/R/ LENITION IN QUEBEC FRENCH : EVIDENCE FROM THE DISTRIBUTION OF 9 ALLOPHONES IN LARGE CORPORA
Résumé
Lenition is a process whereby a segment shifts to a "weaker" variant (i.e., closer to deletion in the history of languages). Lenition is also a positional phenomenon, typically affecting intervocalic or coda consonants before post-coda or post-pausal onsets. While the lenition of stops is well studied in Romance languages, investigations about other segments are rare. We propose to fill this gap by focusing on /R/ in Québec French (QF), a variety documented to exhibit up to 9 allophones. We examine 50K+ read words from the PFC-Québec Corpus [1] that we manually annotated (for voicing, manner and place of articulation-based on perception and spectrograms). The analysis of the distribution of /R/ in different syllabic positions shows that lenited (approximantized, vocalized and non-realized) variants indeed appear in leniting positions (coda and intervocalic), thus showing that /R/ realizations in QF are not in free variation but indeed an instance of lenition.
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