Systems, Prosodies, and the Phonology of French: New Insights from a Case Study of the Clitic Pronouns

The preverbal clitic pronouns of French manifest in their phonology three phenomena which have exercised phonologists and variationists for many years: liaison, schwa or e-caduc, and variable (l). Hitherto these have been treated as separate phenomena, of which the clitics are sometimes invoked as instances (the main instance, in the case of (l)). This article, by contrast, takes the preverbal clitic pronoun system as a whole and applies some of the key constructs of Firthian Prosodic Analysis to its synchronic phonological analysis. Using a polysystemic approach, we present subsystems of pronouns and the structural and phonematic contrasts that characterize them. We show how these systems of contrasts and Firthian constructs such as the ‘prosody’ afford new, insightful ways of formalizing these phonological phenomena, which have the potential for broader application to the language. Our analysis is theoretical, but we demonstrate briefly how some of its testable predictions are confirmed by empirical findings in the existing literature, illustrating its potential to provide new insights and a more holistic framework for further analysis of these and other variable phonological features of French.