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Le schwa en français : pourquoi des corpus ?

Jacques Durand and Julien Eychenne

Abstracts

The schwa in French : why corpora are necessary ?

Our principal aim in this article is to show that for the study of a phenomenon as complex as French schwa, the constitution of corpora based on a rigorous and explicit methodology is an indispensable step in the construction of the object of enquiry. With this purpose in mind, we focus on the study of word-final positions. More specifically, we examine the opposition /Cə#/ - /C#/, in the light of three surveys conducted within the PFC project (« Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC) : usages, variétés et structure ») – namely, a corpus from Douzens (Aude), one from Biarritz (Pays Basque), and one from Treize-Vents (Vendée).

After giving an overview of debates surrounding the treatment of word-final positions in French, we provide a brief introduction to the PFC project, its methodology and its tools. We then present the results obtained from our three corpora: the data from Aude represent a rather conservative variety of Midi French where the /Cə#/ - /C#/ opposition proves to be stable despite age-graded variation; the data from Pays Basque represent a Midi variety in an evolving stage, where final oppositions between /Cə#/ vs /C#/ appear to be on their way out but are residually present. The data from Vendée (a rarely described variety) are identical in this respect to the Paris norm and our results show fairly conclusively that the opposition between /Cə#/ and /C#/ is no longer present, not even marginally. We argue that these conclusions and the analyses they allow (including various correlations between speech and writing) could hardly be reached on the basis of uncontrolled observations alone.

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21. Introduction

32. La position finale en français : diversité et unité

43. Le projet PFC

  • 3.1. Généralités

  • 3.2. Le schwa et son codage

  • 3.3. Le classeur-codeur

54. Résultats des corpus

  • 4.1. Le corpus Douzens (Aude)

  • 4.2. Le corpus Biarritz (Pays Basque)

  • 4.3. Le corpus Treize-Vents (Vendée)

65. Conclusion

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Notes

* Nous remercions les membres du projet PFC, et tout particulièrement Géraldine-M. Mallet qui nous a fourni les données de l’enquête Vendée. Nous remercions également deux lecteurs anonymes qui nous ont fait part de leurs commentaires.
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References

Electronic reference

Jacques Durand and Julien Eychenne, “Le schwa en français : pourquoi des corpus ?”Corpus [Online], 3 | 2004, Online since 02 December 2005, connection on 22 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/corpus/246; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/corpus.246

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About the authors

Jacques Durand

ERSS, UMR5610, Université de Toulouse II

By this author

Julien Eychenne

ERSS, UMR5610, Université de Toulouse II

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Copyright

The text and other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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