A corpus-based study of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French and what it teaches us about its phonological status
Abstract
What is commonly considered as an epenthetic vowel can actually refer to at least two different realities: phonological epenthesis or phonetic excrescence. French schwa, noted [ә], is a vowel alternating with zero and limited to unstressed syllables that can appear word-internally or word-finally. This paper presents an extensive description of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French in order to shed light on its nature: is it an intrusive vowel or a full epenthetic vowel? To that extent, three large corpora of French containing more than 110 hours of speech were used to establish the presence of word-final schwa as a function of sociolinguistics, orthography, phonotactics and phonetics. Our conclusions are that word-final schwa is impacted by speech style, gender, orthography, phonotactics (i.e., the number of adjacent consonants and their sonority profile), and the phonological properties of the codas. However, speech rate does not impact word-final schwa realization. The specific results lead us to suggest that word-final schwa in Standard French shares similarities with intrusive vowels but ultimately behaves like a legit epenthetic vowel.
Keywords
Schwa, Epenthesis, pronunciation variation, Standard French, Large corpora, automatic alignmentReferences
Adda-Decker, Martine, Boula de Mareüil, Philippe & Lamel, Lori. 1999. Pronunciation variants in French: schwa and liaison. Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2239–2242, San Francisco
Adda-Decker, Martine, Boula de Mareüil, Philippe, Adda, Gilles & Lamel, Lori. 2002. Investigating syllabic structure and its variation in speech from French radio interviews. Proceedings of ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Pronunciation Modeling and Lexicon Adaptation, Aspen, CO. DOI: 10.1016/j.specom.2005.03.006
Adda-Decker, Martine. 2007. Corpus pour la transcription automatique de l'oral. Revue française de linguistique appliquée, vol. xii(1), 71-84.
DOI: 10.3917/rfla.121.0071
Adda-Decker, Martine & Lamel, Lori. 2005. Do speech recognizers prefer female speakers? Interspeech 2005: 2205-2208. DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-699
Anderson, Stephen. 1982. The analysis of French schwa: or how to get something from nothing. Language 58: 534-573. DOI: 10.2307/413848
Ayres-Bennett, Wendy & Carruthers, Janice. 2001. Schwa: a maverick vowel. In Problems and perspectives: studies in the modern French language, chapter 3. Harlow: Pearson Ed.
Brand, Sophie & Ernestus, Mirjam. 2018. Reduction of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in Parisian French. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 0(0), Retrieved 13 Jan. 2020. DOI: 10.1515/cllt-2017-0067
Bürki, Audrey, Fougeron, Cécile & Gendrot, Cédric. 2007. On the categorical nature of the process involved in schwa elision in French. Interspeech, August 2007, Antwerp, Belgium. DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2007-359
Bürki, Audrey, Ernestus, Myriam, Gendrot, Cédric, Fougeron, Cécile & Frauenfelder, Ulrich. 2011. What affects the presence versus absence of schwa and its duration: a corpus analysis of French connected speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130, 3980-3991. ID:
Carvalho, J. Brandão de, 2017. Deriving sonority from the structure, not the other way round: A Strict CV approach to consonant clusters. The Linguistic Review 34, 589-614. DOI: 10.1515/tlr-2017-0012
Coleman, John, Renwick, Margaret E.L. & Temple, Rosalind A.M. 2016. Probabilistic underspecification in nasal place assimilation. Phonology, 33(3), 425-458. DOI: 10.1017/S0952675716000208
Côté, Marie-Hélène. 2000. Consonant Cluster Phonotactics: A Perceptual Approach. PhD-thesis, MIT
Delattre, Pierre. 1951. Le jeu de l'e instable intérieur en français. French review, 341-351
Delattre, Pierre. 1966. Studies in French and comparative phonetics. La Haye: Mouton.
Dell, François. 1970. Les règles phonologiques tardives et la phonologie dérivationnelle du français. PhD thesis, MIT
Dell, François. 1976. Schwa précédé d’un groupe obstruante-liquide. Recherches Linguistiques 4. Université de Paris 8-Vincennes, 75-111
Dell, François. 1985. Les règles et les sons. Introduction à la phonologie générative. (Première édition : 1973). Paris : Hermann.
Duez, Danielle. 2003. Acoustic properties of consonant sequences in conversational French speech. Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona. pp. 2965-2968. ID: < hal-00136754>
Durand, Jacques & Eychenne, Julien. 2004. Le schwa en français : pourquoi des corpus ? Corpus n°3 « Usage des corpus en phonologie », 311-356.
DOI: 10.4000/corpus.246
Eychenne, Julien. 2019. On the deletion of word-final schwa in Southern French. Phonology, 36.3, 1-35. DOI: 10.1017/S0952675719000198
Fónagy, Ivàn. 1989. Le français change de visage ? Revue Romane 24, 2 : 225-254
Fouché, Pierre. 1956. Traité de prononciation française. Paris : Klincksieck.
Galliano, Sylvain, Geoffrois, Edouard, Mostefa, Djamel, Choukri, Khalid, Bonastre, Jean-François & Gravier, Guillaume. 2005. ESTER Phase II Evaluation Campaign for the Rich Transcription of French Broadcast Newshase II Evaluation Campaign for the Rich Transcription of French Broadcast News. Interspeech 2005, 2453–2456.
DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-441
Gauvain, Jean-Luc, Adda, Gilles, Adda-Decker, Martine, Allauzen, Alexandre, Gendner, Véronique, Lamel, Lori & Schwenk, Holger. 2005. Where are we in transcribing French broadcast news? Interspeech 2005, 1665-1668.
DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-544
Gauvain, Jean-Luc, Lamel, Lori & Adda, Gilles. 1998. Partitioning and transcription of broadcast news data. ICSLP 98 (5), 1335-1338
Gauvain, Jean-Luc, Lamel, Lori & Adda, Gilles. 2002. The LIMSI broadcast news transcription system. Speech communication 37 (1-2), 89-108. DOI: 10.1016/S0167-6393(01)00061-9
Gouskova, Maria. 2002. Exceptions to sonority distance generalizations. Proceedings of CLS 38. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Grammont, Maurice. 1894. Le patois de la Franche-Montagne et en particulier de Damprichard (Franche-Comté). IV : La loi des trois consonnes. Mémoires de la Société de linguistique de Paris 8: 53-90
Grammont, Maurice. 1914. Traité Pratique de Prononciation Française. Delagrave, Paris, 236 pp.
Gravier, Guillaume, Adda, Gilles, Paulson, Niklas, Carré, Matthieu, Giraudel, Aude & Galibert, Olivier. 2012. The ETAPE corpus for the evaluation of speech-based TV content processing in the French language. LREC Eighth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. ID: < hal-00712591>
Hall, Nancy. 2006. Cross-linguistic patterns of vowel intrusion. Phonology 23, 3. 387-429. DOI: 10.1017/S0952675706000996
Hall, Nancy. 2011. Vowel epenthesis. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds.) The Blackwell companion to phonology. 5 vols. Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 1576–1596.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0067
Halle, M., Hughes, G.W. & Radley, J.-P.A. 1957. Acoustic properties of stop consonants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 29, 107‑116.
DOI: 10.1121/1.1908634
Hallé, Pierre & Adda-Decker, Martine. 2007. Voicing assimilation in journalistic speech. 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2007, 493–496
Hallé, Pierre & Adda-Decker, Martine. 2011. Voice assimilation in French obstruents: A gradient or a categorical process? Tones and features: A festschrift for Nick Clements, De Gruyter, 149–175. ID: < halshs-00684437>
Hansen, Anita. B. 1994. Étude du E caduc - stabilisation en cours et variations lexicales. Journal of French Language Studies 4, 25–54.
DOI: 10.1017/S0959269500001964
Hansen, Anita B. 1997. Le nouveau [ә] prépausal dans le français parlé à Paris. Polyphonie pour Ivàn Fònagy, Paris: L’Harmattan, 173-198. ISBN : 2-7384-5458-5
Hansen, Anita B. & Mosegaard-Hansen, Maj Brit. 2002. Le e prépausal et l’interaction. In Anita B. Hansen & Maj Brit Mosegaard-Hansen (eds.), Structures linguistiques et interactionnelles dans le français parlé. Actes du Colloque international, Université de Copenhague du 22 au 23 juin 2001 (Études romanes 54). Copenhague: Museum Tusculanum Press, 89-109. ISBN: 87-7289-819-4
Householder Jr, Fred W. 1956. Unreleased PTK in American English. In Halle, Lunt, McLean, van Schooneveld, For Roman Jakobson, 235-244
Hutin, Mathilde. 2018. La détente syllabique et ses implications phonologiques. Thèse de doctorat. Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. ID : < tel-02963100>
Hutin, Mathilde, Jatteau, Adèle, Vasilescu, Ioana, Lamel, Lori & Adda-Decker, Martine. 2020. Le schwa final en français standard est-il un lubrifiant phonétique ? Actes de CMLF 2020. DOI: 10.1051/shsconf/20207809004
Jatteau, Adèle, Vasilescu, Ioana, Lamel, Lori, Adda-Decker, Martine & Audibert, Nicolas. 2019a. “Gra[f]e!” Word-final devoicing of obstruents in Standard French: An acoustic study based on large corpora. Interspeech 2019, Graz (Autriche). ID : < hal-02336119>
Jatteau, Adèle, Vasilescu, Ioana, Lamel, Lori & Adda-Decker, Martine. 2019b. Final devoicing of fricatives in French: Studying variation in large-scale corpora with automatic alignment. In S. Calhoun, P. Escudero, M. Tabain and P. Warren (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 295–299. ID: < hal-02270089>
Karlin, Robin. 2021. Finnish inserted vowels: A case of phonologized excrescence. Nordic Journal of Linguistics [FirstView articles]. Cambridge University Press.
DOI: 10.1017/S033258652100007X
Lamel, Lori, Gauvain, Jean-Luc & Eskénazi, M. 1991. BREF, a large vocabulary spoken corpus for French. Proceedings of the European Conference on Speech Technology, EuroSpeech, 505–508, Genoa
Lamel, Lori, Rosset, Sophie, Bennacef, Samir, Bonneau-Maynard, Hélène, Devillers, Laurence & Gauvain, Jean-Luc. 1995. Development of spoken language corpora for travel information. Proceedings of the European Conference on Speech Technology, EuroSpeech, Madrid
Leben, W.R. 1973. Suprasegmental Phonology. Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington. Published 1980, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London
Leray, F. 1930. La loi des trois consonnes. Revue de philologie française XLII. 161-184
Levin, Juliette. 1987. Between epenthetic and excrescent vowels. Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 6. 187–201
Liberman, Mark, Stolcke, Andreas, Yuan, Jiahong, Lai, Catherine, Lee, Yong-cheol, Izak, Jonathan & Tan, Jingjing (eds.). 2011. Proceedings of the workshop on new tools and methods for very large-scale phonetics research (VLSP 2011), January 29-31, 2011. University of Pennsylvania
Lodge, Anthony. 1993. French: From Dialect to Standard. Routledge, 296 p. ISBN: 9780415080712
Lombardi, Linda. 2001. Why Place and Voice are different: Constraint-specific alternations in Optimality Theory. In Linda Lombardi (ed.), Segmental Phonology in Optimality Theory: Constraints and Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13– 45. DOI: 10.1.1.387.6586
Lowenstamm, Jean. 1996. CV as the Only Syllable Type. In Jacques Durand & Bernard Laks (eds.), Current Trends in Phonology Models and Methods, European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford, pp. 419-442.
Malécot. André. 1955. The elision of the French mute-e within complex consonantal clusters. Lingua, 5, 44-60
Malécot, André. 1958. The role of releases in the identification of released final stops: a series of tape-cutting experiments. Language, 370–380. ISSN: 0097-8507
Malécot, André. 1976. The effect of linguistic and paralinguistic variables on the elision of the French mute-e. Phonetica, 33, 93-112. DOI: 10.1159/000259716
Martinet, André. 1969. Le français sans fard. Paris : Presses universitaires de France
Martinon, Philippe. 1913. Comment on prononce le français. Paris : Larousse
McCarthy, John J. 1988. Feature Geometry and Dependency: A Review. Phonetica 43: 84-108. DOI : 10.1159/000261820
Mende, Ad. 1880. Étude sur la prononciation de l’e muet. Londres : Trubner
Milne, Peter. 2014. The variable pronunciations of word-final consonant clusters in a force aligned corpus of spoken French. PhD Thesis, University of Ottawa
Morin, Yves-Charles. 1978. The status of mute e. Studies in French Linguistics 1/2: 79-140.
Nemoto, Rena, Adda-Decker, Martine & Durand, Jacques. 2010. Word boundaries in French: Evidence from large speech corpora. LREC
Parker, Steve. 2012. Sonority. The Blackwell Companion to Phonology. van Oostendorp, Marc, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Blackwell Reference Online. 12 January 2012. ISBN : 9781405184236
Picard, Marc. 1991. La loi des trois consonnes et la chute du cheva en québécois. Revue québécoise de linguistique, 20 (2), 35–48. DOI : 10.7202/602703ar
Picheny, M.A., Durlach, N.I. & Braida, L.D. 1986. Speaking clearly for the hard of hearing II: acoustic characteristics of clear and conversational speech. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research. 29: 434–446. DOI: 10.1044/jshr.2904.434
Purse, Ruaridh. 2019. Variable Word-Final Schwa in French: An OT Analysis. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 25, Issue 1, Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Penn Linguistics Conference, Article 22
R Development Core Team. 2008. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing Vienna, Austria. http://www. R-project.org
Racine, Isabelle & Grosjean, François. 2002. La production du E caduc facultatif est-elle prévisible ? Un début de réponse. French Language Studies, 12, 307-326. DOI: 10.1017/S0959269502000340
Ranson, Diana & Passarello, Matthew. 2012. L'élision variable du schwa en fin de mot chez des hommes méridionaux : L'effet des consonnes environnantes et de la fréquence de la lexie. Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française – CMLF 2012. DOI : 10.1051/shsconf/20120100299
Rialland, Annie. 1986. Schwa et syllabes en français. In L. Wetzels & E. Sezer (Eds.), Studies in compensatory lengthening, 187–226, Dordrecht: Foris.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110821666-010
Seidenberg, M. S. & Tanenhaus, M. K. 1979. Orthographic effects on rhyme monitoring. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5, 546–554. DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.5.6.546
Silverman, Daniel. 2011. Schwa. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume & Keren Rice (eds.) The Blackwell companion to phonology. 5 vols. Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 628-642. DOI: 10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0026
Slawinski, Elzbieta B. 1991. Age-related changes in articulation of /b/ and /w/. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 90, 2363. DOI: 10.1121/1.402105
Steriade, Donca. 2001. The phonology of perceptibility effects: the P-map and its consequences for constraint organization. UCLA.
Taft, M. & Hambly, G. 1985. The influence of orthography on phonological representations in the lexicon. Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 320–335. DOI: 10.1016/0749-596X(85)90031-2
Torreira Francisco, Adda-Decker, Martine & Ernestus, Mirjam. 2010. The Nijmegen Corpus of Casual French. Speech Communication, Elsevier: North-Holland, 2010, 52 (3). DOI : 10.1016/j.specom.2009.10.004
Tranel, Bernard. 1981. Concreteness in Generative Phonology. Evidence from French. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ventura, Paulo, Kolinsky, Régine, Brito-Mendes, Carlos & Morais, José. 2001. Mental representations of the syllable internal structure are influenced by orthography. Language and Cognitive Processes 16, 393-418. DOI: 10.1080/01690960042000184
Wang, W.S.-Y. 1959. Transition and release as perceptual cues for final plosives. DOI: 10.1044/jshr.0201.66
Wu, Yaru, Adda-Decker, Martine & Fougeron, Cécile. 2016. Rôle des contextes lexical et post-lexical dans la réalisation du schwa : apports du traitement automatique de grands corpus. Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016, volume 1 JEP: 633-641
Wu, Yaru, Adda-Decker, Martine, Fougeron, Cécile & Lamel, Lori. 2017. Schwa Realization in French: Using Automatic Speech Processing to Study Phonological and Socio-Linguistic Factors in Large Corpora. Interspeech 2017, 3782-3786
Ziegler, J. C. & Ferrand, L. 1998. Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 5, 683-689. DOI: 10.3758/BF03208845
Published
Downloads
Copyright (c) 2021 Mathilde Hutin, Adèle Jatteau, Ioana Vasilescu, Lori Lamel, Yaru Wu, Martine Adda-Decker
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
