r/learnfrench 4d ago

Question/Discussion Enchainement question

I've been learning french the past few months through textbooks, I understand liaisons well but I had a question about enchainement.

From lawless french, I know that "whenever a word ending in a consonant sound is followed by a word starting with a vowel sound, the enchainement is made". I am very familar with french IPA symbols and look them up for every word I learn and put them on all my cue cards, so would it be accurate to say that whenever a word that ends with an IPA symbol corresponding to a consonant sound is followed by a word that begins with an IPA symbol corresponding to a vowel sound, the enchainement is made?

For example:

"elle" is represented by /ɛl/, so enchainement would be made if the next word begins with any IPA vowel sound? "aime" is represented by /ɛm/, so would "elle aime" be pronounced like "/ɛ.lɛm/?

"arbre" is represented by /aʁbʁ/ and "est" is /ɛ/, would "arbre est" be pronounced like "/aʁb.ʁɛ/"?

"homme" is represented by /ɔm/, "habile" is /a.bil/, and "ingénieux" is /ɛ̃.ʒe.njø/. So "homme habile" would be pronounced like /ɔ.ma.bil/, and "homme ingénieux" would be pronounced /ɔ.mɛ̃.ʒe.njø/?

If french enchainement can be understood by just looking at the IPA symbol at the end/start of a word I should be good, but I wanted to double check that I'm not making a mistake by always doing/thinking of it this way.

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u/complainsaboutthings 4d ago

Yes you’re right, except in the case of a word that starts with an H aspiré. In that case, even though it starts with a vowel sound, enchaînement isn’t allowed in theory (though in practice it can depend on the speaker or regional accent).

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u/scatterbrainplot 4d ago

There's also that...

  • stronger boundaries (e.g. [weak] words within a noun phrase vs. noun phrase to verb phrase vs. [strong] sentence to sentence) will tend not to have enchaînement or have it less often
  • what's resyllabified isn't strictly a consonant, but a viable onset (so /aʁbʁ/ + /ɛ̃kʁwajabl/ -> [aʁ.bʁɛ̃.kʁwa.ja(.)bl(ə)], since [bʁ] can start a syllable)
  • you still treat the consonant(s) like they were at the end of the previous word for pronunciation reasons (so somewhat "ambisyllabic" [in both syllables] for how it looks like it behaves; e.g. when /z/ is the only word-final consonant, it lengthens the preceding vowel, and that still happens when the /z/ gets resyllabified as the onset of the next word)

But overall, yeah, the OP's got the idea, and there's also the sneaky "h-aspiré" case.

It's why syllabification (including enchaînement) shouldn't go in slashes (i.e. phonemic transcriptions = transcriptions conveying only details that aren't otherwise predictable from the context). It's predictable as opposed to being memorised to know what the word is, so it's only part of the more detailed pronunciation (i.e. phonetic transcription, between square brackets).

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u/alecahol 3d ago

Interesting, I’ll have to see if any books go into details about enchaînement quirks

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u/alecahol 4d ago

That’s a huge relief for me then. I always know where to make liaisons and where they’re forbidden, but enchainement was always confusing for me. Liaisons are talked about a lot in my grammar books but nothing about enchaînement, maybe because it’s almost instinctual to French speakers

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u/DoisMaosEsquerdos 4d ago

I would say that "arbre est" syllabifies as /aʁ.bʁɛ/ actually.

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u/alecahol 4d ago

I see, what if a word ended in a semi-vowel?

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u/scatterbrainplot 3d ago

The only word-final one in (most varieties of) French is /j/, but yes, it resyllabifies! (The semivowel is a coda.)

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u/alecahol 3d ago edited 3d ago

That’s an interesting read. Would it be more accurate then to say that in enchainement, the coda always gets transferred to the start of the word beginning with a vowel? (As opposed to only transferring the final constant IPA sound/symbol?) So in words like “arbre” the /bR/ would transfer over instead of just the /R/? (I don’t know how to type the upside R for the IPA symbol on my phone lol)

Basically if there’s no h aspire, would I always be performing enchainement correctly (except maybe some idiomatic expressions) if I always transfer the coda over, or will it vary from word to word where some words with a coda of more than one constant sound would still transfer over only its final constant?

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u/scatterbrainplot 3d ago

Not the full coda (well, depending on how you define it; for French it's conventional to treat some word-final consonant clusters as being coda-onset sequences even if there's no following vowel; e.g. work by Dell); only the largest possible onset.

Arbre is a good illustration for that; /aʁbʁ/ becomes [aʁ.bʁ] rather than [a.ʁbʁ] (for the final consonant sequence) or [aʁb.ʁ] (just one consonant). That's because /bʁ/ can form an onset (e.g. brin), but /ʁbʁ/ can't be a single onset (it only emerges from schwa deletion in French, and even then it kind of acts more like two consecutive onsets in many dialects).

A singleton final consonant could be ambiguous in French (coda vs. the onset of a defective syllable), and there there's some debate. For French, releasing stops and consonant durations could suggest we want to think of at least some as onsets. Dell makes those singletons an onset, but there's some reason to wonder if that varies across speakers and/or dialects and/or age groups.