Reflections of the French nasal vowel shift in orthography on Twitter

IF 0.6 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of French Language Studies Pub Date : 2022-07-01 DOI:10.1017/S095926952100020X

James Law

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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Abstract Non-standard orthography on social media provides a useful supplementary data source for sociophonetic research. Regarding an ongoing chain shift in Northern Metropolitan French nasal vowels, spellings reflecting shifted vowel targets are observed on Twitter. These non-standard spellings, e.g. avont [avɔ̃] for avant /avɑ̃/ ‘before’, provide insight into speakers’ awareness of this change and its lexical distribution. Tweets with shifted and standard spellings of 306 word forms containing the phonemes /ɛ̃/, /œ̃/, /ɑ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ were collected from an 870-million word Internet Archive corpus of French tweets from 2011–2017. Shifted spellings were found for all four vowels and 168 words. The shifted spelling rate is lower than that of comparable variables in English and is not conditioned by stress, grammatical category, frequency, or phonological context, which affect the distribution of shifted nasal vowels in speech. However, frequent words show more indications of intentional misspelling, such as repetition and capitalization of the target vowel, suggesting that some speakers are conscious of the variation and comment on it using salient words. The results also contribute to an ongoing debate about a possible merger between /ɛ̃/ and /œ̃/, supporting the hypothesis of an incomplete merger where /ɛ̃/ shifts towards [ɑ̃] but /œ̃/ does not.

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推特上对法语鼻音移位的反思

摘要社交媒体上的非标准正字法为社会语音学研究提供了有益的补充数据源。关于法国北部城市鼻音元音的持续连锁转移，在Twitter上可以观察到反映元音目标转移的拼写。这些非标准拼写，例如avont [av]表示avant /av / ' before，可以让我们深入了解说话者对这种变化及其词汇分布的认识。从2011年至2017年的8.7亿字法语推文互联网档案语料库中收集了306个包含音素/ / /、/ / / /、/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /的单词形式的移位和标准拼写的推文。所有四个元音和168个单词的拼写都发生了变化。移位的拼写率低于英语中可比较的变量，并且不受重音、语法类别、频率或语音上下文的限制，这些因素会影响语音中鼻音移位的分布。然而，频繁出现的单词显示出更多故意拼写错误的迹象，比如重复和目标元音的大写，这表明一些说话者意识到这种变化，并使用突出的单词进行评论。研究结果也有助于对/ / æ [n] /和/ / æ [n] /之间可能合并的持续争论，支持不完全合并的假设，其中/ / æ [n] /向[[n]转移，但/ / æ [n] /没有。

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来源期刊

Journal of French Language Studies Multiple-

CiteScore

1.40

自引率

16.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： Journal of French Language Studies, sponsored by the Association for French Language Studies, encourages and promotes theoretical, descriptive and applied studies of all aspects of the French language. The journal brings together research from the English- and French-speaking traditions, publishing significant work on French phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis and semantics, sociolinguistics and variation studies. Most work is synchronic in orientation, but historical and comparative items are also included. Studies of the acquisition of the French language, where these take due account of current theory in linguistics and applied linguistics, are also published.