Vestigial Feet in French

This paper offers an OT analysis of strong prosodic positions in contemporary French and claims that a specific type of trochee (a modified version of the French foot proposed by Selkirk 1978) still regulates a large (schwa-related) portion of the word-internal phonology. To account for the behavior of French schwa, three goals must be attained: 1) prosodization: correctly define foot domain and foot form, 2) latency: establish whether or not the prosody dictates that schwa must be realized, and if it must, 3) specification: determine featural information. The organization of the paper reflects this approach. Section 1 explains the distinction that must be made between strong prosodic positions and actual phonetic stress, while section 2 provides a quick overview of the data. Then the three goals are addressed in the order given above: delimitation of the prosodic domain in section 3, treatment of latency in OT in section 4, and featural specification in section 5. The strongest justification for this approach comes from the patterning of tonic and countertonic schwas, as shown in sections 6 and 7.