Optional Word-Final Consonants in French

Abstract

A number of French words (mostly monosyllabic nouns) whose orthographies end in a consonant, e.g., but, mœurs, fait, are frequently heard pronounced both with and without that final element. A computer-assisted analysis of a corpus of 50 tape-recorded conversations with well-educated upper middle-class Parisians has revealed that the final consonant of these words is now generally pronounced in all contexts (utterance-final, prevocalic and preconsonantal). Variations in the frequency of occurrence of this phenomenon, as a function of a number of paralinguistic factors, such as age, sex, syllabic rate, degree of formality, etc., were also studied. The results were corroborated by questionnaires designed to reveal the awareness and the degree of acceptance of this phenomenon, on the part of a representative group of Frenchmen.

Syllabic Rate and Utterance Length in French

“…The present study concerns two of these, namely syllabic rate and utterance length in upper middle-class Parisian French, and thus continues our series of reports on the various phonetic aspects of that language [2,3]. However, in contrast to our previous results, it is quite possible that those to be presented in this article apply not only to French but represent language universals.…”

French Liaison as a Function of Grammatical, Phonetic and Paralinguistic Variables

“…This article is actually the sixth in a series of reports on the results of a long-range analysis of the pronunciation of the dominant dialect of French, known as 'Ile-de-France' or 'Francien', as it is spoken by the educated middle-class of Paris [12][13][14][15][16]. Our methods have been described in detail in earlier articles of this series -see references.…”

The Effect of Linguistic and Paralinguistic Variables on the Elision of the French Mute-e

“…In a larger context, this is the eighth of a series of reports on our long-term global analysis of the phonetics of the dominant (Fran cien) dialect of French, as it is spoken by the educated middle-class of Paris. The Paris Project uses a recently developed system of com puter programs known as PAS (Phonetic Analysis System) to analyse a 2.5-million byte data file representing 50 surreptitiously recorded natural conversations [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17], with appropriate instrumental verifi cation of subtle phenomena. This study concerns mute-e stability as a function of (1) phonetic context -the consonants that precede and follow it, its position in the word and in the utterance -, (2) lexical factors -'groupes figés', etc.…”