Inter- and intra-speaker variation in French schwa

Abstract

Quantitative constraint-based theories of optionality typically aim to model the frequency with which an individual speaker's grammar maps one input onto various output forms. But existing studies in this area use population-level frequency data as a proxy for the frequencies produced by an individual speaker's grammar. This practice is problematic for three reasons. First, population-level variation could result from aggregation over individuals with differing categorical behavior, not individual variation at all. Second, some theories predict that individuals with identical relative constraint rankings/weights can produce those outputs with different frequencies, while others predict uniform frequencies across speakers; these prediction cannot be tested without individual-level data. Third, if indeed individuals differ in their output frequencies, population-level averages may disguise true patterns of individual variation. This paper addresses these shortcomings through a corpus study of optional schwa deletion in French. We find that individual speakers do in fact show variable omission of schwa. We also find variation between speakers in the frequency of schwa's appearance. Taken together, these results confirm that for French schwa, formal theories are correct to ascribe variation to a single speaker's grammar, and they favor theories that decouple the means of producing variation from the account of output frequency.

French schwa and gradient cumulativity

“…Previous work modeling French schwa has taken the same approach. In Bayles et al (2016) and Bürki et al (2011), the inclusion of random effects is shown to help control for interspeaker differences in the realization of French schwa and significantly improve model fit. The coding of the fixed effects is shown in Table 4.…”

On the deletion of word-final schwa in Southern French

“…Over the last few decades, generative phonology has been moving away from the study of an ‘ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community’ (Chomsky 1965: 3), and has started recognising the importance of variation and gradience (e.g. Hayes & Wilson 2008, Pater 2009; see Bayles et al 2016 for a review). Despite the progress that has been accomplished, a lot of work still needs to be done to be able to account for the range of variation found in observational data.…”

“…(See in particular the results from the project Phonologie du français contemporain ( PFC ; see Durand et al 2002), 1 especially the contributions in Detey et al 2016, Durand et al 2009 and Gess et al . 2012; see also Bürki, Ernestus et al 2011, Bürki, Fougeron et al 2011 and Bayles et al 2016.) The main goal of this paper is to contribute to these recent efforts by clarifying the factors that influence the loss of word-final lexical schwa in a relatively understudied variety, namely Southern French.…”

“…First, while the individual studies offer valuable information about the variety on which they focus, both the factors investigated and the methods used vary, making it difficult to know what holds for Southern French as a whole and what might be more specific to a given variety. Second, the statistical methods which are now available (generalised linear mixed-effects models) allow us to probe phonological variation with increased precision, and in much greater depth, than was previously possible (Bürki, Ernestus et al 2011, Bayles et al 2016). Third, as shown below, there are several potential factors whose influence (or lack thereof) is simply unknown.…”

Assessing surface phonological specification through simulation and classification of phonetic trajectories

“…However, this method does not allow us to test H4, the optional lingual target hypothesis. The reason is that, in evaluating statistical significance in this way, we are testing whether the tokens as a group are different, which involves the implicit assumption of phonological homogeneity across tokens of a word (see Bayles et al 2016). The next computational tool we introduce alleviates this problem.…”