Vowel harmony in Montreal French

This paper investigates some systematic properties of the French phonological system spoken in Montreal. The vowel system has a set of late rules, producing vowel harmony among all/syllabic units within a breath group. Analysis of the corpus‐120 spontaneous‐style interviews of all social strata of the Montreal‐French‐speaking community, collected by Cedergren and Sankoff—reveals that a vowel's F₂ is influenced by the F₂ of the succeeding vowel, which in turn has been influenced by the F₂ position of the vowel which follows it, For English vowel systems studied to date, even task‐oriented discourse, the primary coarticulation is between the vowel and its surrounding consonants; however, for these data, all systematic coarticulatory constraints obtain among the unstressed vowels which occur within one breath group. In addition, the transition from the nucleus is directed toward the nucleus of the succeeding vowel rather than toward the locus of the intervening consonant. [Work supported by SSRC of Canada, and Canada Council.]