Feet without stress: high vowel deletion in Québec French

Abstract This article investigates whether high vowel deletion (HVD) in Québec French (QF) is conditioned by prosodic structure. In Prosodic Phonology, prosodic constituents are typically assumed to be universal. However, the universality of certain constituents, such as the foot, has been questioned for languages like French, where prominence is obligatory only at the phrase level. We probe this issue by analysing HVD, a lenition process that is sensitive to prominence. We conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 examined the role of phrasal tone profile in HVD, while Experiment 2 examined whether word-internal constituency affects HVD. The results show that, while tone profile does not affect HVD, the process is preferred in dependent positions of iambic feet in even-parity forms. Odd-parity forms show no preference regarding HVD, suggesting that even- and odd-parity forms are parsed differently in QF.