Some listener-oriented accounts of h-aspiré in French

Abstract

This article shows that the usual speaker-based account of h-aspiré in French can explain at most three of the four phonological processes in which it is involved, whereas a listener-oriented account can explain all of them. On a descriptive level, the behaviour of h-aspiré is accounted for with a grammar model that involves a control loop, whose crucial ingredient is listener-oriented faithfulness constraints. These constraints evaluate phonological recoverability, which is the extent to which the speaker thinks the listener will be able to recover the phonological message. On a more reductionist level, however, the pronunciation of h-aspiré and its variation is accounted for with a new, very simple, grammar model for bidirectional phonology and phonetics, which uses a single constraint set for the four processes of perception, recognition, phonological production, and phonetic implementation, and in which phonological and phonetic production are evaluated in parallel. In this model, the phenomenon of phonological recoverability is not built in, as in control-loop grammars, but emerges from the interaction of four equally simple learning algorithms.