The Sound of Text: Prosody and Typography in French Read-aloud Speech

This book examines the dynamic relationship between speech prosody and typographical features, offering a framework for understanding how different linguistic systems mediate the interactions between written and spoken language.

The volume charts how typographical features are interpreted prosodically in read-aloud texts, exploring the interplay of prosody, with its role in conveying meaning, emotion, and intent in oral communication, and typography, such as punctuation and syntactic structures, which guides readers and facilitates comprehension. Wiklund draws on examples from French, a language whose highly developed typographical systems and well-established traditions of prosodic expression offer a rich set of data from which to see these interactions at work. In so doing, the book offers wider insights into how written structures are dynamically expressed in spoken language, with broader implications for the study of these dynamics in other languages and in multilingual contexts.

The Sound of Text will be of interest to scholars across different areas of study within linguistics, including phonetics and phonology, discourse analysis, speech communication, and second language acquisition, as well as those interested in media and communication technologies.

Mari Wiklund is Senior University Lecturer in French language and culture at the University of Helsinki, Finland.