| Abstract | Much of the phonological literature shows little concern for recent phonetic data. Even in a provocative overview of Jakobsonian phonology (Jackobson and Waugh, 1979) that does give much attention to recent phonetic research, the latter is not exploited very convincingly in defining certain distinctive features. A case in point is the notorious French chestnut embodied in vous la jetez vs. vous l’achetez, a pair of expressions traditionally said to be distinguished by a voicing feature in the palatal fricatives, which appear here as initial elements in consonant clusters with /t/. It is reported, however, that the /z/ of jetez is devoiced through assimilation to the following /t/, and it is argued that a feature of ‘fortisness’ or ‘tensity’ is therefore needed. We have tested two hypotheses: (1) Such pairs are likely to be distinguished in production and perception. (2) When they are distinguished, the phonetic basis is glottal adduction vs. abduction. Readings by native speakers of standard French of written sentences terminating in la jeter and l’acheter were collected and those tokens in which the terminal items were pronounced as disyllables were presented to French listeners for identification. Their responses suggest instability of the distinction with a perceptual bias toward /f/, thus largely negating the first hypothesis. Insofar as the distinction is maintained, spectrographic analysis and perceptual tests involving the manipulation of /z/ and /f/ noise segments do not argue against a hypothesis of laryngeal control. |
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