Some utterances are pragmatically ambiguous. For instance, Tu peux fermer la fenêtre ? (“Can you close the window?”) can be a request for information or an “indirect request” (IR) to close the window. A possible way for speakers to make it clear whether they intend these expressions as a direct or indirect speech act is to use cues such as gestures or prosody. It has been shown for English that participants’ identifications of IRs are predicted by f0 slope, mean f0, and f0 duration. However, the extent to which these findings extend to other languages remains unknown. In this article, we explore the prosodic features associated with French IRs, a language poorly documented from that perspective. We address two research questions: Are listeners’ pragmatic interpretations of French IR constructions predicted by speaker’s original intent? Do prosodic cues play the same role in French modal interrogatives as in declarative remarks? We find, first, that remarks with more positive f0 slope are more likely to be interpreted as requests, but modal interrogatives with more positive f0 slope are more likely to be taken as questions. Second, while longer remarks were more likely to be interpreted as requests, longer modal interrogatives were more likely to be interpreted as questions.

有些话语在语用上是模棱两可的。例如，Tu peux fermer la fenêtre？（“你能关闭窗口吗？”）可以是信息请求或关闭窗口的“间接请求”(IR)。说话者要明确表示这些表达是直接还是间接的言语行为，一种可能的方法是使用手势或韵律等提示。对于英语，参与者对 IR 的识别是由 f 0斜率、平均 f 0和 f 0预测的期间。然而，这些发现在多大程度上扩展到其他语言仍然未知。在这篇文章中，我们探讨了与法语 IR 相关的韵律特征，从这个角度来看，这种语言的记录很少。我们解决两个研究问题：听众对法语 IR 结构的语用解释是否由说话者的原始意图预测？韵律线索在法语模态疑问句中的作用是否与在陈述性言论中的作用相同？我们发现，首先，具有更多正 f 0斜率的评论更有可能被解释为请求，但具有更多正 f 0的模态疑问句斜率更可能被视为问题。其次，虽然较长的评论更有可能被解释为请求，但较长的模态疑问句更有可能被解释为问题。