Schwa Metathesis in Cajun French

Abstract

Although the phonology of schwa in Standard French has been extensively studied, the same is not true of many varieties of French, and in particular of Cajun French. This paper will focus on wordinitial metathesis, a widespread phenomenon of Cajun French. Word-initial metathesis occurs either after a consonant cluster (e.g. grenier-gernier 'attic') or after a single /r/ (e,g. retourner-ertourner 'to return'), in which case the conditioning environment is larger than the phonological word. I will show that the two phenomena are two aspects of the same process. I will first consider two nonlinear approaches to metathesis and show that they are both unable to explicitly point out the triggering force of the sonorant /r/. I will present a prosodic analysis where the initial syllable is degenerate in that it lacks a vocalic nucleus. Epenthesis of a vocalic segment will save the deficient syllable. Surface differences between the two types of metatheses will be attributed to weight distinctions within the French syllable. It will be claimed that epenthesis, a powerfül device which should be highly constrained, is well motivated in the present context because the segments involved fonn a natural phonetic class.