Carnochan, Scott & Whitley's 'Prosodic analysis of French regular verbs'

This paper presents a Firthian Prosodic Analysis of the French verb. The original analysis was done by J. C. Carnochan, N. C. Scott and E. M. Whitley at SOAS in the early 1950s, and was presented at a departmental seminar in 1954. The paper is important for several reasons: it is one of the few extant pieces of work in which Eileen Whitley had a hand; it is the only documented prosodic analysis of a major Indo–European language carried out at SOAS by Firth's co–workers, and as such it has great historical value; and finally it portrays an important stage in the development of FPA. Our paper describes the history of the original manuscript and explains the phonological analysis it contains. Some comparison is made with a contemporaneous phonemic analysis of French.