PFC, coding systems and representations: the issue of schwa

Abstract

Nous tenons à remercier Marie-José Béguelin, Federica Diémoz et Mathieu Avanzi pour l'organisation du colloque « Corpus de français parlés et français des corpus » à Neuchâtel, les 8 et 9 mai 2014, journées qui sont à l'origine de cette publication. Nous remercions également l'ensemble de nos collègues impliqués dans le programme PFC ainsi que tous les locuteurs qui ont permis de constituer la base de données. Nous sommes également reconnaissants à Léa Courdès-Murphy pour son aide avec les données méridionales. Le travail sur les données suisses romandes n'aurait pas été possible sans le travail de N.

Not only size matters: limits to the Law of Three Consonants in French phonology

“…The finding that Swiss French speakers are systematically more likely to accept the schwaless variant than French speakers from France is in line with the conclusions reached by Racine (2007;2008) based on judgment data and by Racine et al (2016) (among others) based on production data. Despite these systematic differences, participants from France and Switzerland behaved remarkably similarly with respect to the hypotheses studied in this paper, except for the treatment of OL_C in derived vs. inflected words (see Table 5).…”

“…Earlier studies have reported that French speakers from France are more likely to pronounce schwas than French speakers from Switzerland overall (Racine 2007;2008;Racine 2016). The hypothesis is summarized in (14a) at the level of the data and in (14b) at the grammatical level.…”

“…The present study uses speakers' metalinguistic judgments as primary data, following a long in the present study. In particular, the PFC corpus does not provide information about whether a word-internal schwa is morpheme-internal or at a morpheme boundary (see Racine et al 2016 for a description of the variables that were coded for schwa in PFC).…”