Schedule 74. StuTS

This talk will be streamed online and shown in the indicated room.

This study examines /ɔ/-fronting, in which /ɔ/ is fronted towards /œ/, in
the French spoken in Caen and Le Havre (LH). This phenomenon originates from working-class Parisian French (Martinet 1958). Recent research suggests fronted variants are spreading throughout France (Mooney 2016), but especially in Northern French (Armstrong and Low 2008, Boula de Mareuil, Adda-Decker and Woehrling 2011). These studies are however limited in scope, as they often rely on small samples and have only surveyed a limited set of locations. To fill these gaps, this study tests in Caen the literature’s prediction that /ɔ/-fronting is present throughout Northern France. In LH, where fronting has been attested, a pilot study explores the effects of speaker’s socioeconomic class on the variable, a factor that has often been left aside in previous variationist studies of (ɔ). A corpus of fourteen sociolinguistic interviews, 10 from Caen and 4 from LH, was collected and transcribed. Measurements of /ɔ/’s f2 are retrieved at vowel midpoint. Lobanov-normalised values are analysed through mixed-effect linear regression. The results are based on 1205 tokens of /ɔ/. Results differ significantly across field sites. In Caen, the f2 of (ɔ) is mainly affected by linguistic factors such as syllable type (open or closed) and following and preceding consonants. No strong evidence of differences across social groups is found, and fronting is marginal, suggesting its spread might be more limited than previously thought. In LH, it appears that working class speakers lead the use of fronted variants, while middle-class speakers tend to avoid them, likely in a conscious effort. Some perceptual data indeed suggest fronted variants take different indexical links in LH than elsewhere in France. In LH, fronted variants are linked to localness, but also to working-class speakers, which leads them to be stigmatised.

Armstrong, N., and J. Low. 2008. ‘C’est encœur plus jeuli, le Mareuc: some evidence for the spread of /ɔ/-fronting in French’. Transactions of the Philological Society 106(3): 432–455.
Boula de Mareuil, P., M. Adda-Decker, and C. Woehrling. 2010. ‘Ant ériorisation/aperture des voyelles /ɔ/-/o/ en français du Nord et du Sud.’ Proc. of the 28es Journées d’ ́Etude sur la Parole 81-84.
Martinet, A. 1958. ‘C’est jeuli, le Mareuc!’ Romance philology 11(4): 345-355.
Mooney, D. 2016. “C’est jeuli, la Gasceugne!’: L’antériorisation du phonème /ɔ/ dans le français régional du Béarn’. French studies 70(1): 61–81.

Info

Day: 2023-10-27
Start time: 15:30
Duration: 00:25
Room: NIG Raum 2
Track: Sociolinguistics
Language: en

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