Feet without stress: High vowel deletion in Québec French

Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 2006

There is disagreement in the literature on whether French has stress and on whether it has a foot projection. The disagreement stems from the observation that French is unusual in that the phrase rather than the word is the domain of stress assignment, there is optional initial stress in addition to obligatory final stress, and there are rampant violations of word minimality. In view of these observations, this paper examines the outputs of a child learner of Québec French in an attempt to determine the conclusions she has arrived at concerning the status of the foot in the language being acquired. It is demonstrated that, in spite of the challenge that the facts of the target language present, from the onset of production, the child's outputs are compatible with standard views on prosodic structure. Word minimality effects, the distribution of final lengthening, the emergence of word-final consonants, and the organisation of functional material into prosodic structure are all examined. The paper also provides a preliminary analysis of stress in target French which is, to the greatest extent possible, consistent with standard views on prosodic structure.

Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019, 2019

We examine the effects of prosodic strengthening on the acoustic realization of L2 French oral vowels. We analyse 12,283 vowels produced by 20 learners of French (L1 Spanish and English) and 10 native speakers according to different prosodic positions: (i) IP-final (ii) AP-final (obligatory accent) or AP-initial (initial non-obligatory accent) and (iii) word-internal unaccented. We computed the convex hull area of F1/F2 and F2/F3 spaces, Euclidean distances and vowel durations. Results show that the L2 vowel space is expanded in strong prosodic positions. Differently from what we observe for native French speakers, vowel expansion does not consistently reflect the prosodic hierarchy for the two groups of learners. We discuss these results in the light of L2 acquisition phonology.

Eleventh Annual Conference of the …, 2010

This study investigates phrase-medial vowel devoicing in European French (eg/ty pø/[typø]'you can'). Our spontaneous speech data confirm that French phrase-medial devoicing is a frequent phenomenon affecting high vowels preceded by voiceless consonants. We also found that devoicing is more frequent in temporally reduced and coarticulated vowels. Complete and partial devoicing were conditioned by the same variables (speech rate, consonant type and distance from the end of the AP). Given these ...

2003

This study presents kinematic data for the vowel /i/ at several different prosodic boundaries in French. It follows on from previous work presented in Tabain (in press), where the vowel /a/ was shown to be highly affected by the strength of the prosodic boundary. Consistent with previous data showing minimal contextual variability in the production of /i/, our results show minimal effects of prosodic boundary strength on tongue and jaw movement for /i/. However, durational data show the same pattern as is observed for all other speech sounds. We suggest that since a very precise production of /i/ is important for correct perception of this vowel, the speaker is not free to mark the prosodic hierarchy in terms of supralaryngeal articulation in the same way as it is marked for /a/. For this reason we suggest that duration is still the primary marker of prosodic boundaries in French.

2015

We examine occurrences of categorical assimi-lation (neutralizations) in French, the perception of voiced and unvoiced word-final obstruents in dif-ferent phonological contexts. We first show the categorical nature of the alternation (Exp. 1), sup-ported in Exp. 2 by perceptual categorization data. In Exp. 3, the interpretation of this first percept appears to be corrected in certain contexts, induc-ing compensation. We argue that context effects are phonological in this case, rather than auditory or phonetic. We conclude that linguistic knowl-edge of alternations is necessary in compensation for categorical assimilation.

We examine occurrences of categorical assimi-lation (neutralizations) in French, the perception of voiced and unvoiced word-final obstruents in dif-ferent phonological contexts. We first show the categorical nature of the alternation (Exp. 1), sup-ported in Exp. 2 by perceptual categorization data. In Exp. 3, the interpretation of this first percept appears to be corrected in certain contexts, induc-ing compensation. We argue that context effects are phonological in this case, rather than auditory or phonetic. We conclude that linguistic knowl-edge of alternations is necessary in compensation for categorical assimilation.

2015

Final vowel devoicing is a feature of Continental French in which utterance-final vowels lose their voicing and produce fricative-like whistles. Previous studies have examined the phenomenon’s phonological and pragmatic tendencies, revealing its preference for high vowels in open syllables at the ends of statements. Here, we re-examine and expand upon previous work by investigating the role of vowel type, preceding consonant and lexical frequency. Results reveal that high rounded vowels devoice more frequently than high unrounded ones, and that stops precede devoiced vowels at significantly higher rates than fricatives or sonorants. No significant effect was found for voicing in the preceding segment. A slight effect for lexical frequency was also found, such that words that were more frequent were more likely to be realized with a devoiced vowel. This suggests that although final devoicing is heavily predictable via phonological constraints, it also exists on the lexical level.

We examined tonal alignment and scaling patterns of the start and end points of the French late intonational rise in two read speech corpora. Our goals were twofold.

Nouveaux départs en phonologie, 2004

Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 2007

The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La Revue Canadienne De Linguistique, 2015

sign language. Two points are made in this paper: first, that DGS (Deutsche Gebärdensprache 'German Sign Language') uses prosodic levels comparable to those found in oral languages, showing that prosody is a crosslinguistic feature of language in general, and second, that prosody has meanings that are compositionally present, again comparable to what is found in oral languages. Like many papers on sign languages, it introduces a lot of general knowledge on the language first, leaving only little space for the detailed analysis of prosody and meaning. As should have become clear from these summaries, in most of the articles the role of prosody is taken more seriously than the role of meaning. Only Truckenbrodt's and Baumann and Riester's contributions use meaning as a point of departure and investigate how tunes express it, and in these two papers, the role of prosody is kept to a minimum. Most of the contributions use conventional information-structural categories and investigate how they are realized by prosody. Frota assumes that in European Portuguese a nuclear high tone is associated with narrow focus and a low tone with broad focus. Bishop is interested in the role of prominence in different focus contexts in American English. Surányi, Ishihara, and Schubö use a broad and narrow focus to investigate prosody in Hungarian, as does D'Imperio for German and Michelas for French. Calhoun and Schweitzer assume that meaning is associated with words in a one-to-one fashion and that it is a vain task to try to attribute meaning to tones independently of words. Gili Fivela uses her own categories in a way that is difficult to reconcile with standard semantics. The meaning of prosody remains a largely unexplored field in linguistics, especially from a crosslinguistic perspective. Books like the one reviewed here testify that progress is being made, but that there is still a long way to go before standards in intonation as part of grammar can be established. Fortunately, the exceptionally high quality of the individual papers compensates for the lack of consensus on the main theme of the book.

Journal of Phonetics, 2001

This study reports on how what is usually called &&segmental'' articulation may be a!ected by prosodic structure. Articulatory properties of segments of various types are compared in initial position of four prosodic constituents in French: an Intonational Phrase, an Accentual Phrase, a Word and a Syllable. Modi"cation of linguopalatal contact, nasal #ow, acoustic measures of glottal articulation, as well as durational properties of segments are examined depending on these prosodic positions. Results show that the articulation of initial segments varies according to the prosodic level of the constituent. Initial segments in higher prosodic domains tend to have more linguopalatal contact, somewhat less nasal #ow for nasals, and vowels tend to be more frequently glottalized than in initial position in lower domains. The magnitude and the realization of the articulatory modi"cation observed in these positions is found to depend on speakers, articulators, and segment types. However, the regular trend observed suggests that these articulatory properties can re#ect the prosodic encoding of constituents of various levels within utterances. 2001 Academic Press position in a syllable or a word (see Fougeron, 1999, for a review). It is more recently that studies have looked at whether traces of the higher level hierarchical prosodic organization of an utterance can be found in the articulation of the segments it contains. The study presented here shares this objective. It aims at determining whether articulatory variation re#ects the prosodic encoding of utterances into constituents (domains) of various levels in French. French is considered to be a &&boundary language'' rather than a &&stress language'', following expression, since most of its prosodic cues are associated with constituent boundaries. As a consequence, one can expect that if there is articulatory variation associated with the marking of prosodic structure, this should occur at constituent boundaries in such a language. Two positions around a boundary can be explored: the preboundary position which corresponds to the "nal position in a constituent, and the postboundary position which corresponds to the initial position in a constituent. Preboundary, or domain-"nal, position has been shown in several studies and in many languages to be the site of realization of prosodic markers, such as "nal lengthening and intonational boundary contour or tone (see among others, . This study will focus on the mirror position, that is the domain-initial or postboundary position. Evidence for the special status of domain-initial position has been widely documented at the syllable and word levels. Initial segments in these constituents show a particular behavior regarding synchronic and diachronic variants (e.g., : they are especially resistant to reduction or lenition processes. For example, in the sound changes from Latin to French, most of the syllable-and wordinitial consonants have been maintained while medial or "nal ones have lenited or disappeared . Initial segments have also been shown to have speci"c articulatory properties. Within a syllable or a word, the glottal and supraglottal articulations of a segment may vary depending on its position. Along with some well-known positional allophones, like the aspirated stops or the light form of /l/ occurring in initial position in English (e.g., Kahn, 1976;, more subtle articulatory variations have been described in word-or syllable-initial position in many languages. For example, initial consonants can have, compared to "nal ones, a larger glottal opening (Cooper

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

The aim of this paper is to investigate prosodic phrasing and more precisely the use of prosodic cues in the marking of morphosyntactic units in French. As a first step towards this goal, a perception study was conducted on 27 listeners, who had to perform 3 distinct perceptual tasks on 32 syntactically controlled phrases read by a female speaker: a prominence strength judgment task, a boundary strength judgment task, and a task where listeners had to choose between 4 different phrase groupings intended to reflect the potential choices of prosodic phrasing. The corpus consists of syntactically ambiguous structures manipulating high and low adjective attachment on 2 coordinated nouns. It was designed to specifically test the role of prominence and boundary cues in the marking of prosodic constituency. Our results show that listeners use prosodic cues to discriminate between the two syntactic structures, with boundary cues being more readily used to capture morphosyntactic structuring. More interestingly, our results indicate that prominence and boundary cues are used to distinguish finer-grained grouping levels than those predicted by traditional descriptions on French prosodic structure.

The Linguistic Review, 2017

This paper argues for quantity-sensitive, trochaic foot structure in Québécois French, which allows for a unified prosodic account of the variable distribution of tenseness of high vowels in non-final syllables. Following Montreuil (Montreuil, Jean-Pierre. 2004a. Fragmenting weight in Scottish English. In Monica Pulki (ed.),