Compensatory Lengthening in Historical French: The Role of the Speaker

Abstract

This chapter highlights the synchronic role of the speaker in compensatory lengthening (CL), through an in-depth exploration of two major types seen in Old French. In the context of a typological survey of approaches to CL, I put forth a model that complements the strictly listener-oriented account of Kavitskaya (Compensatory lengthening. Phonetics, phonology, diachrony. Routledge, New York/London, 2002), and assumes the speaker/innovator as the ultimate source of CL. CL is gradual, as intermediate forms become, through the speaker’s postlexical reductions, more and more similar to (confusable with) forms with long vowels. CL has taken place diachronically once the listener has taken the speaker’s ultimately highly misperceivable output and done just that – misperceived it. The central aspect of this more comprehensive view of CL is that the speaker, through innovative reductive articulations, crucially feeds listener misperceptions. Speaker innovations are constrained by a principle of isochrony and by articulatory gesture preservation constraints (Gess R. J French Lang Stud 18:175–187, 2008) projected from a static perceptual knowledge source containing statements on the relative perceptibility of various phonetic cues across different phonological contexts (Steriade D. Directional asymmetries in place assimilation: A perceptual account. In: Hume E, Johnson K (eds) The role of speech perception in phonology. Academic Press, San Diego, pp 219–250, 2001).