Final devoicing of fricatives in French: Studying variation in large-scale corpora with automatic alignment
Résumé
This study quantifies “final devoicing” (FD) in largescale corpora of Standard French via automatic alignment with pronunciation variants. We use corpora of different speech styles, ESTER (journalistic speech) and NCCFr (conversation between friends), to compare the rates of devoicing and voicing of word-final fricatives as a function of the following context (voiceless obstruent, voiced obstruent, sonorant, vowel and pause). Three categories emerge: before obstruents, word-final fricatives undergo laryngeal assimilation (arrive[f] tôt); before vowels and sonorants, only little variation is found; before pause, there is a high rate of devoicing (trouve[f] ##) and only negligible voicing. This last point shows
that French features FD. This finding, in accordance with the typology and phonetic studies, extends previous small-scale investigations on regional varieties of the language to large corpora of Standard French. The FD effect is reinforced in conversational speech, and is stronger in labial than in alveolar and postalveolar fricatives.