BackgroundPhonetics: The Contrast of Voiceless High Vowels vs. ZeroThe Environment of High Vowel DevoicingOptionalityThe Blocking Effect of Secondary StressAlternationsAnalysisIllustrative DerivationsA Cloud on the HorizonLinguistics 120A Hayes/FleischhackerPhonology I Winter 2001Sample Paper: High Vowel Devoicing in Québécoisby Bruce Hayes1. BackgroundThe purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze a process of High Vowel Devoicing inQuébécois. Québécois is a dialect of French spoken in Canada, principally in the province ofQuebec. According to my consultant, most forms of Québécois are mutually intelligible withcontinental French.My consultant for this paper, Kie Zuraw, is a native speaker of Québécois. Kie’s parents areEnglish speakers, but when Kie grew up in Montreal she was sent to French-speaking daycareand later, school. She thus learned Québécois from her peer group, starting in the sandbox. Kiewas also exposed considerably to the (basically continental) variety of French spoken by thelargely Moroccan teachers in her school.Kie spent her high school years in Urbana, Illinois; returned to Montreal for college, and hasspent the last few years in Los Angeles as a linguistics graduate student. Her judgment is that herQuébécois has survived these “droughts” of input data fairly intact.The words used in this project were thought up by Kie and me (I using my dilapidated highschool French). Kie brought along a very fat French dictionary, which helped a great deal.Other than Phinney (1980), cited below, I can’t find any reference sources on high voweldevoicing. I know I must have read somewhere that Québécois devoices high vowels betweenvoiceless consonants, but I can’t remember where. At any rate, now I have learned, with my ownears, that this is true.2. Phonetics: The Contrast of Voiceless High Vowels vs. ZeroThe first challenge in analyzing the voiceless high vowels of Québécois is to hear them.They are subtle. I found that by collecting minimal and near-minimal pairs for high vowel vs.zero, under good listening conditions, I could hear them pretty well. Here are some cases:[»stab] ‘stable’[si••••»»»»tab] ‘citable’[su••••»»»»si] ‘worry’[»si] ‘yes (in cases of contradiction)’Linguistics 120A Sample Term Paper p. 2[spiX] ‘one turn of a spiral’[su••••»»»»piX]‘to sigh’My only reference source, Phinney (1980), claims that high vowels are deleted, not devoiced.These minimal pairs suggest she is wrong, although perhaps there really is deletion for thoseparticular speakers Phinney studied.3. The Environment of High Vowel DevoicingIt can be seen in all of the words above that the high vowel occurs (a) in stressless position;(b) surrounded by voiceless consonants. Here are some other words that make the same point:[si••••»tXo)] ‘lemon’[si••••»te] ‘to cite’[pi••••s»tPl] ‘type of old French coin’[ku••••s»to] ‘Cousteau’[Su••••»kXUt] ‘sauerkraut’[«ynivEXsi••••»te] ‘university’[«paXtÉsi••••si••••»pe] ‘to participate’As the last form shows, there is no prohibition against having voiceless vowels in consecutivesyllables.When at least one of the consonants surrounding the high vowel is voiced, then the vowelstays voiced:[tÉsi»“e] ‘to pull’[si»¯e] ‘to sign’[mu»to)U)] ‘sheep’[ly»nEt] ‘eyeglasses’[ly»te] ‘to struggle’Further, the vowel really does have to be high. In the following examples, the target vowel(boldface) is stressless, and surrounded by voiceless consonants. But since it is not high, so itstays voiced:[so»sIs] ‘sausage’[«fiSa»sjo)] ‘put in a file-1 plur. imperfect subjunctive’[ka»to] ‘proper name’When asked, Kie explicitly rejects pronunciations like *[so••••»sIs] or *[ka•»to].Linguistics 120A Sample Term Paper p. 3Note in the second word, the high vowel /i/ occurs surrounded by voiceless consonants. Butit does not devoice, because it bears secondary stress. For more on stress in Québécois, seebelow.Putting all these observations together, I propose the following phonological rule:High Vowel Devoicing+syllabic+high → [-voice] / [-voice] ___ [-voice] (optional)-stressThat is: “Devoice a stressless high vowel when it is surrounded by voiceless sounds.” The ruleassumes that all vowels are underlyingly voiced, so a vowel will appear as voiced unless HighVowel Devoicing applies to it.4. OptionalityHigh Vowel Devoicing is stated as being optional. In our elicitation session, Kie applied itmost of the time, but every once in a while suppressed the rule. In the data, if High VowelDevoicing can apply to a form, the form is transcribed with a voiceless vowel. But, as far as wecan tell, the voiced vowel is always an option, in extra-careful speech.5. The Blocking Effect of Secondary StressIn longer words, the effects of secondary stress can be seen. If our ears tell us right,secondary stress occurs on the first syllable of any word has three or more syllables. (Theprimary stress is always on the last syllable.) One might say that Québécois “wants” to have aninitial secondary stress, but not in monosyllables (where the only syllable bears primary stress),nor in disyllables (where we would get two stresses adjacent to each other). Thus, you need aword of at least three syllables for the secondary stress to show up.In the following words, all trisyllabic, secondary stress blocks High Vowel Devoicing in thevowel of the first syllable:[«pista»Sje] ‘pistachio tree’[«sykXi»e] ‘sugar bowl’[«kutøz»mA)] ‘in a costly way’[«supœ»“i] ‘soup-ery’ (made-up word)These may be compared with the disyllabic forms earlier, where the high vowels werecompletely stressless, and therefore underwent devoicing.Linguistics 120A Sample Term Paper p. 4It is possible to show that it really is stress, and not trisyllabicity alone, that blocks HighVowel Devoicing in these forms. If the high vowel is in the medial syllable of a word having atleast