The course includes the analysis of the difference between Phonetics and Phonology, the International Phonetic Alphabet, the speech sounds of the French language, as well as basic phonetic phenomena observed in the flow of speech, such as assimilation, liaison etc. Particular emphasis is given to prosodic features and some speech sounds of the French language, whose pronunciation often confuses Greek speakers. The target of the course is to help students familiarize with scientific, political and journalistic oral discourse of French speakers.

Upon successful completion of the course, the students will be able to:

• help students familiarize with the speech sounds of the French language
• help students comprehend French oral speech in higher degrees of difficulty
• summarize a speech from Greek into French and from French into Greek
• use and recognize important peculiarities of oral speech in French
• help students familiarize with the political, scientific and journalistic discourse of the French language

Week 1

Differences between Phonetics and Phonology.

Week 2

International Phonetic Alphabet and human articulation mechanism.

Week 3

French language’s speech sounds and their variations depending on their origin by providing examples of original oral speech.

Week 4

Phonetic phenomena of liaison and elision, as well as the rules for their use in language.

Week 5

Phonetic phenomena of assimilation and hiatus and their use in language by analysing the presentation of a French speaker.

Week 6

Introduction to conversational speech. Syntactic, lexical and phonetic phenomena of the French conversational speech, followed by the projection of a video.

Week 7

Conversational speech prosodic phenomena, with emphasis on intonation and rhythm, followed by the projection of a video.

Week 8

Conversational speech prosodic phenomena, with emphasis on intonation and rhythm, followed by the projection of a video.

Week 9

Presentation of prosody’s functionality in the speech, listening to an audio file to confirm it.

Week 10

Application of the learning material on the analysis of political speech.

Week 11

Application of the learning material on the analysis of scientific speech.

Week 12

Application of the learning material on the analysis of journalistic speech.

Week 13

Course recap and instructions for the term paper.

Maingueneau D. (Ed.), L’analyse du discours. Etat de l’art et perspectives. Marges Linguistiques. 9 (mai 2005).

Pateli M. & Fredet F. (2010). La phonétique du français. Athènes: Symmetria.

Van Dijk T. (1993). «Principles of critical discourse analysis» in Discourse and Society. vol. 4(2). SAGE Journals: 249-283.

Face to face teaching. The course’s duration is two hours. The course is offered only to the students of Interpreting studies and is carried out exclusively in French for the best possible learning outcomes. The course is laid out as follows: projection of an up to 10-minute video or audio file on the current affairs in France and analysis of the linguistic and prosodic features used by the speakers.

Use of ICT in teaching.

Each week the students are assessed based on their performance in the class. The final assessment and grading of the course will be held through an obligatory term paper, which will be based on the transcription and phonetic representation of a 5-minute monologue from a French speaker’s live interview.