French Phonology - Glides and Diphthongs

Glides and Diphthongs

The glides, and appear in syllable onsets, immediately followed by a full vowel. In many cases they alternate systematically with their vowel counterparts, and, for example in the following pairs of verb forms:

nie ; nier ('deny')

loue ; louer ('rent')

tue ; tuer ('kill')

The glides in these examples can be analyzed as the result of a glide formation process that turns an underlying high vowel into a glide when followed by another vowel: e.g. /nie/ → .

This process is usually blocked after a complex onset of the form obstruent + liquid (that is, a stop or a fricative followed by /l/ or /ʁ/). For example, while the pair loue/louer shows an alternation between and, the same suffix added to cloue, a word with a complex onset, does not trigger the glide formation: clouer ('to nail') Some sequences of glide + vowel can be found after obstruent-liquid onsets, however. The main examples are, as in pluie ('rain'), and . Such data can be dealt with in different ways, for example by adding appropriate contextual conditions to the glide formation rule, or by assuming that the phonemic inventory of French includes underlying glides, or rising diphthongs like /ɥi/ and /wa/.

Glide formation normally does not occur across morpheme boundaries in compounds like semi-aride ('semi-arid'). However, in colloquial registers, glide formation can be observed across morpheme or word boundaries: si elle ('if she') can be pronounced just like ciel ('sky'), or tu as ('you have') like tua (' killed').

The glide can also occur in syllable coda position, after a vowel, as in soleil ('sun'). Here again, one can formulate a derivation from an underlying full vowel /i/, but this analysis is not always adequate, given the existence of possible minimal pairs like pays ('country') / paye ('paycheck') and abbaye ('abbey') / abeille ('bee'). Schane (1968) proposes an abstract analysis deriving postvocalic from an underlying lateral by palatalization and glide conversion (/li/ → /ʎ/ → /j/).