Department of French and Italian

F576 introduces French phonology from a sociolinguistic perspective, exploring the major controversies of 20th century phonological analysis and their evolution into current theoretical frameworks. We will focus on two types of phonological models (rule-based and constraint-based) and discuss models of segmental representation (features, trees). Over the course of the semester, we will examine well-known French sound-system phenomena such as latent final consonants, e ‘muet’, nasal vowels, h-aspiré, and prosodic structure.