Benjamin Storme- PhD
- Universitair Docent at Leiden University
Benjamin Storme
- PhD
- Universitair Docent at Leiden University
About
37
Publications
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Introduction
Benjamin Storme currently works as an Assistant Professor in French linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Benjamin does research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, with a special focus on French varieties.
Visit bstorme.com for more information.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2018 - present
Position
- Professor (Assistant)
Description
- I teach linguistics classes to undergrads at the University of Lausanne while also working as a researcher in phonetics/phonology (and more anecdotally in morphology).
Publications
Publications (37)
The exact nature of French liaison as a phonological or morphological alternation is still debated. Under the phonological analysis, liaison is allophony: liaison consonants are special phonemes that alternate between a consonant allophone and zero (e.g., [t] ∼ ∅), the zero allophone being derived from the consonant phoneme through deletion (/t/ →...
One key hypothesis of Optimality Theory is that phonological processes are motivated by phonotactic constraints. This hypothesis has been challenged by Morin (2005) using data from French liaison that are problematic for the analysis of this phenomenon as motivated by an anti-hiatus phonotactic constraint. Morin proposed instead a usage-based accou...
La phonologie et la phonétique du créole martiniquais n’ont pas fait l’objet de la même attention que sa syntaxe ou son lexique. Cet article contribue à combler cette lacune en documentant la réalisation des 10 voyelles orales et nasales du créole martiniquais à partir d’une liste de 180 mots prononcés par un locuteur natif de la langue. Les mots o...
Cet article présente et motive l'utilisation de deux méthodes issues des sciences naturelles pour la linguistique : l'expérimentation et la modélisation. L'expérimentation vise à tester une hypo-thèse de façon contrôlée et est particulièrement adaptée pour statuer sur les liens de causalité entre variables linguistiques. La modélisation linguistiqu...
A growing body of research shows that readers and listeners are biased by the grammatical gender of a noun when making inferences about the gender of its referent. This result is central in debates about gender-fair language but has mostly been established using masculine generics. This paper presents two preregistered studies on French that aim to...
French liaison is a type of external sandhi involving the use of a special consonant-final allomorph before vowel-initial words. Consonants occurring at the end of these allomorphs are challenging for phonological theory because of evidence that their prosodic and segmental realization is intermediate between the realizations of word-final and word...
Cet article présente et motive l’utilisation de deux méthodes issues des sciences naturelles pour la linguistique : l’expérimentation et la modélisation. L’expérimentation vise à tester une hypothèse de façon contrôlée et est particulièrement adaptée pour statuer sur les liens de causalité entre variables linguistiques. La modélisation linguistique...
Systemic constraints evaluating several input-output mappings jointly have been proposed in phonology and morphology to account for contrast enhancement and homophony avoidance. However, these constraints are not directly compatible with current probabilistic models for constraint-based grammars, as these models typically assume constraints that ev...
Phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy (PCSA) may be phonologically optimizing: allomorph selection complies with the language phonotactics. However this is not always the case. A counterexample often discussed in the literature is Haitian determiner a/la. This paper further investigates Haitian by focusing on a PCSA pattern in Northern H...
Grammont’s (1914) influential Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Later works have shown that schwa presence is also sensitive to the nature of the consonants involved, at least at the word and phrase levels. However the LTC is still generally cons...
Cross-linguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible, (ii) languages may prioritize these requirements differently, and (iii) probability distributions for...
Grammont's Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Although schwa presence has been shown to be sensitive not only to cluster size but also to the nature of consonants in post-lexical phonology, the LTC is still considered as accurate to describe schwa...
The classical constraints used in phonological theory apply to a single candidate at a time. Yet, some proposals in the phonological literature have enriched the classical constraint toolkit with constraints that instead apply to multiple candidates simultaneously. For instance, Dispersion Theory (Flemming 2002, 2004, 2008) adopts distinctiveness c...
In a language, suffix cohesion refers to the fact that suffixed words behave phonologically as simple or complex units depending on the suffix they are built with. This article uncovers a previously undescribed pattern of suffix cohesion in French, where words suffixed with vowel-and glide-initial suffixes behave phonologically like simple units (e...
Classical phonological constraints apply to individual candidates. Yet, some authors have proposed constraints that instead apply to sets of candidates, such as distinctiveness constraints (Flemming 2002) and Optimal Paradigm faithfulness constraints (McCarthy 2005). As a consequence, the classical constraints need to be ''lifted'' to sets by summi...
Some languages allow tense and lax vowels to contrast before word-final consonants but not word-finally, where only tense vowels are permitted. What is the motivation for this pattern? This paper proposes that the loss of vowel-duration contrasts in word-final positions is a phonetic precursor to word-final tensing. In languages where tense and lax...
French liaison consonants are challenging for phonological theory because they pattern ambiguously between word-initial and word-final consonants. In recent works, these facts have been used to motivate different underlying representations for liaison consonants and non-liaison consonants. This paper argues that this move is not necessary. The grad...
Crosslinguistic generalizations about grammatical contexts favoring syncretism often have an implicational form. This paper shows that this is expected if (i) morphological paradigms are required to be both as small and as unambiguous as possible and languages may prioritize
these requirements differently and (ii) probability distributions for gram...
French liaison consonants are challenging for phonological theory because they pattern ambiguously between word-initial and word-final consonants. In recent works, these facts have been used to motivate different underlying representations for liaison consonants and non-liaison consonants. This paper argues that this move is not necessary. The grad...
This paper proposes that closed syllable laxing and open syllable tensing of non-low vowels are motivated by conflicting strategies of contrast enhancement in vowel–consonant sequences. Laxing enhances the distinctiveness of consonant contrasts by allowing for more distinct VC formant transitions, in particular in sequences involving a non-low vowe...
The Calibrated Error-Driven Ranking Algorithm (CEDRA; Magri 2012 ) is shown to fail on two test cases of phonologically conditioned variation from Boersma and Hayes 2001 . The failure of the CEDRA raises a serious unsolved challenge for learnability research in stochastic Optimality Theory, because the CEDRA itself was proposed to repair a learnabi...
![Figure 1 shows the perceptibility of [l] and [ ] across the six...](profile/Benjamin-Storme/publication/328383520/figure/fig1/AS:684137610489856@1540122525111/shows-the-perceptibility-of-l-and-across-the-six-segmental-contexts-in-the_Q320.jpg)
Haitian, a French-lexifier creole with a Gbe substrate, shows an asymmetry in the way it has adapted French liquids: the French lateral was maintained in postvocalic coda position in Haitian, but the French rhotic was systematically deleted in this position. This paper presents the results of a perception study showing that the lateral is generally...
Phonologically-derived environment effects (henceforth, PDEEs) describe patterns where a phonological process P applies only if accompanied by another phonological process P’. This paper proposed that PDEEs follow from the hypothesis that the input-output distance is perceived logarithmically: this predicts that a feature change may be less salient...
This paper reports the results of two experiments on the acoustics of French mid vowels in a variety in which close-mid vowels ([e], [ø], [o]) occur in open syllables and open-mid vowels ([ɛ], [oe], [ɔ]) in closed syllables, according to the 'loi de position'. Open-mid allophones have consistently higher F1 realizations and more central F2 realizat...
In Southern French, mid vowels are lowered in open syllables before schwa and in closed syllables. I propose that mid-vowel lowering is a strategy to enhance the perceptibility of a following consonant lacking good release cues. Open syllables followed by schwa behave like closed syllables and not like open syllables followed by a full vowel becaus...
Closed-syllable vowel laxing describes the cross-linguistic tendency for high and mid vowels to have higher F1 values and more central F2 values in closed than in open syllables. This pattern is often analyzed as resulting from vowel shortening in closed syllables. However, vowel undershoot does not generally result in an increase of F1 for mid vow...
This paper tests a hypothesis about the perception of consonants under repetition. In the Indo-European languages, stop-sonorant-initial roots reduplicate by copying C1: pa-plana (schematic); however, other cluster types, including stop-stop-initial roots, display different behaviors: e.g. pta-ptana (cluster-copying), ta-ptana (C2-copying), a-ptana...
This dissertation claims that allowing perceptual factors to play a role in phonology helps make some progress on the understanding of two challenging phenomena: closed-syllable vowel laxing (CSVL), i.e. the tendency for vowels to be lowered and centralized before word-final and preobstruent consonants, and phonologically-derived environment effect...
This study examines the adaptation of French vowels in Vietnamese focusing on adaptation patterns that seem to defy a straightforward analysis based on native phonotactic restrictions or comparison of phonetic input-output similarity. A proper analysis requires reference to knowledge of the input language phonology. In the first case study, we obse...
The "synoptic method" applied to the interpretation of the Létôon
Trilingual has been of much value, since it allowed scholars to make
sense of a large part of the Lycian version by using the parallel Greek
text. However, this method may sometimes also have been misleading,
particularly when it comes to the first sentence of the two texts, whose
sy...
This paper concerns the reference to characters and places in “L’Occupation des sols”. These two types of referent are taken into account in the first part of the article which is devoted to the first two paragraphs of the text wherein are introduced the major characters and the places where they live. The second and third parts of the paper respec...
Résumé Cet article s’appuie sur un exemple tiré de Quinte-Curce pour montrer que les séquences du type Sicilia amissa ou Ab urbe condita ne sont ni des syntagmes nominaux, ni des « constructions à participe dominant », mais des propositions subordonnées.
In this paper, the author will show, using an example from Curtius, that strings like Sicilia amissa or Ab urbe condita are neither nominal phrases nor "Dominant Participle Constructions", but embedded clauses.
