Markedness, Faithfulness, Vowel Quality and Syllable Structure in French
نویسنده
چکیده
The goal of this paper is twofold: first it reviews the distributional properties of tense and lax vowels in a relatively standard dialect of Northern French which still contrasts vowel length, and second, on the basis of these data, it examines the interaction between markedness and faithfulness constraints in Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky 1993). The intricate interplay between vowel quality, syllable structure and cooccurrence restrictions between vowels and consonants that one observes in French makes it an ideal language for exploring the interactions between the two kinds of constraints. As a general tendency, it can safely be assumed that tense vowels appear in open syllables and lax vowels in closed syllables; thus, that generalization (1) which has repeatedly been observed for the Germanic languages holds in French, too (see van der Hulst 1984 and Kager 1989 for Dutch, Moulton 1962, Wiese 1996 and Féry 1997 for German, Hammond 1997 for English).
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