Le statut des voyelles nasales en Créole haïtien

Le statut des voyelles nasales en Créole haïtien Article

Cadely, JR. (2002). Le statut des voyelles nasales en Créole haïtien . Lingua, 112(6), 435-464. 10.1016/S0024-3841(01)00055-9

This paper examines the phonological status of nasal vowels in Haitian Creole. We propose to represent these elements in the lexicon by a sequence oral vowel/floating nasal consonant. The postulating of such a floating segment allows us to evaluate two rules of nasalization: a regressive rule of nasalization that takes place within a morpheme and a progressive rule that occurs across a morpheme boundary. It is shown that these rules apply in very few cases and processes of nasalization/free variation/non-nasalization occur in the speech of the same speaker. We assume that the unstable nature of the phenomenon of nasalization is due to a phenomenon of linguistic change toward nasalization. The floating nature of the nasal element accounts, from a theoretical standpoint, for both the process of linguistic change and the unpredictible nature of nasal assimilation. The description proceeds within the framework of Principles and Parameters. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.