OPTIMALITY AND OPACITY IN CANADIAN FRENCH VOWEL HARMONY: A VARIATIONIST ACCOUNT

Vowel harmony in Canadian French (CF) is a variable phenomenon whereby laxing of high vowels in closed final syllables spreads leftward to high vowels in open syllables. A case of derivational opacity occurs in words like [ ] ‘musical’ which show harmony even though the presumed harmony trigger, the stem-final [i], is tense and in a non-final open syllable on the surface. Poliquin (2006) argues that this case cannot be analyzed without a rule-based theory that includes a cyclic component, posing a challenge to parallelist theories of phonology such as Optimality Theory (OT). I argue that Poliquin’s exclusion of variation as an analytical tool limits him to proposing explanations based on the abnormality of variation. By allowing variation to play a more central role than that of constraint re-ranking, I can improve the descriptive adequacy of an OT account of CF vowel harmony and formulate quantitative, testable predictions about phonological theory. RÉLQ/QSJL Vol III, No 1, Automne/Fall 2008 2 Relations of more or less were . ruled out of linguistic thinking; a form or rule could only occur always, optionally, or never. The internal structure of variation was therefore removed from linguistic studies. (Labov, 1972, p. xiv) Vowel harmony in Canadian French (CF) is a variable phenomenon whereby laxing of high vowels in closed final syllables spreads leftward to high vowels in open syllables. It manifests two cases of counterbleeding opacity, which are also variable. In a 2006 dissertation, Gabriel Poliquin argues that neither transparent nor opaque cases of vowel harmony in Canadian French can be analyzed without a rule-based theory that includes a cyclic component. In his view, this poses an insoluble problem for parallelist theories of phonology such as Optimality Theory (OT). While Poliquin observes the variable nature of CF vowel harmony, his approach abstracts away from it through the assumption that each variant manifestation of harmony represents a separate grammar, and through the subsequent methodological decision to gather judgment data at the expense of observing production. I argue that Poliquin’s exclusion of variation as an analytical tool limits him to proposing explanations based on the abnormality of variation. By allowing variation to play a more central role, I can improve the descriptive adequacy of an Optimality Theoretic account of CF vowel harmony and formulate quantitative, testable predictions about phonological theory. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I summarize Poliquin’s account of CF vowel harmony, focusing on those facts that seem to lie outside the reach of OT. Second, I identify the major approaches that have been taken to incorporate variation more integrally into phonological theory, and show how Poliquin’s work generally disregards these. Third, I apply a sociolinguistic perspective on variation to the CF data that involves (1) showing how floating and crucially unranked constraints make realistic quantitative predictions about attested harmony patterns; (2) proposing a constraint banning unlicensed harmony, based on the observation that the process triggering variable harmony is itself variable; and (3) positing output-to-output faithfulness to more than one variant. In addition, I show that an OT account makes different quantitative predictions about the relative frequencies of each variant than Poliquin’s rule-based account, suggesting that the relative merits of the two accounts are testable with production data. Vowel harmony in Canadian French In Canadian French, laxing of high vowels /i, u, y/ to [ ] is extremely common in closed syllables. Lax high vowels can also variably occur in open syllables due to the leftward spreading of closed syllable laxing. Such harmony may affect only the adjacent RÉLQ/QSJL Vol III, No 1, Automne/Fall 2008 3 high vowel, only the leftmost high vowel, or all high vowels. In three-syllable words, all logically possible harmony patterns are therefore attested. When it comes to words with four high vowels, however, Poliquin finds in a judgment task that his twelve informants only accept four of eight logically possible patterns (2006, p. 10). Table 1. Vowel harmony patterns in tetrasyllabics 4 No harmony [ ] Adjacent non-iterative harmony [ ] Non-local harmony [ ] Across-the-board harmony [ ] Not accepted *[ ], *[ ], *[ ],