Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Linguistics and Translation, October 4-7, 1972, Montreal, Canada. (DD)

This note examines motivations and consequences of a widely held generative phonological analysis of the Modern French vowel system. This analysis claims that only three degrees of vowel height are distinctive in Modern French. It is argued that the analysis would be improved by adding an additional degree of vowel height, creating a system which…

The validity of using phoneme monitoring techniques to measure syntactic processing in French was validated by two experiments. Significant differences in the reaction times of 80 French-speaking academic professionals to phonemes immediately following reversible subject relative clauses and those following object relative clauses demonstrate the…

This paper attempts to show that Zwicky's rule of Auxiliary Reduction is an incorrect analysis of the contraction of auxiliaries in English; and that the phonological processes involved are not as complicated as Zwicky makes them out to be. A simpler explanation is offered through analyzing auxiliary reduction as a three-step process. The three…

This study progressively examines fundamental principles of articulatory phonetics, French and English phonemics, and theoretical phonetics. The Parisian accent is examined at great length. Vowel charts and phonetically transcribed sample lexical items are included. For a companion document see FL 001 799. [Hard copy not available due to marginal…

The task of any phonetic theory is to determine the form of a phonetic component by establishing the internal and external constraints on that component. The phonetic component itself converts linguistic knowledge of the structure of the speech act into time-varying commands suitable for control of the articulatory mechanism. Performing involves…

This paper examines the phenomenon of final consonant deletion in clusters which do not agree in voicing and compares this phenomenon with clusters sharing the voicing feature. The speech studied is that of Puerto Rican and black Harlem teenagers. The data reported here refutes many of Bailey's (1972) claims. Clusters where voicing is not shared…

The Kutchins are a group of Athapaskan Indians who live in an area between the East Fork of the Chandalar River in Alaska and the Mackenzie River in Canada. Eight main groups were classified by Osgood (1936) and McKennan (1965) added a ninth group, Chandalar Kutchin. The present study is based on material collected during the summer of 1972 in one…

This paper presents a diachronic phonological analysis of French in order to show that Kiparsky's (1972) argument against formal (or language-specific) notation is based on a small sample of phenomena and is therefore not valid. Examples of vocalic tension in French are given, and the process from tension to relaxation is described. This tension…

Although spelling instruction has traditionally treated almost every spelling word as requiring a separate learning act, recent research indicates that over 90% of American-English orthography actually is determined by a set of rules for unit phoneme-grapheme relationships, based with decreasing productivity upon three levels of…

This paper argues that the origin of the tonal accents in Low German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian can be explained on the basis of segmental circumstances, that they may be considered as secondary in the historical development of these languages, and that they arise when the redundant tonal transition in centering diphthongs becomes distinctive…