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In:Interdisciplinary Approaches to Romance Linguistics: In honor of Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio
Edited by Mark Amengual and Amanda Dalola
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 45] 2025
► pp. 115–136

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Chapter 5
Pas d’ schwa

The deletion of non-schwa French vowels in laboratory speech

 | Brigham Young University
Published online: 2 September 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.45.05mcb
Abstract
Researchers have previously observed the deletion of certain stable, non-schwa vowels in spoken French, but the possibility of observing this phenomenon — generally associated with casual speech — to any extent in data collected in a laboratory setting has been questioned (Torreira & Ernestus, 2011; Green & Hintze, 2021). This study demonstrates that the vowel /ɛ/ in the common collocation c’est [sɛ] ‘it/this is’ was deleted in approximately 19.1% of tokens produced by 19 French speakers completing a prose reading task in formal laboratory conditions. The primary factors conditioning deletion seem to be the individual speaker, the rate of speech, and the position of the target word within the phrase.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Vowel lenition, schwa, and liaison
    • 2.1Vowel lenition
    • 2.2French schwa
    • 2.3French liaison
    • 2.4Cases of non-schwa vowel deletion
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Acoustic measures and data extraction
      • 3.2.1Segments measured
      • 3.2.2Z2 — Z1
      • 3.2.3Position in phrase
      • 3.2.4Speech rate
      • 3.2.5Methods for analysis
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Deleting /ɛ/
    • 4.2Phonetic properties of lenition and deletion
      • 4.2.1Lenited /ɛ/
      • 4.2.2Duration of [s] and [t]
      • 4.2.3Factors conditioning /ɛ/ deletion
    • 4.3Limitations and future work
    • 4.4Implications
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Griffiths, Joshua M.
2025. On the status of epenthetic schwa in French. In Interdisciplinary Approaches to Romance Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 45], ► pp. 186 ff. DOI logo

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