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Compensatory Lengthening in Historical French: The Role of the Speaker

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Research on Old French: The State of the Art

Part of the book series: Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ((SNLT,volume 88))

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Abstract

This chapter highlights the synchronic role of the speaker in compensatory lengthening (CL), through an in-depth exploration of two major types seen in Old French. In the context of a typological survey of approaches to CL, I put forth a model that complements the strictly listener-oriented account of Kavitskaya (Compensatory lengthening. Phonetics, phonology, diachrony. Routledge, New York/London, 2002), and assumes the speaker/innovator as the ultimate source of CL. CL is gradual, as intermediate forms become, through the speaker’s postlexical reductions, more and more similar to (confusable with) forms with long vowels. CL has taken place diachronically once the listener has taken the speaker’s ultimately highly misperceivable output and done just that – misperceived it. The central aspect of this more comprehensive view of CL is that the speaker, through innovative reductive articulations, crucially feeds listener misperceptions. Speaker innovations are constrained by a principle of isochrony and by articulatory gesture preservation constraints (Gess R. J French Lang Stud 18:175–187, 2008) projected from a static perceptual knowledge source containing statements on the relative perceptibility of various phonetic cues across different phonological contexts (Steriade D. Directional asymmetries in place assimilation: A perceptual account. In: Hume E, Johnson K (eds) The role of speech perception in phonology. Academic Press, San Diego, pp 219–250, 2001).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It has been a rather standard assumption that the rhotic in Old French had a dental or alveolar place of articulation. Gess (1999) points out the quote below cited in Bishop (1968:69), however, suggesting that the rhotic in fact had a uvular articulation, at least in some varieties. Jean de Joinville, the biographer of King Louis IX, attributes this quote to him.

    To restore [rendre] is such a hard thing to do that even in speaking of it the word itself rasps one’s throat because of ther’s that are in it. Theser’s are, so to speak, like the rakes of the devil, with which he would draw to himself all those who wish to ‘restore’ what they have taken from others.

    Bishop concludes that “the remark indicates that the Parisian, or uvular,rwas current in the thirteenth century”. I adopt the same conclusion here.

  2. 2.

    Note that the relevant vowel in these forms was also subject to an earlier process of compensatory lengthening (as illustrated in (1)). The length indicated in these forms is in addition to the inherent length resulting from the earlier process.

  3. 3.

    Like many words representing abstract concepts, this word was introduced into the language after the deletion of syllable-final /S/- hence the unaffected [s] in the initial syllable.

  4. 4.

    The deletion of rhotics in syllable-final position was incomplete geographically and in terms of lexical diffusion in those dialects in which it did occur. Furthermore, lost rhotics were largely restored in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Gess1996:2).

  5. 5.

    An example of CVC CL in a final syllable is chosen for illustration in order to avoid confusion, since many instances of CVC CL in penultimate syllables resulted in forms that later underwent CVCə CL as well. The forms in (1b, c) and (2b, d) are examples of words that would have been available for both rounds of CL.

  6. 6.

    For discussion of the choice between these alternatives, see McCarthy (1979), Clements and Keyser (1983), Hyman (1984,1985), Levin (1985), Lowenstamm and Kaye (1986), McCarthy and Prince (1986), Hayes (1989), and Szigetvári (2009).

  7. 7.

    For the licensing of word-final consonants and the site of their adjunction, see Gess (1996:98–99).

  8. 8.

    “Whenscomes with a followingt, it will have the sound ofh.”

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  1. School of Linguistics and Language Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Randall Gess

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Correspondence to Randall Gess .

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  1. , Department of Foreign Languages, University of Nevada, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, 89154-5047, Nevada, USA

    Deborah L. Arteaga

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Gess, R. (2013). Compensatory Lengthening in Historical French: The Role of the Speaker. In: Arteaga, D. (eds) Research on Old French: The State of the Art. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4768-5_5

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