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Minimalism and French /ʀ/: Phonological representations in phonetically based phonology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

ERIC RUSSELL WEBB
ERIC RUSSELL WEBB*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
*
Address for correspondence: Eric Russell Webb, 108 Sproul Hall, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA e-mail: erussell@ucdavis.edu
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Abstract

This paper examines the phonological structure of French rhotics and their treatment in a production grammar. Assuming emergent featural specification, it is argued that the underlying representation of /ʀ/ contains only values for sonorance, continuance and place of articulation. Grammatical analysis is undertaken in an Optimality Theoretic framework, where evaluation highlights the effect of effort reduction and perceptual augmentation on /ʀ/, also demonstrating that more richly specified segments are unaffected by these constraints. The proposal is shown to be compatible with antecedent analyses and data from regional forms and registers.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 87 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to three anonymous referees for suggestions in making this paper more coherent. Thanks also to B. Tranel and B. Bullock for useful comments on earlier versions of this work. It goes without saying that all remaining shortcomings are my own.

References

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