Zsuzsanna Fagyal

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · Department of French and Italian

Excerpt Papers in this Special Issue fill a gap in French sociolinguistics by providing a coherent and yet diverse sample of empirical studies on a variety of structural aspects of French digital media. Collectively, their thematic focus reflects a traditional framing of language variation, well known from variationist sociolinguistics, correlating...

In this paper we review current findings in the inter-disciplinary field of socio-phonetics, focusing on fieldwork-and corpus-based analyses of speaker-and group-specific phonetic and phonological variation in selected Romance languages. We show how multiple sources of allophonic variation represent a rich potential for the expression of social-ind...

We present the results of a forced-choice gating experiment to test the accuracy of same- and crossdialectal perception of phonemic nasal vowel contrasts in two dialects of French. We found that contrasts were identified with high accuracy, but differences in the phonetic realizations of vowels involved in ongoing chain shifts lead to confusion bet...

Nahon Peter, Gascon et français chez les Israélites d’Aquitaine : documents et inventaire lexical. (Travaux de lexicographie, 2.) Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2018, 441 pp. 978 2 406 07296 6 (broché), 978 2 406 07297 3 (relié) - Zsuzsanna Fagyal

This article presents the results of a corpus study of prosodic rhythm in the urban vernaculars of 24 female and male adolescents featured in the MPF corpus (Gardner-Chloros et al., 2014). Using canonical rhythm metrics, among them the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI), we show that there is no clear effect of gender and only a small eff...

Miklós Kontra , Miklós Németh , & Balázs Sinkovics (eds.), Elmélet és empíria a szociolingvisztikában [Theory and empiricism in sociolinguistics]. Budapest: Gondolat, 2013. Pp. 564. Pb. HUF3,825; $14. - Volume 46 Issue 2 - Zsuzsanna Fagyal

Les français parlés en milieux minoritaires au Canada sont probablement les français vernaculaires les plus étudiés en sociolinguistique francophone. L’étude comparée des locutions adverbiales de restriction rien que/juste/seulement/seulement que/ne que de Mougeon, Hallion, Bigot, et Papen publiée dans ce volume s'inscrit dans une longue tradition...

We analyze and extend a recently proposed model of linguistic diffusion in social networks, to analytically derive time to convergence, and to account for the innovation phase of lexical dynamics in networks. Our new model, the degree-biased voter model with innovation, shows that the probability of existence of a norm is inversely related to innov...

Sociolinguistic studies have demonstrated that centrally-connected and peripheral members of social networks can both propel and impede the spread of linguistic innovations. We use agent-based computer simulations to investigate the dynamic properties of these network roles in a large social influence network, in which diffusion is modeled as the p...

We simulate the dynamics of diffusion and establishment of norms, variants adopted by the majority of agents, in a large social influence network with scale-free small-world properties. Diffusion is modeled as the probabilistic uptake of one of several competing variants by agents of unequal social standing. We find that novel variants diffuse foll...

This paper argues that while single ja / 'yes' is typically analyzed as an acknowledgement token, confirmation marker, or continuer, a doubled ja, either produced as ^jaja. or ja^ja., cannot be considered a more intense version of the same action. Moreover, the two forms jaja. and ja^ja. systematically accomplish separate interactional goals. Both...

Cet article cherche à illustrer, dans la parole de deux adolescents enregistrés dans un contexte d’énumération et utilisant surtout une prosodie typique au français de référence, l’alternance stylistique entre plusieurs contours marqués et non marqués pragmatiquement dans des buts interactionnels précis. Dans les cas illustrés dans l’article, il s’...

This paper examines acoustic aspects of vowel harmony (VH), understood as regressive vowel-to-vowel assimilation, in two regional varieties of French in six speakers' productions of 107 disyllabic word pairs. In each word pair, the word-initial vowel (V1) was phonemically either /e/ or /o/, and the word-final stressed vowel (V2) alternated between...

Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine, Le discours en interaction, Collection U, Lettres, Linguistique. Paris: Armand Colin, 2005, 365 pp. 2 200 26513 1 - - Volume 16 Issue 2 - Zsuzsanna Fagyal

This paper shows that jaja 'yes yes' sequences in German conversations carry two distinct interactional meanings cued by their intonation and by their sequential placement. Combined Conversation Analytic (CA) and Intonation Phonological analyses indicate that jaja tokens uttered with H* L-% intonation (following GToBI (8)) convey that the previous...

French is used on every continent, spoken not only in France but also in Belgium, Switzerland, North America, the Caribbean, Polynesia and Africa. This is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the structure of French, suitable for those with little prior knowledge of linguistics or of the French Language. It clearly introduces the language's hist...

1. The speech community La Courneuve, a town of about thirty-five thousand people, is one of the poorest peripheral urban areas of the French capital. Residents of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis where the town is located (Figure 1) had the lowest annual income of all areas of greater Paris in 1990 (Soulignac, 1993), a trend which, during the n...

This study is concerned with the perceptual relevance of regressive vowel harmony in French. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment showed that acoustic variations in a non-final vowel depending on the final vowel can be detected by listeners. The second experiment revealed that vowel harmony can facilitate the identification of the f...

This study investigates a prosodic pattern in the vernacular of the working-class Parisian French youth known as 'lengthening of the penultimate syllable'. Eighty-five middle-school students from a predominantly immigrant suburb near Paris were recorded in a picture-naming task during breaks and after school. Results for five words uttered by twelv...

This paper presents the preliminary results of an acoustic study, and a review of previous work on vowel harmony in French. It shows that harmony, initially regarded as regular sound change, is considered an optional constraint on the distribution of mid vowels. Acoustic evidence of anticipatory assimilation of pretonic mid vowels to tonic high and...

This paper shows that utterance-medial parentheticals elicited in controlled conditions in French have a typical tonal template, in which pitch is scaled down to some extent in non-intonational phrase-final syllables. Downscaling is implemented primarily as pitch register lowering, while pitch range compression seems speaker-dependent. Results also...

This paper presents preliminary acoustic evidence for the merger of [e] and [E] in word-final open syllables in minimal pairs recorded in Labovian-type sociolinguistic interviews from three native speakers of French living in Paris. Although the [e]-[E] distinction in Île-de-France is one of the most studied vowel contrasts in French, variations we...

This paper shows that in the 17th century various attempts were made to build fully automatic speaking devices resembling those exhibited in the late 18th century France and Germany. Through the analysis of writings by well-known 17th century scientists, and a document hitherto unknown in the history of phonetics and speech synthesis, an excerpt fr...

The use of increased duration to signal prosodic boundaries has been demonstrated for many languages. However, a number of studies have claimed that languages in which length is phonemic do not have pre-boundary lengthening or the amount of lengthening at boundaries is not perceptually relevant . We show that for Hungarian, a language with phonemic...

Bien que l'intonation soit consideree comme un phenomene extremement variable en parole spontanee, certains contours intonatifs varient tres peu d'un contexte a l'autre. Ces contours, dits stylises, ou appeles cliches melodiques, s'attachent directement a certaines situations de parole. Contrairement a d'autres contours, ils semblent avoir des inte...

This paper reports on an innovative prosodic pattern in the vernacular of adolescents recorded in a middle school of La Courneuve, a predominantly immigrant working-class suburb North of Paris. Speech data were gathered in six fieldwork sessions of two to six weeks between 2000 and 2002. After two sessions devoted to the establishment of contact an...

It has been claimed that in Parisian French high and mid front vowels in utterance-final open syllables are often devoiced and pronounced with a fricative-like noise. We investigated this phenomenon in spontaneous and read speech samples recorded from three generations of Parisian French speakers. Acoustic measurements indicate that the majority of...

In French, the quality of mid vowels in non-final syllables is known to show a greater variability than in final syllables, and this variability has been ascribed to several phonological factors. One major factor is syllable structure: mid vowels tend to be close-mid in open syllables and open-mid in closed syllables, although this rule is subject...