Canadian French Vowel Harmony

Abstract

This thesis provides a phonological, psycholinguistic and phonetic description of vowel harmony in Canadian French (CF), as well as a theoretical account of the phenomenon showing that the CF facts may only be accounted for in derivational frameworks that include the notion of 'cycle.' CF [ATR] vowel harmony is regressive, optional, and parasitic on the feature [+high]. CF [ATR] harmony involves spreading of a [-ATR] feature from a final [+high] vowel in a closed syllable to other [+high] vowels within the same word that are in non-final open syllables (e.g. [fi.lIp] or [fI.lIp] are both acceptable variants for 'Phillip'). The thesis describes and explains the four key attributes of harmony in this language: 1) There is inter-speaker (and possibly intra-speaker) variation with respect to whether harmony is applied locally and/or iteratively. Variation with respect to these parameters leads to the existence of three patterns of harmony, as evidenced by words of more than two syllables. There is the local non-iterative pattern, e.g. [i.lI.sIt] ('illicit'), the non-local pattern, e.g. [I.li.sIt] and the 'across-the-board' pattern [I.lI.sIt].2) As shown in 1), there exists a pattern of non-local harmony, in which the target vowel is separated from the trigger by another [+high] vowel. 3) Harmony is counterbled by a process of 'pre-fricative tensing,' which leads to opaque allophony. 4) Harmony applies cyclically, but is then counterbled by another 'open-syllable tensing' process, which results in another case of opacity. For example, harmony can apply in a word like [mY.zIk] ('music'), but if we concatenate a resyllabifying suffix like [al], we obtain [mY.zi.kal] ('musical'). The initial [+high] vowel can be [-ATR], since harmony applied in the stem, but the resyllabified trigger must be [+ATR], by an open syllable tensing rule.The thesis makes the following claim: CF vowel harmony shows very compellingly that models of the phonological component must include mechanisms accounting for non-local relations, derivational opacity and the interaction between phonology and morphology.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 104 citations exist upstream.