timed but unstressed syllables up to (normally) a maximum
of six or seven (see 7.3.3).
9.5 Emphatic Stress in French
9.5.1 In English, emphatic stress is effected by giving even
greater prominence to the syllable that bears the normal stress,
i.e. by pronouncing it with even greater energy than normally.
In French, this is not the case. In French, emphatic stress
in most cases affects the first syllable, though if this begins
with a vowel it frequently falls on the second syllable (which,
in most such cases, begins with a consonant, though there
are a very few words, such as ahurissant /a-y-ri-se/, in which
the first two syllables both begin with a vowel). Emphatic
stress can be indicated by the mark ['] before the syllable
concerned, e.g.: