DESCRIPTORS Foreign Countries; *French; Language Research;

An analysis of high vowel variation in Quebec French shows that the phenomenon can generally be accounted for in terms of stress and syllabic closure. However, it is also proposed that by positing underlying lax high vowels in the language, a more insightful analysis is achieved, suggesting that a process of high vowel tensing is occurring instead. This accounts for several facts that would otherwise appear to be highly implausible, e.g., laxed vowels in stressed closed syllables and lax vowels in open syllables in reduplicated forms. More generally, it is shown that in derivational affixation there is no independent motivation for morphological levels in French, and that an affixation process resembling level ordering is explicable in terms of extrametricality. In support of extrametricality, evidence from the differing behavior of two forms of the same suffix is presented, suggesting that this difference is phonological, not morphological. The discussion has implications for the question of levels in lexical phonology. with the evidence suggesting that French may have only one lexical level. Further research examining inflectional affixation and compounding is recommended to resolve the question more definitively. (MSE) ***********w*W**W**** * ****** * ****************lek************************ Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the pest that can be made from the original document