Laurentian French Affrication in External Sandhi: The Facts, and a CVCV Analysis

Abstract

Affrication (also known as Assibilation) is recognized as one of the strongest and most reliable accent markers of Laurentian French, yet its behavior in external sandhi has received little attention. It is described in the literature as variable, optional, and even prohibited. In this article, we demonstrate that affrication between two words is mandatory, prohibited, or optional depending on the syntactic relationship between the words involved. Data comes from a pilot study of 35 native speakers of Laurentian French. We offer an analysis of these effects that considers both the syntactic (phases) and phonological (CVCV Phonology) modules of each derivation.