Chapter 11
Return to Frenchville
Tracing a near-merger from legacy data
This study investigates a potential case of near-merger in legacy French data from Frenchville, Pennsylvania. With previous research having found a robust differentiation in production between French schwa and the front mid rounded vowels by the final generation of Frenchville French speakers, we hypothesize that a former near-merger of these vowels enabled a subsequent demerger. The present analysis examines schwa and the mid vowels in interview data from the penultimate generation of Frenchville speakers and finds evidence for a near-merger, as the vowels are similar but not identical in duration and spectral quality. The data also support the notion that the differentiation of these vowels by the final generation was likely an innovation, rather than the result of transmission.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background: The status of schwa French
- 2.1A case for near-merger?
- 3.Participants and data
- 4.Methods
- 5.Results
- 5.1Results of F3 drop
- 5.2Results for spectra of the vowels: F1
- 5.3Results for the spectra of vowels in the front-back dimension: F2-F1
- 5.4Results of durational measures
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
References (39)
References
Andreasson, Helene N., and Kathrine Asla Østby. 2014. Une étude inter-variété des voyelles moyennes antérieures arrondies en français: une approche phonético-phonologique. In La phonologie du français: Norms, périphéries, modélisation ed. by Jacques Durand, Gjert Kristofferson & Bernard Laks, 35–81. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest.
Bazylko, Sławomir. 1981. “Le statut de [ǝ] dans le système phonématique du français contemporain et quelques questions connexes.” La linguistique 17 (1): 91–101.
Boersma, Paul, and David Weenink. 2013. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.52, accessed December 14, 2013, [URL]
Bounds, Paulina, Naomi Palosaari, and William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. 2011. Issues in Using Legacy Data.” In Sociophonetics: A Student’s Guide, ed. by Marianna Di Paolo and Malcah Yaeger-Dror, 46–57. London: Routledge.
Bullock, Barbara E., and Chip Gerfen. 2004a. “Phonological Convergence in a Contracting Language Variety.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7 (2): 95–104. 

Bullock, Barbara E., and Chip Gerfen. 2004b. “Frenchville French: A Case Study in Phonological Attrition.” International Journal of Bilingualism 8 (3): 303–320. 

Bullock, Barbara E., and Chip Gerfen. 2005. “The Preservation of Schwa in the Converging Phonological System of Frenchville (PA) French.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 8 (2): 117–130. 

Bürki, Audrey, Fougeron, Cécile, Gendrot, Cedric, and Ulrich H. Frauenfelder. 2011. “Phonetic Reduction Versus Phonological Deletion of French Schwa: Some Methodological Issues.” Journal of Phonetics 39: 279–288. 

Colantoni, Laura, and Jeffrey Steele. 2011. “Synchronic Evidence of a Diachronic Change: Voicing and Duration in French and Spanish Stop–Liquid Clusters.” The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique 56 (2): 147–177. 

Coveney, Aidan. 2001. The Sounds of Contemporary French: Articulation and Diversity. Exeter: Elm Bank Publications.
Delattre, Pierre. 1966. Studies in French and Comparative Phonetics. The Hague: Mouton.
Di Paolo, Marianna, and Alice Faber. 1990. “Phonation Differences and the Phonetic Content of the Tense-Lax Contrast in Utah English.” Language Variation and Change 2 (2): 155–204. 

Faber, Alice, and Marianna Di Paolo. 1995. “The Discriminability of Nearly Merged Sounds”. Language Variation and Change 7: 35–78. 

Fougeron, Cécile, Cedric Gendrot, and Audrey Bürki. 2007. “On the Phonetic Identity of French Schwa Compared to /ø/ and /œ/.” Paper presented at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Saarbrücken, Germany, August 6–10, 2007.
Hall, Kathleen C., and Elizabeth V. Hume. 2013. “Perceptual Confusability of French Vowels.” Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 19: 060113. 

Hansen, Anita Berit. 1994. “Étude du E caduc: stabilisation en cours et variations lexicales.” Journal of French Language Studies 4: 25–54. 

Janson, Tore, and Richard Schulman. 1983. “Non-distinctive Features and Their Use.” Journal of Linguistics 19 (2): 321–336. 

Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Labov, William. 2007. “Transmission and Diffusion.” Language 83 (2): 344–387. 

Labov, William, Mark Karen, and Corey Miller. 1991. “Near-mergers and the Suspension of Phonemic Contrast.” Language Variation and Change 3 (1): 33–74. 

Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger, and Richard Steiner. 1972. A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress (Vol. 1). Philadelphia: The U.S. Regional Survey.
Léon, Pierre. 2007. Phonétisme et pronunciations du français, 5e édition. Paris: Armand Colin.
Malécot, André. 1974. “The Frequency of Occurrence of Phonemes and Consonant Clusters in French.” Phonetics 29: 158–170. 

Malécot, André, and Gérard Chollet. 1977. “The Acoustic Status of the Mute-e in French”. Phonetica 34 (1): 19–30. 

Manaster Ramer, Alexis. 1996. “A Letter from an Incompletely Neutral Phonologist.” Journal of Phonetics 24 (4): 477–489. 

Martinet, André. 1972. “La nature phonologique d’e caduc.” In Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics to the Memory of Pierre Delattre, ed. by Albert Valdman, 393–399. The Hague: Mouton.
Mielke, Jeff. 2013. “Ultrasound and Corpus Study of a Change from Below: Vowel Rhoticity in Canadian French.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 19 (2): 141–150.
Morin, Yves-Charles. 1978. “The Status of Mute ‘e’.” Studies in French Linguistics 1 (2): 79–140.
Morin, Yves-Charles. 2000. “Le français de référence et les normes de pronunciation.” Cahiers de l’Institut de Linguistique de Louvain 26 (1): 91–135. 

Mougeon, Françoise, and Dorin Uritescu. 2006. “Les derniers Français de Frenchville.” La Linguistique 42 (1): 115–128. 

Tranel, Bernard. 1987. “French Schwa and Nonlinear Phonology.” Linguistics 25: 845–866. 

Valdman, Albert. 1979. “Créolisation, français populaire et le parler des isolats francophones d’Amérique du Nord.” In Le français hors de France, ed. by Albert Valdman, 181–197. Paris: Champion.
Walker, Douglas C. 1993. “Schwa and /œ/ in French.” Canadian Journal of Linguistics 38 (1): 43–64.
Walter, Henriette. 1982. Enquête phonologique du français. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Wassink, Alicia Beckford. 2006. “A Geometric Representation of Spectral and Temporal Vowel Features: Quantification of Vowel Overlap in Three Varieties.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119 (4): 2334–2350. 

Yu, Alan C. L. 2007. “Understanding Near Mergers: The Case of Morphological Tone in Cantonese.” Phonology 24 (1): 187–214. 

Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Wendy Ayres-Bennett & Mairi McLaughlin
2024.
The Oxford Handbook of the French Language,

Molina García, Álvaro
2023.
The pitfalls of near-mergers: A sociophonetic approach to near-demergers in the Malaga /θ/ vs /s/ split.
Open Linguistics 9:1

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.