La honte

[toxic island]

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[grizzled hornet]

There's no real stress in French, it's all intonation really

And you're right, it's based on rhythm groups

[livid pier]

so each rhythm group has a sharp intonation at the end, instead of a steady rise throught the sentence?

[grizzled hornet]

There's a general intonation pattern across a sentence usually, with smaller patterns underneath according to rhythm groups

[grizzled hornet]

I've seen conflicting info about that tbh

My feeling and most recent infos I've seen don't even mention a stress-like peak at the end

Just overall rise and overall decline during each rhythm group

But I know it's usually mentioned that the last syllable of a rhythm group is "stressed" so I might be wrong or misremember

From my Experimental Phonetics class:

[livid pier]

I see, what about in isolated words like "jamais" or monosyllabic words like "ciel"

do those still "count" as a rhythm group

[grizzled hornet]

yeah

but it doesn't make sense for monosyllabic words on their own to be defined as stressed or unstressed

i believe there are sources that state that words in isolation "stress" the last syllable, but again i'm not sure this info still stands today

[livid pier]

what about polysyllables?

[grizzled hornet]

this ^

[livid pier]

ah sorry i overlooked thanks!

[grizzled hornet]

nw

i'm far from an expert as you can see, but i think the truth of the answer might be evolving with more studies on prosody in the recent years

[livid pier]

do you think that this is something il just pick up on instead of studying the rules lol?

[grizzled hornet]

yes lol it's almost useless info for a learner

it's only interesting from a linguistics point of view