Law of three consonants in French phonology

Grammont's (1914) influential Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Later works have shown that schwa presence is also sensitive to the nature of the consonants involved, at least at the word and phrase levels. However the LTC is still generally considered as accurate under its original formulation to describe schwa-zero alternations at the stem level. The goal of the paper is to test whether the LTC should be relaxed even in this context. The paper presents two studies using judgment data to compare the behavior of schwa in derived words (stem-level phonology) and in inflected words (word-level phonology). The results of the two studies show that the nature of consonants involved in the CC_C sequence plays a role at both stem and word levels. Moreover, the same phonotactic asymmetries among consonant clusters are found in both contexts. The data therefore support a weaker version of the stem-level vs. word-level divide than what is usually assumed for French. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a modeling study showing that a constraint-based grammar with the same phonotactic constraints across stem- and word-level phonologies provides a better fit to the judgment data from Study 1 and Study 2 than a grammar with different phononotactic constraints in the two morphosyntactic domains. The paper also replicates a number of earlier findings on the role of morphosyntactic domains, clash avoidance, and dialectal variation in schwa-zero alternations.

Grammont于1914年提出的具有深远影响的“三辅音法则”（LTC）指出，法语中的元音省音在任意CC_C序列中均为必然发音，以规避三辅音连缀现象。后续研究业已表明，元音省音的存在亦对所涉辅音的性质敏感，至少在词和短语层面如此。然而，在原始公式的语境下，LTC依然被广泛认为在描述词根层面的元音省音交替时具有准确性。该论文旨在探讨LTC是否即使在词根层面也应放宽。论文通过两项研究，利用判断数据对比分析了派生词（词根层面音韵学）和屈折词（词层面音韵学）中元音省音的行为。两项研究的结果显示，所涉CC_C序列中辅音的性质在词根和词层面均发挥作用。此外，在两个语境中均发现了相同的辅音群音位不对称性。因此，数据支持了一种比通常对法语所假设的更弱的词根层面与词层面之间的区分。这一结论通过一项建模研究得到加强，该研究表明，在词根和词层面音韵学中具有相同音位约束的基于约束的语法比在两个形态句法领域中具有不同音位约束的语法更能拟合来自第1项和第2项研究的判断数据。论文还复制了关于形态句法领域、冲突规避和方言变体在元音省音交替中作用的一系列早期发现。