Some listener-oriented accounts of hache aspiré in French

This article shows that the usual speaker-based account of h-aspiré in French can explain at most three of the four phonological processes in which it is involved, whereas a listener-oriented account can explain all of them. On a descriptive level, the behaviour of h-aspiré is accounted for with a grammar model that involves a control loop, whose crucial ingredient is listener-oriented faithfulness constraints. These constraints evaluate phonological recoverability, which is the extent to which the speaker thinks the listener will be able to recover the phonological message. On a more reductionist level, however, the pronunciation of h-aspiré and its variation is accounted for with a new, very simple, grammar model that can be called phonology and phonetics in parallel. This model uses a single constraint set for all four processes involved in bidirectional three-level phonology, namely perception, recognition, phonological production, and phonetic implementation. In this model, the phenomenon of phonological recoverability is not built in, as in control-loop grammars, but emerges from the interaction of four equally simple learning algorithms. This paper is about the pronunciation of the French form une hausse. It has often been observed that the first e tends to be pronounced, but no satisfactory explanation has yet been given. Section 1 gives the French facts, points out the descriptive inadequacy of derivational approaches, and gives a new informal listener-oriented account for why the pronunciation [yn os] is better than both [ynos] and [yn os]. Section 2 points out the descriptive inadequacy of speaker-based approaches in Optimality Theory (OT), and shows that the simplest form of listener-oriented OT already accounts for the preference of [yn os] over [ynos]. Section 3 then formalizes the listener’s behaviour, so that section 4 can formalize the speaker’s listener-orientedness in more detail, finally leading to an accurate account for the preference of [yn os] over [yn os] and for the occasional occurrence of a phonetically enhanced fourth form, namely [yn os]. 1. Hache aspiré: facts and explanations This section presents the facts about hache aspiré, shows that a derivational analysis suffers from conspiracies, and proposes an informal explanation in listener-oriented terms. 1.1. Three types of word-initial segments in French French words can start with any of three segment types: consonants, vowels, and a third type called hache aspiré. The types are listed in (1), each time with two examples, namely a masculine and a feminine noun.