Douglas C. Walker

Douglas C. Walker, a Professor of French and Linguistics in the Department of French, Italian and Spanish at the University of Calgary, teaches French and general linguistics. He has authored An In...

French Sound Structure, with CD-ROM

Douglas C. Walker

French Sound Structure provides a comprehensive, detailed, and well-illustrated description of the pronunciation of Modern Standard French, incorporating comments on regional and social variation, on abbreviatory processes and Rword playS, and on certain historical phonological changes that continue to be reflected in the contemporary language. It is written in a way that presupposes little or no formal training in linguistics proper (other than some familiarity with phonetic notation, to which students of linguistics are normally exposed independently).


This work will be of interest to university students studying French and to students of linguistics in general. Others wishing to know more about the nature of the French language will also find the material useful, since pronunciation is rarely considered in any detail in general handbooks of French. The accompanying CD-ROM provides oral examples that are relevant to the linguistic material under study.


Table of Contents
1. The Object of Description
2. Key Descriptive and Theoretical Concepts
3. Basic Descriptive Units and Domains
4. Vowels and Semi-vowels
5. Consonants
6. Prosody

University of Calgary Press