Please be mindful of the fact that all the French sounds are produced with greater facial, throat and other phonatory muscle tension than any English sound.
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The Word Group or Chunk
There are more or less similar spoken characteristics in all languages, including English, so this phenomenon should not be too unfamiliar to you.
Words in spoken French sentences usually form meaningful, grammatically binding rhythmic groups. These word clusters systematically borrow the speech/phonetic characteristics of isolated words. Inside the chunk the word boundaries may fuse in such a way that the final utterance could be easily taken for an isolated/freestanding word. So the chunk is to be treated as a continuous sound/phonetic unit :not the multiple of freestanding words but the sum total of all constituant words in a way like fused together.
Effectively the novice language learner is often confused by the degree of fusion or a linking sound or assimilations inside a chunk and will remain for a long time bewildered by this phenomenon.Why? Most probably because initially we tend to learn to recognize words as we need to learn to handle the basic building blocks in the first place; the words from a dictionary, a person or some other sources.
Being able to talk through the use of a naturally flowing stream of "chunks" is the distiguishing sign of the advanced language learner/user, yet learners at all proficiency levels should be made aware of this penomenon without a fail and very early in their French studies.
Where is the stress point in the chunk?
For all practical purposes let's accept that it is regularly the last syllable of the chunk that will receive the stress; just like in the case of the isolated word. In a way it resembles very much the rising intonation of the interrogative sentence that does not contain a question word eg. 
What criteria are used to decide about the size of the chunk?
Mostly semantic, grammatical and syntactic bindings hold the constituent words of a chunk together.
NOTE: The "chunks" generated here below are taken out of full syntactic context and might sound manipulated. Nevertheless the goal of getting it right should be the driving force and you should make every effort to achieve or at least approximate a rising tone on the last syllable of the "chunk" just as you hear them next.
le garçon | 
le grand garçon |
je travaille | 
je ne travaille pas | 
je vais les lui passer | 
quand il leur a tout raconté de ses affaires | 
comme vous le voulez boire petit à petit | 
In a long sentence you can create several "chunks".
Eh bien, comme fruits, on mange des fraises, des framboises, des prunes, des pêches, des poires, des pommes et des cerises. 
Copyright 2011 AntWise
Frank ANTAL
Page updated 04/07/11
Brisbane Queensland Australia
