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Competing repair strategies for word-final obstruent-liquid clusters in northern metropolitan French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2021

Joshua M. Griffiths
Joshua M. Griffiths*
Affiliation:
Northeastern University
*
E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

French licenses word-final obstruent-liquid clusters (table /tabl/; souffre /sufʁ/). These clusters may be realised faithfully resulting in an apparent violation of the sonority sequencing principle (Clements, 1990). Yet, the clusters can also be repaired in one of two ways: (1) through the reduction of the cluster (i.e. [tab]) or (2) through the epenthesis of a schwa vowel, resyllabifying the cluster into the onset position (i.e. [ta.blə].) In this article, I investigate which factors condition the realisation of word-final obstruent-liquid clusters. The results are formalised in Maximum Entropy Grammar (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003), but evidence for effects of style and speaker age require the scaling of several constraints (Coetzee and Kawahara, 2013). This study sheds light on these curious clusters, while raising new questions about the interaction of grammatical and non-grammatical factors.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 1 - 24
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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