A corpus-based study of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French and what it teaches us about its phonological status

What is commonly considered as an epenthetic vowel can actually refer to at least two different realities: phonological epenthesis or phonetic excrescence. French schwa, noted [ә], is a vowel alternating with zero and limited to unstressed syllables that can appear word-internally or word-finally. This paper presents an extensive description of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French in order to shed light on its nature: is it an intrusive vowel or a full epenthetic vowel? To that extent, three large corpora of French containing more than 110 hours of speech were used to establish the presence of word-final schwa as a function of sociolinguistics, orthography, phonotactics and phonetics. Our conclusions are that word-final schwa is impacted by speech style, gender, orthography, phonotactics (i.e., the number of adjacent consonants and their sonority profile), and the phonological properties of the codas. However, speech rate does not impact word-final schwa realization. The specific results lead us to suggest that word-final schwa in Standard French shares similarities with intrusive vowels but ultimately behaves like a legit epenthetic vowel.

A debate on a Universal Morphology

This debate stems from Michal Starke’s keynote lecture at NELS 51, entitled “UM. Universal Morphology”. The video can be found at this link: https://michal.starke.ch/talks/2020-11_nels/nels_starke.mp4. In his talk, Starke sketches a nanosyntactic analysis of French irregular verbs, with the aim of showing that irregularities in French verbal paradigms (and in general) are only apparent. We asked some prominent morphologists and morpho-syntacticians to comment on and provide replies to Starke’s proposal and arguments. Subsequently, the author wrote a reply to these comments. You can find them all here. We wish to thank the NELS 51 organizing committee for allowing us to use the talk as a starting point for the debate, Michal Starke for his availability, and the linguists who agreed to engage in this interesting and fruitful exchange. This keynote debate celebrates the first year of the new Isogloss, in the hope of having more occasions to host discussions like this one.