French ‘Schwa’ Deletion in Natural Generative Phonology

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of french schea deletion where, in agreemant with some basic principles of natural Generative Phonology, all rules are obligatory and not extrinsically ordered. This analysis is at variance with Dell's (1973) treatmant. It is contended that even if, as suggested by Rudes (1976), marking each phonological rule for applying only within a certain tempo can eliminate from the phonological component true optional rules, a certain amount of optionality must still be allowed within a rule. Furthermore, the nature of French schwa deletion forces us to reject rudes' model where the output of a tempo is the input to the next faster one.