32.2482, Diss: French; Phonology; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Author: Joshua M Griffiths: '' A quantitative reanalysis of schwa realization in contemporary metropolitan French''

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2482. Tue Jul 27 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2482, Diss:  French; Phonology; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Author: Joshua M Griffiths: '' A quantitative reanalysis of schwa realization in contemporary metropolitan French''

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Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2021 01:03:46
From: Joshua Griffiths [jo.griffiths at northeastern.edu]
Subject: A quantitative reanalysis of schwa realization in contemporary metropolitan French

 
Institution: University of Texas 
Program: French Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2020 

Author: Joshua M Griffiths

Dissertation Title: A quantitative reanalysis of schwa realization in
contemporary metropolitan French 

Dissertation URL:  https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/86542

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): French (fra)


Dissertation Director(s):
Bernard Laks
Barbara E Bullock

Dissertation Abstract:

The French schwa – also known as the e-muet and e-caduc – is perhaps one of
the most studied phenomena in phonology. Its alternation with zero seems
highly unpredictable; however, this alternation is clearly subject to the
influence of phonological and sociolinguistic factors. Despite the thousands
of pages that have been written about this vowel over the last five-hundred
years, linguists disagree on virtually every aspect of this vowel, including
its representation and definition. Yet, in spite of the variety in definitions
and conceptualizations of this vowel, much of our understanding is dependent
on generalizations of the schwa and its distributions that were written in the
late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (i.e. Delattre, 1939/1966, 1949,
1951; Fouché, 1959; Grammont, 1894, 1920). Following from Weinreich, Labov,
and Herzog (1968) who argue that variation is the crux of any linguistic
system, this dissertation proposes a purely quantitative reanalysis of the
e-muet and its distribution. Before any sort of theoretical treatment of a
variable phenomenon can be applied, a thorough data-driven description must be
furnished (c.f. Laks & Griffiths, to appear). Data from this study come from
the Projet phonologie du francais contemporain corpus (PFC; Durand, Laks, &
Lyche, 2002) a large corpus of spoken French with a coding protocol that
specifies and annotates every schwa within (n = 207167). A general and
adaptable program is written to clean and further specify the PFC query as
part of pre- processing. Once pre-processed, data were fit to series of
generalized linear mixed-effects regression models and random forest models
that predict the realization and distribution of the e-muet. I find that the
traditional descriptions of the French schwa-zero alternation are largely
accurate, and the multifaceted variability of this vowel is subject to
segmental, prosodic, and phonotactic constraints. I also find that the
variability of this alternation is subject to a large effect from the lexicon,
particularly in Northern Metropolitan France. The primary motivation behind
the schwa-zero alternation is found to be phonotactics in two varieties of
Metropolitan French, but the granularity afforded by the pre-processing
program allows for a more nuanced view into the phonological factors affecting
this alternation. These include a reconsideration of the domain for
phrase-final schwa realization from the intonational phrase to the accentual
phrase, and an effect of fricatives, which were found to facilitate schwa
deletion. I also find that lexical schwa and epenthetic schwa are subject to
two distinct linguistic distributions; however, they curiously overlap in the
word-final position resulting in an asymmetry between word-final schwa
deletion and word-final schwa epenthesis in distinct lexemes. An age effect is
also documented in Southern France whereby younger southerners are beginning
to realize schwa at similar rates to northerners. Finally, I conclude with a
call for a reconsideration of the e-muet not as one phenomenon, but instead as
a collection of phonetically similar and phonologically distinct phenomena.
The quantitative reanalysis furnished in this thesis reaffirms much of our
understanding of the French schwa, while shedding light on new peculiarities.




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