A descriptive account of the Quebec French diphthong<scp>fête</scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diphthongization has a long history in Quebec French. In this variety, lengthened vowels have the potential to be diphthongized. However, one vowel stands out, as it is always long and seems particularly inclined to be diphthongal: the fête vowel. While it has been much studied over the years, some uncertainties remain in the literature, especially whether length or quality primarily distinguishes it and which phonetic transcription appropriately reflects the way Quebec French speakers pronounce it today. This study addresses these issues by drawing a parallel between acoustic properties of the fête vowel and those of other vowels produced in similar consonantal contexts by 52 native speakers of Quebec French. After analyzing 8866 tokens, we present a descriptive account of their relative duration, location in F1/F2 planes and spectral changes. The results show that fête is, in fact, acoustically distinct, but more in terms of the spectral changes that occur than its duration. Its first two formants extensively shift between 25% and 75% of its duration, with a substantial F2 increase and F1 decrease. In F1/F2 planes, fête has onset values similar to /a/ and offset values similar to /ɛ/. Therefore, we argue that the two most commonly used phonological transcriptions for this singular vowel, /ɜ/ and /ɛː/, present some problems and do not capture its characterizing features. Drawing on our results and the IPA vowel chart, we suggest a more accurate symbol.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".