Publications
Journal articles
2025
- A new perspective on the development of Quebec French rhotic vowelsMassimo Lipari & Morgan SondereggerLaboratory Phonology, 2025
Quebec French is reportedly developing rhoticity, with low F3 resulting from a bunched or retroflexed tongue (like English /ɚ/), in some or all of the front mid rounded vowels /ø, œ, œ̃/. The source of this rare, understudied sound change is unclear from previous work: contact with English and contrast enhancement have been suggested, and phonologization of coarticulation is typologically plausible. We examine this issue, investigating the apparent time change in the F3 trajectories of the three vowels using generalized additive mixed models on a corpus of parliamentary speech (108 speakers from across Quebec). We observe rhoticity in /ø/ and /œ̃ /: men begin with low F3 in these vowels, and women show change in progress. Conversely, there is less clear evidence of change in /œ/. We suggest these findings are best explained by analyzing rhotacization as a two-phased change, originally due to borrowing and subsequently spreading through contrast enhancement. Rhoticity, we argue, is the combined product of intensive exposure to English (which led to frequent nonintegration of bunched/retroflex segments in loanwords) and an exceptionally large vowel inventory. It thus results from the unique interplay of social and phonological factors in Quebec French, which is consistent with such changes being cross-linguistically rare.
@article{lipari_sonderegger2025new, title = {A new perspective on the development of {{Quebec French}} rhotic vowels}, author = {Lipari, Massimo and Sonderegger, Morgan}, journal = {Laboratory Phonology}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.16995/labphon.11678}, language = {en}, }
E-book chapters
2025
- Functional Principal Components AnalysisMassimo LipariIn Morgan Sonderegger, Martón Sóskuthy, Massimo Lipari & Amanda Doucette, Advanced Quantitative Methods for Linguistic Data, version 0.2, 2025
@inebook{lipari25functional, title = {Functional Principal Components Analysis}, booktitle = {Advanced {{Quantitative Methods}} for {{Linguistic Data}}}, author = {Lipari, Massimo}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15942068}, bookauthor = {Sonderegger, Morgan and Sóskuthy, Martón and Lipari, Massimo and Doucette, Amanda}, version = {version 0.2}, language = {en}, }
Conference proceedings
Under review
- Les « données trouvées » et la variation phonétique en français québécoisMassimo Lipari, Peter Milne & Morgan SondereggerIn Les voies du français, Québec (Québec), Under review
Dans cette communication, nous décrivons une nouvelle ressource destinée à l’étude de la variation phonétique synchronique et diachronique en français québécois , le corpus ParlBleu. Inspiré du corpus AssNat (Milne 2014), dont il intègre le volet québécois, ce corpus est constitué à partir d’enregistrements des travaux de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec ayant fait l’objet d’un alignement forcé. Cette approche de mise en valeur de « données trouvées » (contenu audiovisuel divers découvrable sur Internet), jusqu’à présent relativement peu exploitée pour le français québécois, permet de contourner certains obstacles associés aux méthodes de collecte de données traditionnelles (e.g., corpus sociolinguistiques, expériences en laboratoire)—notamment, les importants investissements en temps et en ressources qu’elles nécessitent. À l’heure actuelle, 152 locutrices et locuteurs natifs du français québécois (67 femmes et 85 hommes) nés entre 1941 et 1992 sont représentés dans le corpus, qui totalise plus de 31 heures de données. Nous présentons également ici les résultats préliminaires d’une analyse acoustique semi-automatisée de plus de 300 000 exemplaires de voyelles tirées du corpus.
@inproceedings{lipari_etalunderreviewdonnees, title = {Les « données trouvées » et la variation phonétique en français québécois}, author = {Lipari, Massimo and Milne, Peter and Sonderegger, Morgan}, year = {Under review}, booktitle = {Les voies du français}, publisher = {Les Presses de l'Université Laval}, location = {Québec (Québec)}, language = {fr}, }
2023
- The emergence of rhotic vowels in Quebec French: a change from below?Massimo LipariIn Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2023
Quebec French is undergoing a rarely observed kind of sound change whereby the front mid rounded vowels become rhotic (produced with a bunched tongue or retroflex gesture resulting in low F3, like English /ɚ/). Previous work has suggested that this is a change from below—i.e., one which speakers are not conscious of and which is thus not socially marked. These previous studies, however, have not had the breadth to robustly demonstrate this finding throughout the entire speech community, and the extent of interspeaker variation (especially according to age, gender, and geographic origin) remains largely unknown. This study, which employs a sizeable corpus of parliamentary speech, adds to the documentation of the change, while directly examining the effects of the aforementioned predictors. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis of change from below (with some caveats), although additional data from new speakers is likely needed to draw any strong conclusions.
@inproceedings{lipari23emergence, title = {The emergence of rhotic vowels in {Quebec} {French}: a change from below?}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the {20th} {International} {Congress} of {Phonetic} {Sciences}}, publisher = {International Phonetic Association}, author = {Lipari, Massimo}, editor = {Skarnitzl, Radek and Volín, Jan}, year = {2023}, pages = {3740--3744}, language = {en}, } - The acoustics of borrowed /ɚ/ in Quebec FrenchMassimo LipariIn Canadian Acoustics, 2023
@inproceedings{lipari23acoustics, title = {The acoustics of borrowed /ɚ/ in {Quebec} {French}}, volume = {51}, issue = {3}, booktitle = {Canadian {Acoustics}}, publisher = {Canadian Acoustical Association}, author = {Lipari, Massimo}, year = {2023}, pages = {210--211}, language = {en}, }