Abstract High-vowel laxing in Laurentian French is notoriously variable and complex: while high-vowel tenseness is categorically predictable in final syllables, speakers seemingly apply distinct combinations of optional processes in non-final syllables (see, e.g., Dumas 1987 and Poliquin 2006). The current study investigates laxing in non-final syllables with two core objectives: (a) to determine which grammars individual speakers have acquired, and (b) to elucidate whether subgroups within the community have distinct grammars as suggested by Poliquin or instead these subgroups are superficial categorisations (e.g., emerging from a shared community with wide distributions of possible weightings for constraints). The results reveal that a larger number of superficially distinct individual grammars emerge than were proposed in existing literature, but that these patterns fall on a spectrum centred on a shared community grammar. They also provide new evidence for the importance of prosody in conditioning phonological processes in this variety of French.
Jeffrey Lamontagne (Wed,) studied this question.