Markedness, Faithfulness, Vowel Quality and Syllable Structure in French

Markedness, Faithfulness, Vowel Quality and Syllable Structure in French

The goal of this paper is twofold: first it reviews the distributional properties of tense and lax vowels in a relatively standard dialect of Northern French which still contrasts vowel length, and second, on the basis of these data, it examines the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints in Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993). The intricate interplay between vow...

Vowel aperture and syllable segmentation in French.

The theories of Pulgram (1970) suggest that if the vowel of a French syllable is open then it will induce syllable segmentation responses that result in the syllable being closed, and vice versa. After the empirical verification that our target French-speaking population was capable of distinguishing between mid-vowel aperture, we examined the relationship between vowel and syllable aperture in...

Systemic Markedness and Faithfulness

1 Introduction Phonological patterns, whether viewed synchronically or as they change over time, can be explained only with reference to the larger system of oppositions that they are part of. This was the fundamental insight of modern phonology at the beginning of the last century, as it developed under the hands of de Saussure, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, and others, in opposition to the atomistic ...

On the convergence of positional markedness and positional faithfulness in vowel harmony

Positional Markedness in Vowel Harmony

1. Introduction A key issue in research on vowel harmony is the role of positional privilege. Vowels in prominent positions are frequently granted a special status in their function as triggers or targets in harmony. Studies of harmony patterns in which linguistically-prominent positions display a unique triggering role have identified positional faithfulness as a source of privilege in strong ...