Reconsidering the mid-vowel system of Parisian French:

The French mid vowel system exhibits a complex marginal phonological contrast. The distributions of three pairs of vowels (/e, ɛ/; /o, ɔ/; /ø, œ/) are neither completely contrastive nor allophonic, and their heights vary, leading to overlapping phonetic realizations. This paper explores the phonetic and phonological factors that determine mid vowel height in Parisian French. We especially explore the relative contributions of phonological grammar, including the tension between contrast maintenance and positional neutralization based on syllable structure alongside the phonetic factor of vowel duration. Results are formalized in Maximum Entropy Grammar (Goldwater & Johnson 2003) with constraint scaling (Coetzee & Kawahara 2013) to model the interplay of phonetics and phonology. We find that speakers of Parisian French do tend to realize these vowels more faithfully than in varieties in which the loi de position is consistently productive, but realizations are still highly variable, and although an effect of duration was observed, we find that vowel length may not play a role in helping speakers distinguish high- and low-mid vowels.