<i>Les Normes de prononciation du français: une étude perceptive panfrancophone</i> . Par Marc Chalier <i>Les Normes de prononciation du français: une étude perceptive panfrancophone</i> . Par ChalierMarc. (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 454.) Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. xxix + 513 pp., ill.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Uniquely among the global languages, French is assumed to have a monocentric pronunciation norm, based on the usage of Paris. In the opening chapter of this volume, Marc Chalier challenges this perception and asks whether endogenous norms have emerged outside France. After setting out the normative background in Chapter 2 and presenting his methodology in Chapter 3, the author addresses this question by comparing Paris with two peripheral francophone zones (French-speaking Switzerland and Quebec) from three perspectives, examined in Chapters 4 to 6. The first of these (‘Représentations et attitudes’) reports questionnaire responses, from a representative non-specialist panel in each geographical area, to questions relating to perceptions of ‘correct’ French pronunciation. For Parisian informants, the norm is viewed in centre–periphery terms within France, with Paris, then Tours, and finally a general ‘Nord de la France’ seen as a model. Away from Paris, Canadian respondents showed greater acceptance of an endocentric norm than their Swiss counterparts. All three panels identified broadcast news presenters as representatives of the spoken norm, and it is to these that the author turns in Chapter 5 (‘Productions’). Twenty radio or television journalists in each site were asked to read aloud the stimulus text from the Phonologie du français contemporain project and a separate word list, their production then being subjected to phonetic analysis with respect to a number of locally variable vowel oppositions. Results from Paris presented rather a mixed picture. Here, traditional normative oppositions such as /a/–/α/, or /ε/–/e/ in open syllables were found to be better maintained in word-list style than in the reading passage, and in some cases appeared to be lexically conditioned, with /ε/–/e/ for example being more consistently realized for the pair épais–épée than for étaient–été. While the Swiss informants showed some adherence to local norms, there was considerable internal variability and evidence of a more general shift towards an exocentric français de référence. Much stronger support for an overt endocentric norm was evident in Quebec, where no fewer than eight of the nine identified local phonological features were found to be regularly produced by Radio Canada news reporters. In Chapter 6 (‘Perceptions’), non-specialist panels were asked to evaluate these recordings, focusing on the ‘correctness’ or otherwise of these same local features, and their suitability for news broadcasting or teaching of French to non-natives. For Paris, something of a disjunction emerged between representation of the norm and actual production: informants — particularly those with high levels of education — positively evaluated maintenance of traditional prescriptive oppositions which were not, in fact, consistently realized. Of the two peripheral francophone communities, Quebec again proved far more ready to embrace the local norm as ‘correct’. The author concludes that French is subject to a ‘tendance bicentrique’ (p. 445), favouring separate European and Canadian pronunciation norms. This volume is an impressive piece of research, and is written with admirable clarity. My one reservation is that its presentation mirrors rather too closely the doctoral thesis on which it is based. A more economical structure might have reduced the length of the volume by about a third, and lent sharper focus to its interesting and important findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.004 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".