Prosody and reported speech: Mise-en-scene of voices

In view of providing evidence of an overall difference between Direct Speech (DD in our text) and Direct Reported Speech (DRD in our text), variations of three prosodic parameters, i.e. syllabic rate, energy and pitch, have been observed Direct Reported Speech is taken as the manifestation of various enunciative "voices" (Ducrot, 1984, Vion, 1995) and performed by different "voices" in the prosodic sense. Neither syllabic rate nor energy parameters revealed any significance between DD and DRD but significance was observed for the proportion of high pitch values in DRD versus DD. Such wider pitch range on DRD portions is hypothesized to reflect an emphatization (Selting, 1994), a "cristallisation" of DRD in discourse (de Gaulmyn, 1994). Moreover, correlation between the mean pitch of two consecutive "Pseudo-syllables" showed a higher significant value for DRD, suggesting lesser hesitation from our speaker.