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Rules of stress assignment in Québec French: Evidence from perceptual data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Claude Paradis  and
Denise Deshaies
Claude Paradis
Affiliation:
Université Laval
Denise Deshaies
Affiliation:
Université Laval
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Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of the prosodic system of Québec French in a variationist framework. However, major problems have to be resolved before one can give a comprehensive view of this system, one of these concerning stress assignment. In order to examine the validity of the traditional view claimed for French by most linguists, which states that stress is always superposed on the final syllable of lexical words, different perceptual tests were devised and carried out with two groups of students. The results of these tests show the effect of structural factors on the perception of stressed syllables in Québec French and demonstrate that this canonic rule does not always hold for varieties of Québec French. On the basis of these results, a subset of stress rules is then proposed and illustrated with examples of words tested in the perceptual tests. Counterexamples to these rules are thereafter discussed, and a reconsideration of the principles of syllabification that are usually taken for granted for French is proposed in light of variable rules.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , July 1990 , pp. 135 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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