French Vowels

The purpose of this research is to examine the question of whether French vowels are underlyingly nasal or underlyingly nonnasalized. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal elements of the issue as presented by Bernard Tranel, and then to discuss the basis for his view that the question is best answered by means of a method of analysis he calls concrete generative phonology. The research will also point toward a conclusion that suggests that Tranel's approach to analyzing nasalized French vowels takes into account the concomitant evolution of what might be called the language's phonemic or phonetic representations, along with its lexical presentations of vocabulary, context, and dialect variations. Additionally, as appropriate, reference will be made to the fact that the method by which French vowels are analyzed and evaluated as underlyingly nasalized or nonnasalized is as important as the determination of whether or not such nasalization is underlying.

Tranel devotes a good deal of attention to showing that, if vowels in French are underlyingly nasal, they are not so for the reasons set forth by other analysts who are attempting, as he is, to explain the structure and rationale of French vowel sounds, but who are using methods he deems inadequate to the task. He is concerned to make a case for the method he uses to explain why and how patterns of vowel nasalization emerge in French. On the whole, he appears to take the view that standard methods for

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ervation. The abstract approach, according to Tranel, fails to account for the reason that vowels in words of like surface construction are sometimes nasalized and other times not. The following difference of presentation (60) is typical of illustrations used by Tranel, who cites instances of nasalized and nonnasalized vowels at the beginning, within, and at the end of words: innombrable [innobrabl] 'innumberable' innommable [innomabl] 'horrible' Tranel sums up this argument by saying that "the abstract generative treatment of French nasal vowels cannot account for all occurrences of nasal vowels and that it cannot account for all cases where vowel nasalization does not take place" (70). To put it another way, the contingencies of the language as it is learned, spoken, and modified in general use cannot be accounted for if highly prescriptive constructions are put on words that have similar lexical representations but that may have dramatically different meanings and rootword forms and sources. Tranel's solution is to assert a lexical basis for the nasality of French vowels. He asserts that the problems associated with an inability to predict nasalization "are eliminated in an analysis that recogni

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