The traditional separate procedure of treating tonic stress, emphatic stress, & dialectal prosodies is questioned in this experimental study of pretonic syllable prominence in a regional variety of French, Nova Scotia Acadian, based on the auditive & quantitative analysis of data extracted from recorded but unrehearsed interviews with 5 informants. The possibility of elaborating an integrated model for predicting syllable prominence is suggested. Distribution of tonic stress in the speech samples is compared to the norm of Standard French, using a formal syntactic model proposed by P. Martin ("Une Théorie syntaxique de l'accentuation en français" [A Syntactic Theory of French Accentuation] in L'Accent en français contemporain [The Accent in Contemporary French], Studia Phonetica, 15, Montreal: Didier, 1980); subsequent analysis of the distribution of pretonic syllable prominence supports the hypothesis that this feature may be related to the preservation of morphological stress, which interacts with sentence stress in a rhythmic patterning influenced by syntagmatic patterns (contrary to the Standard French model of a word-stress related oxytonic-only rhythm). 1 Table, 18 References. Modified AA