Reduction of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in Parisian French

Sophie Brand,Mirjam Ernestus

doi:10.1515/cllt-2017-0067

Abstract

AbstractThis corpus study investigated pronunciation variants of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa (OLS) clusters in nouns in casual Parisian French. Results showed that at least one phoneme was absent in 80.7% of the 291 noun tokens in the dataset, and that the whole cluster was absent (e.g., [mis] forministre) in no less than 15.5% of the tokens. We demonstrate that phonemes are not always completely absent, but that they may leave traces on neighbouring phonemes. Further, the clusters display undocumented voice assimilation patterns. Statistical modelling showed that a phoneme is most likely to be absent if the following phoneme is also absent. The durations of the phonemes are conditioned particularly by the position of the word in the prosodic phrase. We argue, on the basis of three different types of evidence, that in French word-final OLS clusters, the absence of obstruents is mainly due to gradient reduction processes, whereas the absence of schwa and liquids may also be due to categorical deletion processes.

Highlights

IntroductionWords tend to be produced with fewer or lenited phonemes compared to their citation forms
In casual speech, words tend to be produced with fewer or lenited phonemes compared to their citation forms
In contrast to most previous studies on reduction, our study focused on the reduction of content words, on the reduction of a sequence of phonemes, and on the presence versus absence of phonemes as well as phonetic traces of absent sounds

Summary

Introduction

Words tend to be produced with fewer or lenited phonemes compared to their citation forms. In American English, the word hilarious [hɪlɛriʌs], for instance, may be pronounced as something like [hlɛrɛs] (e.g., Ernestus & Warner, 2011; Johnson, 2004). This phenomenon, called reduction, is highly frequent and has been studied in a number of languages, such as Dutch (e.g., Ernestus, 2000), German (e.g., Kohler, 1990), Finnish (e.g., Lennes, Alaroty & Vainio, 2001), and Russian (e.g., Van Son, Bolotova, Lennes & Pols, 2004). The term absent refers to segmental absence, that is, to a phoneme that is at best present in the details in the pronunciation of the neighbouring segments

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