Une etude phonologique du francais parle a Sainte-Flore, province de Quebec. (French text)
Description
Phonetic and phonological studies of Canadian French began in the 1940's but didn't expand until the late 1960's. There have traditionally been three basic areas of study: the Acadian French of Nova Scotia, the French in Ontario, and the French in Quebec. This last area has become increasingly popular within the past 15 years because of the determination of the Quebec government to preserve the French Canadian culture and its language and to prevent their loss to an Anglo-American culture. Most phonological studies of Quebec French have been based in Montreal, although some regional studies exist for areas such as Papineauville and Beauce County. However, the speech of many regions in Quebec, such as La Mauricie, has not been studied from a phonological point of view, even though it contains regional variations which are of interest to a linguist and which are due mainly to a geographically-separate evolution. These variations are presently being lost in the development of a standardized French Canadian language which is being brought about by the mass media and vocabulary lists published by the Quebec government. The purpose of this dissertation is to present the phonetic data of an unstudied regional variety of the French Canadian language in order to preserve in written form the varietal features of this one region before they are lost to standardization. It will help to complete our knowledge of Quebec French and aid in a subsequent diachronic phonological study of Canadian French The village of Sainte-Flore was chosen as a restricted linguistic community within La Mauricie. Six informants, three men and three women, who are native to this parish and whose parents were its founders, were recorded during six hours of spontaneous conversation. They represent all levels of society and of formal education and can therefore offer a rather complete picture of the speech of this linguistic community. The conversations were transcribed auditorily using the International Phonetic Alphabet with certain modifications. The phones are presented by Standard French phonemes. A strict phonemic analysis of this varieity of Canadian French was impossible because many of its phones overlap two or more phonemic boundaries. Certain parts of the tapes were subjected to spectrographic analysis in order to visually confirm the auditory conclusions, and a transformational analysis of certain generalizations in the speech of Sainte-Flore was attempted. This latter analysis shows that the regional variations in this speech are due largely to a progressively-detailed application of different lower-level phonetic rules, not to a different generation of forms from deep-structure to surface structure Of the varietal generalizations which can be drawn from the data, the major one is the use of diphthongization in both accented and unaccented syllables. One can also ascertain the use of {-tense} phones for the corresponding {+tense} /i/, /y/, /u/, and /a/ of Standard French. The multiplication of phones for a phoneme increases in proportion to the opening of the oral cavity. The nasal vowel /(' ) / is found to be stable, even though it is being lost from Standard French and from standardized Canadian French. Nasal consonants can perceptively nasalize part of a preceding oral vowel, and some nasal vowels can be partially denasalized in certain phonetic environments. There is either total or unperceived assimilation of voicing and unvoicing of consonants, and some words and expressions have fixed forms with respect to their phonetic manifestation