Inter- and intra-speaker variation in French schwa

Andrew Bayles,Abby Kaplan,Aaron Kaplan

doi:10.5334/gjgl.54

Abstract

Quantitative constraint-based theories of optionality typically aim to model the frequency with which an individual speaker’s grammar maps one input onto various output forms. But existing studies in this area use population-level frequency data as a proxy for the frequencies produced by an individual speaker’s grammar. This practice is problematic for three reasons. First, population-level variation could result from aggregation over individuals with differing categorical behavior, not individual variation at all. Second, some theories predict that individuals with identical relative constraint rankings/weights can produce those outputs with different frequencies, while others predict uniform frequencies across speakers; these prediction cannot be tested without individual-level data. Third, if indeed individuals differ in their output frequencies, population-level averages may disguise true patterns of individual variation. This paper addresses these shortcomings through a corpus study of optional schwa deletion in French. We find that individual speakers do in fact show variable omission of schwa. We also find variation between speakers in the frequency of schwa’s appearance. Taken together, these results confirm that for French schwa, formal theories are correct to ascribe variation to a single speaker’s grammar, and they favor theories that decouple the means of producing variation from the account of output frequency.

Highlights

Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) maps any given input onto a single output candidate, but much recent research has argued that this is inadequate: often an input has multiple possible surface variants
We present the results of a search of a corpus of French that shows that the variation in [ə]’s realization does exist at the level of the individual speaker, and that speakers do not show uniform rates of schwa realization
Our strategy is this: we identify a handful of contexts in which it has been claimed that [ə] is optional, and we assess the extent to which individual speakers exhibit this optionality as recorded in the Phonologie du Français Contemporain (PFC) corpus

Summary

Introduction

Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) maps any given input onto a single output candidate, but much recent research has argued that this is inadequate: often an input has multiple possible surface variants. Dell 1973; Howard 1973; Selkirk 1978; Anderson 1982; Léon 1987; Tranel 1987; Van Eibergen 1991; 1992; Van Eibergen & Belrhali 1994; Côté 2001; Gess et al 2012), so, for example, pelouse ‘lawn’ may be produced with or without the vowel in the initial syllable: [pəluz]∼[pluz]. It is incumbent upon the phonological grammar to provide both [pəluz] and [pluz] as surface forms for this word. Particular theories of optionality often go beyond the multiple-outputs threshold and supply

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion