Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Gestural Delay and Gestural Reduction: Articulatory Variation in /l/-vocalisation in Southern British English
- 2 The Production and Perception of Derived Phonological Contrasts in Selected Varieties of English
- 3 The Phonological Fuzziness of Palatalisation in Contemporary English: A Case of Near-phonemes?
- 4 Asymmetric Acquisition of English Liquid Consonants by Japanese Speakers
- 5 R-sandhi in English and Liaison in French: Two Phenomenologies in the Light of the PAC and PFC Data
- 6 A Corpora-based Study of Vowel Reduction in Two Speech Styles: A Comparison between English and Polish
- 7 On ‘Because’: Phonological Variants and their Pragmatic Functions in a Corpus of Bolton (Lancashire) English
- 8 On the New Zealand Short Front Vowel Shift
- 9 The Northern Cities Vowel Shift in Northern Michigan
- 10 Levelling in a Northern English Variety: The Case of FACE and GOAT in Greater Manchester
- 11 A Study of Rhoticity in Boston: Results from a PAC Survey
- 12 A Corpus-based Study of /t/ flapping in American English Broadcast Speech
- Index
5 - R-sandhi in English and Liaison in French: Two Phenomenologies in the Light of the PAC and PFC Data
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Gestural Delay and Gestural Reduction: Articulatory Variation in /l/-vocalisation in Southern British English
- 2 The Production and Perception of Derived Phonological Contrasts in Selected Varieties of English
- 3 The Phonological Fuzziness of Palatalisation in Contemporary English: A Case of Near-phonemes?
- 4 Asymmetric Acquisition of English Liquid Consonants by Japanese Speakers
- 5 R-sandhi in English and Liaison in French: Two Phenomenologies in the Light of the PAC and PFC Data
- 6 A Corpora-based Study of Vowel Reduction in Two Speech Styles: A Comparison between English and Polish
- 7 On ‘Because’: Phonological Variants and their Pragmatic Functions in a Corpus of Bolton (Lancashire) English
- 8 On the New Zealand Short Front Vowel Shift
- 9 The Northern Cities Vowel Shift in Northern Michigan
- 10 Levelling in a Northern English Variety: The Case of FACE and GOAT in Greater Manchester
- 11 A Study of Rhoticity in Boston: Results from a PAC Survey
- 12 A Corpus-based Study of /t/ flapping in American English Broadcast Speech
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Internal and external sandhi phenomena have long been discussed by phonologists in the different languages of the world from a synchronic or a diachronic perspective, and often from both simultaneously. The emergence of these phonetic processes which occur at morpheme or word boundaries, as well as the scientific interest in these phenomena, are therefore far from new, as Laks (2018) accurately points out:
Déjà en sanscrit et dans les langues indo-européennes archaïques, la syllabe finale d’unité constituait la position la plus faible de la chaîne. Amuïssement et chute de la consonne fermante étaient très courants devant consonne initiale. Devant initiale vocalique, la consonne fermante se maintenait souvent et se liait à cette voyelle si bien que dès l’indo-européen on a pu parler de liaison, même si le phénomène n’y a ni la régularité ni l’ampleur qu’il acquerra en français.
[Already in Sanskrit and in archaic Indo-European languages, the final syllable of a unit constituted the weakest position in the chain. The weakening and deletion of the closing consonant were very frequent before an initial consonant. Before an initial vowel, the closing consonant often remained and linked with that vowel so much so that ever since Indo-European we were able to talk about linking, even though the phenomenon had neither the regularity nor the scope it would later acquire in French.]
However, the debate is still being fuelled by new corpus data and diverse theoretical analyses and models, notably as far as French liaison and English r-sandhi are concerned. Indeed, in both individual languages, these phenomena have been widely discussed, which does not mean that the issues relating to their relevant method of investigation or their suitable phonological modelling no longer lend themselves to controversial and conflicting interpretations. On the contrary, with the advent of corpus phonology, studies have extensively shown that both phenomena are variable in the different varieties of French (Detey et al. 2016) and English (Soum-Favaro et al. 2014; Durand et al. 2015; Navarro 2016) around the world. Consequently, providing a satisfactory definition for them, along with a comprehensive inventory of the contexts in which they arise and a phonological model able to account for their individual mechanics, has proved problematic.
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- Information
- The Corpus Phonology of EnglishMultifocal Analyses of Variation, pp. 98 - 126Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020