Phonology

  • Jacques DURAND (Toulouse)
    Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structures
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 25-37

    The PAC project (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure) aims at giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and its geographical, social and stylistic diversity. Based on Labovian methods, the project seeks to describe both rhotic and non rhotic accents of English, from traditional standards to more recent postcolonial varieties. This large corpus enables researchers to analyse and compare intervarietal features such as rhoticity as well as more specific phenomena such as vocalic length in Australian English or variable rhoticity in New Zealand English. Today LVTI, a collaborative project aiming at an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic survey of great urban centres such as Manchester and Toulouse is being set up following the PAC/PFC classical protocol.


  • Julien EYCHENNE (Groningue, Pays-Bas)
    The Phonology of Contemporary French program: results and perspective
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 7-24

    This paper offers an overview of the work that has been done within the Phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés, structure (PFC) research programme. We first critically assess the relation between phonological research and data. We then move on to describe PFC's methodology and the coding schemes that have been devised for the analysis of schwa and liaison. We finish off by showing how the PFC programme makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phonology of French, by widening the scope and breadth of empirical descriptions and by offering new insights into theoretical problems such as the analysis of liaison or the role of usage frequency in grammar.


  • Frida SPLENDIDO (Lund University)
    Phonetic-phonological development of early second language French Support for a child second language (cL2) mode of acquisition in phonology
    2016, Vol. XXI-2, pp. 19-32

    This multiple case study focuses on phonetic-phonological development of L2 French in early Swedish-speaking learners. More specifically it describes the development of Voice Onset Time (VOT) and liaison in early L2 learners as compared to simultaneous Swedish-French bilinguals and monolingual French children. The results indicate that although the L2 learners present initial similarities with adult L2 learners, more advanced productions resemble those of simultaneous bilinguals. The data from this multiple case study thus appear to support the idea of a cL2 mode of acquisition also in the domain of phonology.