Plusieurs observateurs ont noté que le français québécois faisait en réalisation phonétique un plus grand usage de la durée vocalique que le français standard, par exemple, et surtout qu’il utilise la diphtongaison comme mode de réalisation privilégié de la durée dans certains contextes. La présente étude se propose d’en décrire les manifestations et d’en montrer la portée exacte à partir d’exemples pris essentiellement au français populaire de Montréal: au-delà de ses caractéristiques de détail particulières, c’est un bon représentant des grands traits phonétiques du français québécois, à l’exclusion des variétés d’origine acadienne qu’on peut rencontrer dans la Basse Matapédia et la Baie des Chaleurs, aux Iles de la Madeleine et sur la Basse Côte Nord.

With a few important exceptions, such as Berko (1958) and Derwing and Baker (1977), linguistic morphology has always been a descriptive science, content with investigating actually occurring words and extracting patterns from these. Consequently, it has suffered from a difficulty common to all descriptive endeavours, the fear of obscuring individual cases in abstracting to general principles. In turn, as a result of this deficiency, morphological theory has tended to expend its energy not on general patterns, but rather on single words: more thought has been devoted to the one English word sang than to most other topics. In an earlier paper, Aronoff and Schvaneveldt (1978) showed how an experimental technique borrowed from cognitive psychology, the Lexical Decision Task, could be used to investigate morphological patterns without focusing primary attention on single actually occurring words. The essence of the technique is to ask native speakers of a language (English in this case) whether certain stimuli are words of their language or not.

New words can be formed by adding suffixes to other words. Derived words formed in this way may be phonologically transparent with respect to their base word, or they may be opaque; monstrous is preserved in monstrous#ness but not in monstro+sity. The juncture between suffix and stem is either a word boundary (#) or a formative boundary (+), and while word boundary derivations are always transparent, formative boundary derivations usually result in stress shifting to a syllable other than the syllable which is stressed in the base word, vowel quality changing, etc.

It is always gratifying when one’s research elicits a response, particularly the detailed discussions by Singh (1980) and Morin (1980) of Walker (1978). It is also clear that both of these authors have contributed to our understanding of the process of epen-thesis in Old French, although I am not convinced that we may yet be confident of having dealt with the process in a fully satisfactory way. The following comments on Singh’s and Morin’s proposals may illustrate certain of the difficulties which remain.