Glottal stop insertion and production planning domains in French

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20344367
AutoresTobias Scheer (0000-0002-4824-2610, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS 7320 , Nice , France, autor de correspondencia)
Año2024
Volumen41
Número2
Páginas339-379
Fecha de publicación2024-06-25
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Linguistic Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0167-6318 • E-ISSN: 1613-3676
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/tlr-2024-2011
OpenAlexW4394821279
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas32

The article introduces an experimental study of glottal stops that are generated by h aspiré (H) in French ( il [ʔ] hoche la tête ). To date the phenomenon is merely mentioned in passing, and evidence only comes from native speaker intuitions and cursory personal observation. Participants pronounced verbs that either did ( hocher ) or did not ( aimer ) begin with an H, whereby the left context was controlled for: the preceding word could end in a vowel ( tu hoches / aimes ), in a consonant ( il hoche / aime ) or in a liaison consonant (LC nous hochons / aimons ). Results confirm the observation made in the literature regarding the high variability of H: lexical (elision is much more frequent in j’harcèle than in j’hais ), inter-speaker (some participants chose unelided je for 10 out of 12 H verbs, while others only for 4 H verbs) and intra-speaker (participants pronounced vous [z] hissez with liaison, while they chose je hisse in a multiple choice-based pretest). Results also confirmed that H is indeed a glottal stop creator: glottal stops occur much more often before H-initial than before V-initial words. The glottal stop rate also depended on the left context: while LC + H ( nous hochons ) and C + H ( il hoche ) are statistically indistinguishable, both are significantly distinct from V + H ( tu hoches ). This suggests that glottal stop insertion is sensitive to all types of preceding consonants, whether they are pronounced (C + H) or not (LC + H). This result is relevant in the debate on French liaison where it was claimed that (some) LCs are epenthetic, that is absent from phonological computation when unpronounced: this view is challenged by the experimental evidence. On the analytic side, the article argues that all glottal stops that occur stand in Strong Position, i.e. word-initially or after a consonant {#,C}__ (Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer. 2001. La Coda-Miroir. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 96. 107–152). The word-initial position is in fact domain-initial, and it is a long standing observation in the literature that H sets off its word into a separate domain. Thus even glottal stops in V + H ( tu hoches ) that appear to occur in intervocalic position may in fact be domain-initial V + [H]. The question then is what kind of domain could be responsible for the (rare) presence of glottal stops in V + V ( tu aimes ): such a domain V + [V] cannot stem from H, nor can it be of morpho-syntactic origin. It is argued that these domains are production planning domains in the sense of Wagner (2012. Locality in phonology and production planning. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 22. 1–18 and following)

Chose · Consonant · Linguistics · Vowel · History · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation