Roger Yates

Criminalizing protests about animal abuse. Recent Irish experience in global context

Supporters of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (2006) label as "terrorists" mainstream animal welfare corporations such as the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA). Animal advocates fear that conventional forms of protest, such as boycotts and street demonstrations, are being redefined within such legislation as potential "acts of terror." Meanwhile, in Ireland, peaceful grassroots animal rights campaigners have begun to be arrested and jailed for standing outside fur shops with an information table. Is Ireland next in line in terms of the apparent global criminalisation of animal advocacy?

) following a time, from the mid-1960s onwards, when British animal advocacy had "grown into a large-scale, well-publicised and theoretically informed social movement" (Beirne 2007: 65).

 2006). More particularly, I explore the view that the Irish state is keen to clamp down on relatively weak animal advocacy groups in order to prevent their development and expansion mirroring that of the British animal movement. Would such a clampdown serve as a deterrent to other protest groups and advocacy mobilisations in Ireland?

A leading Irish criminologist, Aogán Mulcahy, notes (2007: 120-121) that when researching issues such as crime, policing, and social control, the sociologists of crime focus on three things; levels and forms of crimes; how societiesparticularly the different aspects of the criminal justice systemrespond to crime and deviance; and they look with particular intensity at the nature of the criminalisation processes prevalent in a given society. They look, therefore, at how particular actions become defined as "crime;" how a behaviour is criminalised by identifying it as socially harmful; and how certain behaviour and activities become seen as something that warrants a "legally imposed sanction" (2007: 120). [For a historical account of criminalisation in Ireland which involves the treatment of nonhuman animals rather than protestors, see Beirne (2009: 27-33)].

Methodological note

 Tovey 2007; also see Lee 1993), I have taken steps to try to disguise the "voices" of the respondents who assisted in the production of this paper. I have not, for example, included long passages from any interviewees, or identified gender (or at least not always the correct gender identification) or their geographical location, since any of these details could reveal to others in social movements -and beyond -the identity of particular speakers.

For this qualitative research paper (see May 1993; Berg 2007; Matthews & Ross 2010), I contacted and corresponded with a number of grassroots animal advocates, in Ireland, Britain, mainland Europe, Australia and the US. I directly interviewed a few, conducted an informal "focus group," and had contact with people via social networking websites such as Facebook and via the technology of Skype. I also spoke with others not directly concerned with animal advocacy but with academia, other social movements, and political activism in Ireland.

Background

The Republic of Ireland, as self-stated by Cromwellian generals in the seventeenth century, and nowadays claimed to be the most deforested area in the European Community (Solnit 1998: 100), is heavily involved in animal use, for example, in the meat, dairy, and fishing industries, horse racing and breeding, fox hunting and "fisheries" interests, and greyhound racing, all of which enjoy substantial political support. Although there has been a complex and uneven shift in recent years from the agricultural to the service sector, and from the rural to the urban (Tovey 2007), Ireland"s main businesses remain agriculture-based with dairy products and "livestock" being major exports. [1] The dairy industry is particularly important in Ireland, as a "Strategic Development Plan for the Irish Dairy Processing Sector" makes clear: "The importance of the Irish dairy sector has long been recognised by successive Governments, who have been supportive in facilitating the development and expansion of the industry." [START_REF]OSCN 2011[END_REF] In Ireland, even dishes such as lobster and stews tend to feature dairy products, while the favourite Irish stout, Guinness, is not vegan or vegetarian due to the bladders of fishes being used in the production process. [START_REF]The Age[END_REF] Tovey (2007: 285) suggests that the statistics about social change relating to Irish agricultural workers "are complex and not easily interpreted." For example, there is evidence of contraction and decline in agriculture, along with "a complicated pattern of restructuring and reorganisation." Ireland has been subject to forces of industrialisation and urbanisation, but later than in most other countries of mainland Europe (Tovey & Share 2003: 42). Tovey (2007) says that, from the 1970s onwards, farming practices in Ireland have been to a large degree intensified, and have also become science-based, resulting in the development of larger farms (often known as "factory farms" in the animal advocacy movement) involved in "dairying, tillage, or cattle finishing" (2007: 285). In Ireland in 2003, research respondents said that they believed that "small farming is dying" (Kelly 2007: 94), seen as part of a process of rural decline and "depopulation, and a recognition of parental acquiescence in the departure of their children from the land " (2007: 95).

In terms of animal advocacy, and across the spectrum from "moderates" to "militants," and large and small mobilisations, most Irish groups and organisations are modelled on existing British ones. For example, the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ISPCA), a traditional animal welfare organisation founded in 1949, has "very close relations" with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty (RSPCA) in England and Wales, and with the Scottish counterpart, the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SSPCA), while Compassion in World Farming-Ireland, founded in 1992, is part of larger Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) organisation based in England.

The more "activist" groups, representing the grassroots organisations, such as the Alliance for Animal Rights (AFAR), founded in 1989, the Association of Hunt Saboteurs, formed in 1989, the National Animal Rights Association, formed in 2007, and ALiberation, formed in 2007, tend to be Irish versions of English grassroots organisations. The notable exception is the Animal Rights Action Network (ARAN), which was formed in 2000, and is modelled closely on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) in North America (although PeTA do have a fairly inactive British branch). These grassroots activist groups, again with the exception of ARAN, regularly publicise the direct action activities of groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), prisoner support groups, and are affiliated in some way to organisations such as Shut Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and the Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade (CAFT).

Compared with Britain and North America, the incidents of direct action in Ireland (currently known as "MDA" -Militant Direct Actionin the activist movement) have been few, sporadic, and low key. For example, there have been a series of attacks on circus billboards and circus direction signs over a number of years, and the spraying of slogans and locks glued, typically in relation to butchers and to fur shops. However, actions bound to be regarded as more serious by the Irish authorities have been carried out also, including releasing hundreds or thousands minks from mink farms, and attacking the vehicles of butchers, hunters, and shooters with paint stripper.

British animal activists who support legal and illegal direct action trace the serious clampdown on their activities to the formation of the Animal Rights National Index (ARNI) in the mid-1980s [START_REF] Webb | Animal liberation -by "any means necessary[END_REF][START_REF] Mann | From dusk 'til dawn: an insider's view of the growth of the animal liberation movement[END_REF]. This is seen as a response to increased militancy within the British activist community from the late 1970s onwardsnot only had the Animal Liberation Front, with its policies of not harming human or nonhuman animals, stepped up its animal rescue raids and its "economic sabotage" attacks, new pro-violence groups and organisations, such as the Hunt Retribution Squad, the Animal Rights Militia, and the Justice Department, emerged either in the 1980s or early 1990s, all declaring a willingness to harm "animal abusers" [START_REF] Gold | Animal century: a celebration of changing attitudes to animals[END_REF][START_REF] Stallwood | A personal view of direct cction[END_REF][START_REF] Webb | Animal liberation -by "any means necessary[END_REF]). Present-day activists in Britain are monitored by National Coordinator Domestic Extremism (NCDE), established in 2004, with describes its aims as that "of reducing, and where possible, removing the threat, criminality and public disorder associated with domestic extremism in the UK, and working with police forces to ensure the facilitation of peaceful, lawful protest." National Coordinator Domestic Extremism (NCDE) is "the national lead on domestic extremism, on behalf of ACPO [Association of Chief Police Officers of England, Wales and Northern Ireland] Terrorism and Allied Matters (TAM), for the UK." The NCDE is made up of three units working "collaboratively to coordinate the police response to domestic extremism: Intelligence -NPOIU (National Public Order Intelligence Unit); Investigation -NDET (National Domestic Extremism Team); Prevention -NETCU (National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit)." [4] (see figure 1.) Defining terms, the ACPO web documents state that, "Unlike terrorism, which is defined in the UK by the Terrorism Act 2000, there is no equivalent legal definition for domestic extremism. This is because the crimes committed by those considered a domestic extremist already exist in common law or statute," and that, "The term [domestic extremist] is generally used to describe the activity of individuals or groups carrying out criminal acts of direct action to further their protest campaign," and "Domestic extremism is most commonly associated with "single-issue" protests, such as animal rights, environmentalism, anti-globalisation or anti-GM crops." [5] The National Coordinator Domestic Extremism (NCDE) document states that the police support and are committed to facilitating peaceful protest but not the "tactics used by extremists" which include "public disorder offences, malicious letters and e-mails, blackmail, product contamination, damage to property and occasionally the use of improvised explosive devices." Stating that, "Domestic extremist campaigns rarely cause a danger to life," the document suggests that the campaigning is done to generate, "a climate of fear or a climate of hate."[5] British animal advocates and political activists have responded to the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (NETCU) with their own websites, such as "NETCUWATCH" [6] and "Fitwatch." [START_REF]Resisting and Monitoring Forward Intelligence Policing[END_REF] It is interesting to note that, although the ACPO web documents go out of their way carefully to define "extremist" and "terrorist," and concentrate on the former term, countermovement organisations and opponents of "animal rights" tend to always use the latter term. [START_REF] Shacwatch | [END_REF][START_REF] Wallace | [END_REF] Guither (1998), described an emerging "counterforce" to animal advocacy in the USA, one which involves, "animal interest groups, scientists and consumers," who often label animal advocacy as involved in extremism and terrorism, and describe the "critical difference between animal welfare and animal rights" (1998: 140).

In the US since 1990 there have been several attempts "by industry front groups, PR firms and conservative think-tanks…to associate environmental activism with terrorism." [START_REF] Sourcewatch | [END_REF] This resulted in the use of the term "ecoterrorism" -widely suggested to have coined by Ron Arnold of the "Wise Use" movement (see Arnold 1997)which "would be defined into law by draft legislation as the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act," proposing provisions to target those deemed to have "encouraged, assisted or financed offences under its extraordinarily broad definition of "terrorism."" Investigative journalist Karen Charman claims that the draft legislation would "effectively ban environmental and animal rights advocacy." [START_REF] Sourcewatch | [END_REF] Eventually, these characterisations of activist groups and social movements became reflected in attempts to enact legislation and in successful moves to create new laws. For example, in 2003 the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, supported by the US Sportsmen"s Alliance and ALEC -American Legislative Exchange Council, a group with connections with the private prison industry, came into force (Hall 2006: 48). Also in 2003, The Oklahoma Farm Animal, Crop, and Research Facilities Protection Act [START_REF] Oscn | The Oklahoma State Courts Network[END_REF] was passed. A similar bill in Texas that year was not enacted. This proposed another version of the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act which included a definition of an "animal rights or ecological terrorist organisation" in the following terms: "two or more persons organised for the purpose of supporting any politically motivated activity intended to obstruct or deter any person from participating in an activity involving animals or an activity involving natural resources" (Hall 2006: 49).

With the language in proposed legislation as vague and ambiguous as this, the growing concern even within the mainstream animal advocacy community became focused on where the growing emphasis on "animal rights=terrorism" was leading to. For example, John Robbins [START_REF] Robbins | Are so-called "eco-terrorists" falsely prosecuted[END_REF], a well-known figure in the animal advocacy movement due to his ground-breaking books, Diet for a New America, and its follow-up, The Food Revolution, reports in The Huffington Post that the "Pennsylvania homeland security office" had been distributing antiterrorism bulletins to state police and other public officials. However, the "terrorist activities" highlighted by the bulletins have included "anti-BP candlelight vigils, peaceful demonstrations by anti-war groups, gay and lesbian festivals, a screening of the documentary "Gasland," and an animal rights protest at a Montgomery County rodeo." Animal rights philosopher, Tom [START_REF] Regan | Empty cages: facing the challenge of animal rights[END_REF], suggests that there has been a concerted effort to socially construct, not only the "out-of-touch-with-reality extremist," but also the "animal rights terrorist."

Like Guither (1998), Regan (2004: 11-15) argues that the animal advocacy countermovements, busily engaged in "special interest politics," frame a contest between "animal welfare moderates, who favour "humane treatment and responsible care of animals," and animal rights extremists who, like the criminals who blew up the twin towers of the World Trade Center, resort to "terrorist tactics" " (2004: 15). An entire movement is being painted as comprised of "terrible people," he claims, with an alleged movement-wide mindset which says, "believe what I believe…or else " (2004: 15).

Regan states that

The origin of the most recent chapter in this story is not hard to find. It begins in 1989, with the publication of the American Medical Association"s white paper, "Use of Animals in Biomedical Research: The Challenge and the Response." Among the AMA's recommendations: People who believe in animal rights "must be shown to be not only antiscience but also (a) responsible for violent and illegal acts that endanger life and property, and (b) a threat to the public"s freedom of choice." ARAs must be seen as people who are "radicals," "militants," and "terrorists," who are "opposed to human well being." By contrast, sane, sensible, decent people must be shown to favour animal welfare, understood as humane, responsible use of animals by humans, for humans (2004: 12). [START_REF] Sorenson | Constructing terrorists: propaganda about animal rights[END_REF] argues that, "Animal exploitation industries, public relations companies and lobbyists, and corporate media emphasise violence by activists describing them as terrorists and extremists." He claims that the attacks on "9/11" has provided "a pretext for government crackdowns on dissent and provided new rhetoric to demonise animal advocates," and outlines in detail mainstream mass media and countermovement characterisation of animal advocacy as terrorism, noting a common theme of suggesting that animal activists may be linked to Islamic extremism, for example, by calling the ALF, "the al-Qaeda of the animal rights lobby."

More worrying for some in the animal movement is the apparent evidence that animal advocates are being set up by agents provocateurs to be trapped by the new laws against protest and protest groups. Indeed, Regan (2004: 16) claims that the past president of the US Surgical Corporation, which carried out vivisection experiments on dogs, financed his own murder, deliberately arranging for an animal advocates with mental health issues, and described as an "unstable loner" (Jasper & Nelkin 1992: 50), to attempt to kill him. Regan claims (2004: 16) that the only reason this plot failed was the discovery of tape transcripts implicating the conspirators. Robbins [START_REF] Robbins | Are so-called "eco-terrorists" falsely prosecuted[END_REF] highlights the case of Californian Eric McDavid who is said to have been set up by an FBI agent posing as his girlfriend, "Anna." It is claimed that she goaded McDavid into more and more extreme and illegal actions, supplied him with materials provided to her by the FBI, and told him he was "all talk" when he expressed doubts about his growing involvement in direct action. McDavid is currently in prison serving a 19 year 7 month sentence after being convicted of the single charge of "conspiracy to damage and destroy property by fire and an explosive." Robbins says that a juror in McDavid"s case issued a complaint ([a "formal declaration to the court" [13]) about not being told the truth about "Anna" being a government agent. She says McDavid was "led on" and being told that "Anna" was working for the FBI would have changed her verdict and, she believes, the verdict of other jurors.

The Irish experience

There appears to be no equivalent "animal extremist" or "eco-terror" legislation in the Irish Republic. There is nothing on the Irish state book remotely similar to the legislation in Britain and the US seeking to identify animal advocacy as a major criminal, extremist, and "terroristic" threat.

One respondent suggested that the nearest to such legislation in the Irish Republic is the Offences Against the State Act of 1939. [START_REF]Irish Statute Book. Offences Against the State Act[END_REF] Although an Irish animal advocate was detained briefly under this legislation in the last year or so, this is a general and dated law found in most nation states, and it is clearly not specifically aimed at the animal advocacy movement. The 1939 Act provides for the banning and "suppression" of organisations, forfeiture of their property, and provisions for internment. Obviously, it was not drawn up or enacted with animal or environmental advocacy in mind. Calls for "animal extremist" and "eco-terror" legislation can be found on Irish public forums (such as "Politics.ie" and "Boards.ie") rather than in political circles, suggesting that few in the Irish parliament currently equate animal activism with extremism or terrorism. The fact that countermovement individuals are active on such forums, and closely monitor and comment on any coverage of grassroots Irish animal advocacy, is another reason I took the "security" steps as outlined in the "methodology note" section above.

According to their various websites, and mainstream and alternative media coverage, the Irish activist groups are engaged in a range of banner demonstrations and other forms of nonviolent protest. They are pictured outside fur farms, zoos, fishing tackle shops, embassies, government buildings, circuses with "performing animals," clothing shops, laboratories, and fast-food restaurants. They hold "information tables" in the major Irish cities, although usually in Dublin. Demonstrating their PeTA-style credentials, ARAN take part in "nude" events, with slogans such as "I"d rather by Naked Than Wear Fur," as well as organising annual marches and rallies in Dublin city centre. When an estimated 4500 "hunting enthusiasts" from the RISE (Rural Ireland Says Enough) organisation marched through the streets of Waterford in 2010 to protest against a bill to ban stag hunting in Ireland [START_REF] Parsons | Protestors march over proposed ban on stag hunting and fur farming[END_REF], Animal Rights Action Network (ARAN) mounted a small counter-demonstration, chanting "there is no excuse for animal abuse" as the line of hunters walked by.

These activities are generally nonviolent and pass off without a great deal of incident or controversy, although they can be noisy. For example, some groups use megaphones or bullhorns and chant slogans during their pickets and demonstrations. Most grassroots organisations in Ireland report that they have little trouble from officers of the Irish police force (Garda Síochána). However, in the last two years, a number of Irish animal advocates in one organisation have been arrested several times during their weekly demonstrations outside a fur shop in the heart of Dublin centre. They have not been charged under the 1939 Act relating to offences against the state but under various sections of the Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act, 1994 [START_REF]Irish Statute Book. Criminal Justice (Public Order) Act[END_REF], and, in particular, sections related to "threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour in a public place," "failure to comply with a direction from a member of Garda Síochána," "wilful obstruction," "assault or obstruction of a peace officer," and "arrest without warrant" (the failure to give personal details). Even so, one respondent told me that Irish animal rights activism in general is "a long way behind" what goes on in Britain and, therefore, there is no reason to believe at the current time that there will be anything like the clampdown seen across the Irish Sea. This person felt there was no threat, "as yet," of a process of criminalisation aimed at controlling and labelling animal advocacy in Ireland at anything like the scale seen in England, suggesting that "animal rights activism here is not important enough yet to be on [the state"s] agenda." Does this raise the possibility that some groups in Ireland are "managing" their relations with the Gardaí better than others? Does that explain why one group in particular are having the most trouble from the guards and, therefore, its members are spending the most time detained in Gardaí stations, along with enduring many weeks and months involved the court process? I explored this question during my contact with respondents. The opinion of many was that this could well be the case, and this view was held by some members of the group in question including those who have been arrested during their demonstrations. Views about the "proper" and "practical" relations with the Gardaí differed markedly among the full range of respondents involved in this research. For example, some felt that often the most sensible course of action when dealing with Gardaí requests and orders, such as to move back or move away from "target" premises, or to move on or move away from a particular shop or entrance, is to negotiate on the spot, or to comply in many cases and then complain by letter after the event if it was felt that particular orders were unreasonable. Others suggested that advocates should actively resist being "pushed around" by the authorities. One said that it was perfectly possible to gain some measure of control over the policing of demonstrations, even the noisy ones. Another interviewee stated that the Irish police force is not used to acts of resistant and, therefore, tend to over-react to them, however "mild" they are. One said that some members of the Gardaí were quite supportive of some aspects if their campaigning, for example, by expressing their personal opposition to the wearing of fur coats. Other officers, however, seem totally baffled and confused as to what values an animal advocate is likely to hold, the same respondent said. For instance, while being searched and eventually arrested, a garda found circus demonstration literature in this interviewee"s pocket and assumed that they were pro-circus advertising leaflets rather than protest literature opposing the circus. The officer remarked as to whether the activist was working "on the side" for the circus. While most of the animal advocates responded to this question of Gardaí-protester relations as a stand-alone issue, the political activists thought as a general matter that there is something rather more serious and draconian going on in Ireland in the relation to the State"s overall responses to expressions of dissent.

Irish people are "passive."

Most respondents expressed agreement with the proposition that Irish grassroots animal mobilisations were "lagging behind" their British counterparts, and the vast majority also agreed with the view that the Irish population can be described as extremely "passive" in nature. I was told: "Irish people are far too willing to sit back and say nothing, and I think that"s the root of the problem." In fact, many advocates say that this is one of their most difficult problems in terms of gaining support and gaining more activists members. Academic respondents suggest that the present student body is not as politicised as it once was, and this certainly applies to Irish students. One respondent, for example, suggested that even the recent European Community bailout of the failed Irish economic system, the fact that politics and the banking sector have been exposed as "corrupt to the core" in Ireland, and the reality that the poorer sectors of society are disproportionately paying for the greed of elite members of society, and their "political stooges," cannot bring out to the street more than a moderate number of demonstrators.

When I pointed out to many of the respondents making this sort of point the research data suggesting the long history of struggle and dissent in Ireland, several stated that the modern manifestation of this is not radical action, as such, but rather moaning, grumbling, and "buckling under." When Hilary Tovey (2007a companion publication with Kelly 2007) interviewed environmental movement activists in the Irish Republic, she found largely similar views about Irish society. She found this significant because she argues that Social movements in general are vehicles for particular understandings of citizenship, civil society, and the potentialities of, and boundaries to, democratic participation in shaping the social world in which we live (Tovey 2007: 4). This research -which began in 2003 in a project entitled "The Making of Irish Environmental Activists" and which culminated in the 2007 publication -is of particular relevance in terms of the views of many of my respondents, especially the chapter "Consequences of Collective Engagement" (2007: 125-157). For example, a local environmental group member suggested in an interview that the Irish are too quiescent, saying "I think Irish people do not fight for their rights;" "it is a question of good people staying silent;" that people, "don"t want to be labelled;" and finally that some members of the public reacted negatively to protestors because protestors, "don"t look cool" (2007: 143). In a section entitled, "Perceptions of Irish society," an interviewee is quoted saying, "the reality of life in Ireland today is that you have to make money. But I think we are losing a lot of our quality and our understanding of quality" (2007: 144). Tovey remarks that A common concern ran through nearly all of the interviews was that Irish people felt impotent to do anything about things that they dislike… They were not encouraged by leaders in society to express their views, dissent or objection in public, and in fact Irish society operated in ways that actively discouraged the public from making their views known (2007: 145).

One respondent expressed the view that, "greed and power, I think, are the two greatest enemies" (2007: 146), and Tovey states that three-quarters of their respondents spoke about Irish society operating in ways that "routinely disempower the public" (2007: 147). Attempts to engage relevant authorities were also described as "universally negative" (2007: 148), and one environmental advocate described a Minister of State "railroading and abusing" campaigners, explained how she was passed around from one government department to another until she felt like she was on a "merry-go-round." Eventually", she says, "I gave up" (2007: 149).

Tovey describes this as a "political-business nexus problem," citing advocates who contrasted their lack of political influence with the apparent ease of access elite politicians gave to business interests, such as those wishing to open a "fish farm" (2007: 149). This respondent described Irish politics as a "sordid game," while many others claimed that it was thoroughly corrupt, leading Tovey to note that, "Environmental groups have a long history of finding it almost impossible to get power holders to spent time with them, to listen to their views, or to treat them as having any right to offer alternative analyses " (2007: 150). This last point may explain why some of the animal groups in Ireland, including the grassroots ones, have sought and succeeded in establishing a working relationship with the Irish Green Party, a junior coalition partner in government with Fianna Fáil from 2007 to 2011. The general point about the nature of Irish politics and the population of Ireland was summed up by similar phrases I heard several times from participants in the current research, such as "[t]he Irish people are passive" and "Sadly, Ireland is practically an activism-free zone."

In Court.

One non-animal advocate respondent expressed the view that the Irish state is especially interested in shutting down animal advocacy groups and, "seemingly in preference to other groups." This person argued that the Irish are "well ahead of the Britain" in terms of controlling protest and dissent; that there is in fact a generational gap between the two. The sort of activism that goes on in Britain is "way more militant" than that which occurs in Ireland because dissent in Ireland is "mostly neutralised." This was an across-the-board assessment of the Irish situation. Nevertheless, the respondent believed that State forces would see animal advocates as quite isolated and consequently relatively weak, meaning they had virtual carte blanche over how they deal with them.

Animal advocates lack the support networks available to other campaigners who often form alliances with other types of social movement activists.

The authorities, she believed, need not fear repercussions for their suppression of dissent in general, and of animal advocates in particular. Not only do large direct action events "barely make the news" (a view strongly supported by several other respondents in the Irish animal advocacy movement), the cases in which the Gardaí overreach their mandate as peacemakers are, likewise, unlikely to make mainstream mass media headlines: even if any did, she said, "there"d be little outrage," adding, "I see Ireland as one of the planet"s most successful and efficient activism-free zones."

Stating that "dissent will not be tolerated in Ireland," this respondent claimed that a clampdown on animal advocacy should be essentially regarded as an efficientand cheapwarning to others involved in larger mobilisations and protests, especially due to the fact that, "the left as a whole doesn"t see this as a direct attack on its own vanguard and as a portent for its own immediate future." Small isolated groups tend to become radicalised more than others, as a means of surviving, she believed, but this makes them very visible and, in turn, gives the State all the more reason, and the social justification, to close them down. "It"s easy for the State to justify picking on these groups to begin with and they can be efficiently shut down," she said. The respondent saw what was happening to the arrested and charged animal advocates, those who could successively be criminalised for doing little more than picketing a shop involved in animal use, in a wider political context, arguing that

The State is only looking for easy targets. Everything is measured in cost. Easier targets are more cost effective and eliminating these easier targets cheapens the cost of stopping everyone else.

In the view of this respondent, the only way animal advocates can be freer of the attentions of the Irish State is through networking with other activist mobilisations. The need for support among groups, "should infer a network of solidarity in combating the State"s attempts at nullification." Being "on the fringe of activism as a whole" is a dangerous place to be, although being relatively isolated seems to be the plight of many animal groups. She said in this respect: "To a large degree it"s a natural tendency." These views echo the recent calls in the animal advocacy movement to seriously engage in "alliance politics," along with the stark recognition that most mobilisations one may wish to join forces with are deeply speciesist (see Best"s "13 Ways to Promote Alliance Politics and Total Liberation." [START_REF] Best | 13 ways to promote alliance politics and total liberation[END_REF]) These support networks are, however, hard to form, my respondent said, despite the obvious benefits that emerge from their establishment. She concluded pessimistically, saying, "The fact that such a network is so hard to form is, I"d say, an indication that we ourselves aid in our own annihilation."

Few of my other respondents analysed or approached the issues under discussion in this contextualised way, and some gave the impression that such a view would be too conspiratorial for them. For example, when I spoke to a group of advocates who had been subject to repeated arrests, detention, and lengthy court cases, they did not tend to talk about their experiences like this. One said that, far from any suggestion that judges may be part of some move in a criminalisation process, the truth was that many are "just bastards," who treat all defendants unlucky enough to be before them in an equally harsh manner. There was no feeling that members of the Irish judicial system were casting a wary eye towards England and concluding that there may be something to "nip in bud" in the Republic. This suggestion was explicitly denied. A respondent did say that they did end up trying to ascertain whether this or that judge was a hunter or, perhaps, a hunt supporters in order to factor in that possibility into their thoughts about treatment in court.

Another view expressed by this group amounted to, "We take up a great deal of court time." There was a sense, then, that courts are not used to dealing with people who are not out for personal gain and who are motivated by a set of ethical beliefs about preffered human-nonhuman relationships which go way beyond the usual lip service members of society give to traditional forms of animal welfarism. Dealing with an animal advocate, therefore, is a far cry from dealing with the average pickpocket, drunk driver, thief, or joy rider, who may be generally dispatched routinely and relatively quickly. Therefore, there was a sense that a case involving animal activists takes the whole court and prosecution system out of its comfort zone on the grounds that it lasts a long time and brings up issues that are not the standard fare of the judicial system. The various court cases that these respondents have been involved in were also lengthened due to the fact that they defended themselves with the aid of a McKenzie friend, an assistant to a "litigant in person" in common court proceedings. The Republic of Ireland is one among a small number of nations who allow the employment of a McKenzie friend.

There was some feeling, given this way of proceeding in court, with frequent advise needs from the legal assistant, that the length of time presentation of evidence and cross-examination takes place can irritate a judge and that is not seen as a wise thing to do. Another factor lengthening court cases was the means the advocates had taken of defending themselves once the harassment, as they saw it, and the arrests became frequent events. It seems that this group felt that some trouble would occur leading to Gardaí involvement and the possibility, and that some members may be arrested, almost every week. Therefore, each of the demonstrators began carrying with them a personal camcorder and/or an audio recording device in order to present visual and sound evidence to the court of the matters that had become central to the cause of their arrests.

Conclusion.

No decisive evidence was found that a process of criminalisation is occurring in Ireland in respect of the activities of grassroots animal advocacy. Moreover, few research respondents see recent arrests, charges, detention, and court appearances as the beginning of such criminalisation in the Irish Republic. The majority view of those involved in this study regard animal advocacy as not enough of a threat to warrant the kind of legal interventions seen in Britain and the US.

The major dissenting voices came from respondents who were not primarily involved in animal advocacy, or not involved at all. Their minority view suggested that it is feasible at least, or likely in one view, that recent events in Dublin may mark the beginning of a clampdown on animal advocacy from forces of social control who see what occurs elsewhere and want to prevent it happening in Ireland, or else may utilise the negative sanctioning of animal advocacy as the more general warning to other social movement activists. In this matter it remains to be seen whether, how, and why, the respective views of movement insiders or outsiders will prevail.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. The Association of Chief Police Officers TAM (Terrorism and Allied Matters ) structure.[4]


LPP Pierre A Hallé

LIMSI Martine Adda-Decker

Voice assimilation in French obstruents: categorical or gradient?

This work contributes to the issue of categoricity versus gradiency in natural assimilations. We focused on voice-assimilation in French and started from the assumption that the main cue to obstruent voicing is glottal pulsing. We quantified glottal pulsing continuously with a single acoustic measure -the proportion in duration of voiced portion(s) within a consonant -which we call v-ratio. We used a large corpus of French radio and television speech to compute v-ratios for all the obstruents appearing in word-final to word-initial obstruent contacts. The results were analyzed in terms of v-ratio distributions, which were compared with theoretical distributions predicted by two contrasted hypotheses on the mechanisms of assimilation: categorical switch versus v-ratio shift. The comparisons strongly suggested that, although voicing itself can be incomplete, voice assimilation is essentially categorical in terms of v-ratio. We discuss this result in the light of recent perceptual data showing sensitivity to extremely subtle acoustic differences: secondary cues to voicing do not seem to follow the same pattern of categoricity as glottal pulsing.

Introduction

In one of his often cited papers, "The geometry of phonological features", Nick Clements wrote: "…there should be three common types of assimilation processes in the world's languages: TOTAL assimilation processes in which the spreading element A is a root node, PARTIAL assimilation processes in which A is a class node, and SINGLE-FEATURE assimilation processes in which A is a single feature." (Clements 1985: 231). An example of TOTAL assimilation would be sweeb boy for sweet boy: the last phoneme in sweet is substituted with the first in boy. But we know that place assimilation in English is only PARTIAL by Clements' definition: sweet boy becomes sweep boy, that is, only the place node is spreading, not the entire root node. Common to both types of assimilation, however, spreading of a node from a source to a target segment (the assimilating and assimilated segments, respectively) is accompanied by the delinking of a "stray" node from the target segment. This part of the process is known as "stray erasure."

On that view of assimilation, assimilated segments retain nothing of the substituted node, whether assimilation is TOTAL or PARTIAL. At a phonetic level of description, this might entail that, for instance, /p/ in sweep boy is realized as a nonambiguous labial [p], with no traces of the underlying coronal place. This view of categorical assimilation is illustrated in (1). In (1) and ( 2), level 1 corresponds to an abstract level of representation, before any contextual rule has applied, whereas level 2 integrates the application of such rules. The phonetic level describes the output phonetically.

(1) and (2) both assume that assimilation systematically happens when immediate context conditions are met. But on a slightly more complex elaboration of these descriptions, assimilation may or may not take place based on immediate context alone: assimilation conditioning is more complex. To make the issue simpler, however, we will assume that (1-2) are further qualified in that assimilation may not always occur.

Let us go back to the sweet boy example. By the categorical account in (1), assimilation, when it takes place, substitutes /p/ for /t/ at level 2, hence [p] to [t] at the phonetic level. Because both the intended sound /p/ and its context /b/ agree on place specification, no coarticulation for place is expected. When assimilation does not take place, /t/ is left unchanged and place coarticulation potentially affects phonetically the sounds in contact: [t] and [b]. Although such coarticulations may produce phonetically intermediate sounds, the categorical nature of assimilation in (1) is not challenged.

By a gradient, incomplete view of assimilation, assimilated sounds are not so fully modified that they change category. They take on part of the assimilating context's phonetic characteristics yet retain part of their original characteristics, just like they are coarticulated. But incomplete assimilation, if this refers to an intentionally planned, active process, must entail something more than coarticulation albeit something less than complete, categorical assimilation. In our view, coarticulation cannot be such an active process (but see [START_REF] Flemming | Phonetic detail in phonology: Evidence from assimilation and coarticulation[END_REF]) and coarticulation effects result from unintended biomechanical constraints. 1 In the sketch of incomplete assimilation shown in (2), the non-categorical nature of the process is therefore implemented at level 2 of the representation. Since (2) lacks delinking of the original specification, the process described is hardly acceptable phonologically (hence the '*' mark): It violates the basic premise that phonological representations be categorical. But how else can we formalize the notion of an assimilation process that is intentionally incomplete? Whatever the appropriate phonological formalism, the implication is clear at the phonetic level: When a sound is assimilated, its phonetic characteristics should always be intermediate between their original specification and that of the assimilating sound.

In section 2, "Gow versus Gaskell," we review the claim that assimilations occurring in natural speech are not categorical but gradient (in particular, [START_REF] Gow | Assimilation and anticipation in continuous spoken word recognition[END_REF][START_REF] Gow | Does English coronal place assimilation create lexical ambiguity?[END_REF][START_REF] Gow | A cross-linguistic examination of assimilation context effects[END_REF]. This claim is in line with the account of assimilation described in (2), whereas it is obviously contrary to that in (1). This latter account is de facto ruled out in the gradient view of assimilation. The claim that natural assimilations are incomplete has important consequences for our understanding of how the human system of speech processing copes with assimilation, that is, compensates for assimilation. Gow proposes a compensation mechanism, which he calls feature cue parsing, based on the premise that assimilations are always incomplete. We review briefly some recent counter-evidence to that view.

In section 3, "regressive voicing assimilation," we narrow in on voicing assimilation, which is the focus of the present chapter. We review phonetic evidence for incomplete assimilations and conclude that only distributional data could convincingly settle the ongoing debate.

In section 4, "corpus analyses," we present our own analyses of a large corpus of French broadcast speech, using the rough but robust index of voicedness that we call "voicing ratio" or v-ratio. The distributional data for v-ratio in assimilating contexts are compared with modeled distributions based on (a) the distributional data in non-assimilating contexts, and (b) the changes in distribution that assimilation imposes as predicted by categorical versus gradient accounts of assimilation mechanisms. Our modeling data suggest assimilation is more categorical than gradient in nature and that the phonetic basis for [±voice] is fully voiced versus not fully voiced. But these results must be tempered since we only looked at v-ratio. Although this index seems to capture most of the variation determining the perception of [+voice] vs. [-voice] in French, voicing is also cued by several other well documented characteristics. Some of these characteristics are addressed in section 5, "subtle traces of voicelessness." In this section, we present a brief survey of a recent study [START_REF] Snoeren | On the role of regular phonological variation in lexical access: Evidence from voice assimilation in French[END_REF] suggesting that listeners can recover an original [-voice] specification even though v-ratio alone would indicate complete voicing. Traces of the original [-voice] seem to involve durational patterns as well as, to a lesser extent, microprosodic variation, and amplitude of glottal pulsing during consonant closure.

We conclude that the picture of voice assimilation in French is more complex than previously thought. Voice assimilation is largely categorical with respect to v-ratio. Yet, the "secondary cues" to voicing do not seem to undergo complete neutralization after voice assimilation. We discuss some possible ways to integrate such dissociation in a phonological description.

Gow versus Gaskell

A few years ago, David Gow published a series of studies on the issue of "compensation for assimilation." Previous studies had defended two different accounts of this perceptual device. On the "regressive inference" view defended by Gaskell and Marslen-Wilson, the right phonetic context licenses or not the recovery of the assimilated sound's underlying identity. For example, leam in leam bacon can be understood as an instance of (intended) "lean," whereas leam in leam gammon cannot [START_REF] Gaskell | Phonological variation and inference in lexical access[END_REF]. In cases of ambiguity created by place assimilation (e.g., a quick rum/run picks you up), regressive inference does not help for recovering the intended word (here, run or rum) [START_REF] Gaskell | Lexical ambiguity resolution and spoken word recognition: Bridging the gap[END_REF]). On the "underspecification" view [START_REF] Lahiri | Distinctive features: Phonological underspecification in representation and processing[END_REF], [CORONAL] is, as a rule, left unspecified. Thus, /n/ in "lean," for instance, would not be specified for place and neither leam nor lean would mismatch the lexical representation of "lean."

Gow noted that the studies cited above had used deliberate, complete assimilations although natural assimilations, that is, produced in natural speech, are often incomplete. His "feature cue parsing" proposal relies on the assumption that natural assimilations are always incomplete. In potentially ambiguous utterances such as right/ripe berries, the assimilated form of right is neither [raɪp] nor [raɪt]: cues to [CORONAL] and to [LABIAL] coexist at the contact between words and are assigned to right and berries, respectively. Thus, by the feature cue parsing mechanism, ambiguity is avoided and at the same time, the intended word right is recovered, even if it is realized closer to [raɪp] than to [raɪt].

This elegant mechanism has been criticized, however, on several grounds. One concern is that compensation for assimilation would function identically across languages differing with respect to their specific phonological process(es) of assimilation. This point is controversial: Gow found positive evidence for compensation for assimilation with both Hungarian and American listeners tested on Hungarian voice-assimilated utterances such as oros dinastia 'Russian dynasty' [START_REF] Gow | A cross-linguistic examination of assimilation context effects[END_REF]); Darcy found language-specific compensations for assimilation with English and French listeners on language-specific place (English) and voice (French) assimilations [START_REF] Darcy | Phonological knowledge in compensation for native and non-native assimilation[END_REF]). Another concern is that feature cue parsing allows recovery of the assimilated consonant only if it retained traces, however subtle, of its underlying, original identity. Recent data from large corpora suggest that complete assimilations do occur [START_REF] Dilley | A study of regressive place assimilation in spontaneous speech and its implications for spoken word recognition[END_REF]. More critically, [START_REF] Gaskell | The impact of strong assimilation on the perception of connected speech[END_REF] found that compensation for place assimilation also applies to word forms with no possible traces of the "recovered" place. For example, rum in a quick rum picks you up, intended as "rum" not "run," is interpreted as an instance of "run" more often than the same rum in a quick rum does you good. Gaskell and Snoeren interpreted their results in terms of learned statistical inference: listeners have experienced a significant number of …rum picks you up… utterances in which unambiguously labial rum was a strongly assimilated form of "run," and therefore (mistakenly) interpret rum as an instance of "run" rather than "rum" more often in a labial than alveolar context. Whether or not this interpretation is correct, the feature cue parsing mechanism proposed by Gow clearly fails to explain such occurrences of counterproductive compensation.

Compensation for assimilation can rely on something other than traces of the initially intended category. But are mechanisms exclusively relying on such traces ever needed? At this point, it is necessary to gauge the likelihood of encountering assimilations that leave traces of the intended category, that is, gradient assimilations. To this end, we focus on voicing assimilation.

Regressive voicing assimilation

There is little controversy about the phonetic substrate of voicing in French, contrary to, for example, English. French voicing is mainly cued by the presence/absence of glottal pulsing during the constriction of obstruent consonants, be they stops or fricatives. That voicing assimilation in French is regressive is also a matter of consensus. But its complete versus partial nature is debated. In the opinion of Grammont, assimilation is not complete when occurring between words, as in une robe courte 'a short dress': "…la cessation des vibrations glottales préparée pour le c commence dès le b, qui devient une occlusive sourde tout en restant une douce." ['…the interruption of glottal pulsing planned for the c already takes effect at the b, which becomes a voiceless stop yet remains a soft [consonant].'] (Grammont 1933: 186; also see [START_REF] Fouché | Traité de prononciation française[END_REF]. In other words, voiceless and voiced stops are characterized by a "soft" versus "strong" quality (i.e., lenis versus fortis) in addition to the presence versus absence of glottal pulsing. The phonetic transcription [b̥ ] would capture rather well the idea that /b/ retains its "soft" quality before a voiceless obstruent. (And likewise, [p ̬ ] would retain the "hard" quality of /p/ when voice-assimilated before a voiced obstruent). Grammont also notes that within-word assimilation is always complete, provided it does not follow schwa deletion as in médecin pronounced (in free variation) [medəsɛ], [metsɛ] or [mɛtsɛ]. For example, "obtenir" is pronounced optenir "avec un p fort et non avec un b sourd" ['with a strong p not a soft voiceless b']. Grammont explains this is because the phonetic context of b in obtenir cannot change, contrary to that of d in médecin. Put differently, the phonological form of the word "obtenir" is fixed at the surface level of representation: It is [ɔptənir]. 2 Grammont's account of voicing assimilation was left unquestioned until an aerodynamic and phonetic study by [START_REF] Rigault | L'assimilation consonantique de sonorité en français: étude acoustique et perceptuelle[END_REF]. Rigault convincingly showed that voicing assimilation was complete in both within-word and between-word assimilation situations. For example, he found that 'd' in either médecin [metsɛ] 'medical doctor', or guide savant [gitsavɑ] 'learned guide') was pronounced [t], with the same acoustic and aerodynamic characteristics as 't' in fuite secrète 'secret escape', and in stark contrast with 'd' pronounced [d] in a voiced context (e.g., guide zoulou 'Zulu guide'). Rigault concluded that the "soft" vs. "strong" distinction proposed by Grammont and elaborated by Fouché has no phonetic bases and moreover is questionable in terms of representational economy [START_REF] Martinet | Économie des changements phonétiques : traité de phonologie diachronique[END_REF].

What can "graded" or partial assimilation mean at a phonetic level of description? For place assimilation, it clearly means that acoustic cues in the assimilated sound are intermediate between the initially intended sound and its assimilating context. For example, vowel-to-consonant formant transitions in assimilated right compared to plain (unassimilated) ripe and right would point to a stop intermediate between alveolar and labial (cf. [START_REF] Gow | Does English coronal place assimilation create lexical ambiguity?[END_REF]. For voice assimilation, we may expect that graded changes in voicing be signaled not only by intermediate cue values but also by incomplete change of the temporal extension of these cues. This is what Jansen (2004; also see [START_REF] Jansen | On sounds that like to be paired (after all): An acoustic investigation of Hungarian voicing assimilation[END_REF] reported to find in Hungarian regressive voice assimilation. He found that "voicing duration" in plosives and fricatives was the main acoustic parameter sensitive to assimilation but did not undergo complete changes that would neutralize the voicing contrast. Although the complete picture Jansen reported was complex, voicing duration -measured as the duration of glottal pulsing within the obstruents under scrutiny -varied substantially for most obstruents between a no-assimilation, baseline condition and an assimilation condition. For example, voicing duration for /k/ changed from 27 ms in a voiceless context (e.g., vak találkozott) to 53 ms in a voiced context (e.g., vak darabolta). Conversely, voicing duration for /g/ changed from 70 ms in a voiced context (e.g., vég dominál) to 30 ms in a voiceless context (e.g., vég távolodik). On average, assimilation did not lead to complete neutralization with respect to voicing duration. In particular, voiceassimilated /k/ did not change to a plain [g]. Interestingly, other cues to voicing, such as duration patterns (closure, release, preceding vowel) were less consistently sensitive to regressive assimilation. Jansen concluded that Hungarian regressive voice assimilation is governed by different processes at the same time: phonetic (coarticulation) and phonological (categorical switch) processes. [START_REF] Gow | A cross-linguistic examination of assimilation context effects[END_REF] reported similar phonetic data on Hungarian voice assimilation in fricatives, using the same measurements as [START_REF] Jansen | On sounds that like to be paired (after all): An acoustic investigation of Hungarian voicing assimilation[END_REF]. They found no assimilation for word-final voiced fricatives such as /z/ and incomplete assimilation for voiceless fricatives such as /s/ in oros ('Russian'). Note that, instead of voicing durations, Gow and Im reported latencies of glottal pulsing onset, which they called VOT. This implicitly entails they consistently found glottal pulsing in the right portion of the fricatives and absence of glottal pulsing in the left portion, contrary to the findings of [START_REF] Barry | Temporal patterns in Arabic voicing assimilation[END_REF] on voice assimilation in Syrian Arabic. Our own data, reported in section 4.3, is in line with Barry and Teifour's. In Gow and Im's data, the mean VOT for voiceless fricatives in a voiced context is much longer than for plain voiceless fricatives but not as short as for plain voiced fricatives, suggesting incomplete assimilation. But behind the mean values suggesting incomplete assimilation, a qualitatively different reality may lie: complete assimilation in most occurrences, as observed by Rigault in French, and no assimilation at all in some other occurrences. That is, assimilation might actually be categorical, not gradient. To resolve the categorical vs. gradient issue, distributional data, not just means are therefore necessary. We expand on this point in the next section. For the moment, we simply note that categorical assimilation may appear as incomplete on average because it does not occur all the time but nevertheless is complete when it does occur.

One attempt at examining distributional data was made in [START_REF] Snoeren | A voice for the voiceless: Production and perception of assimilated stops in French[END_REF] who measured "assimilation degrees" for voiceassimilated stops in French. They argued that voice-assimilation in French is gradient because about 45% of the assimilations they observed fell in the [20%, 80%] intermediate range of assimilation degree values. Such a pattern indeed suggests that assimilation might not be extreme in a substantial number of cases. The statement is, however, problematic for methodological reasons. For underlyingly voiceless stops, the "assimilation degree" in Snoeren et al.'s (2006) study is the percentage of voicing. This index has been used in other studies for either stops or fricatives (e.g., Burton and Robblee 1997) and is equivalent, in percentage, to the v-ratio we use [START_REF] Hallé | Voicing assimilation in journalistic speech[END_REF]. By this definition of assimilation degree, it is thus implicitly assumed that the percentage of voicing is zero for plain, unassimilated voiceless stops. But this latter assumption is rarely met: Voiceless obstruents seldom lack glottal pulsing completely (as we show in section 4.1). A no-assimilation baseline is therefore needed to estimate any "assimilation degree." [START_REF] Snoeren | A voice for the voiceless: Production and perception of assimilated stops in French[END_REF] did not measure such a baseline. For the opposite direction of assimilation -devoicing -the lack of a baseline is less problematic. Indeed, voiced stops in a voiced context are almost always voiced throughout, that is, their percentage of voicing is very often 100%. The definition of the "assimilation degree" for underlyingly voiced stops -100% minus percentage of voicing -is therefore rather plausible. But interpreting incomplete voicing remains problematic: How is the percentage of voicing distributed in plain, nonassimilated voiceless consonants? How does it compare with the distribution observed for assimilated consonants? Does the comparison suggest a continuous or a discrete assimilation process? To answer these questions, we undertook a distributional analysis of v-ratios on a large corpus of journalistic speech, comparing contexts licensing assimilation to no-assimilation contexts.

Corpus analyses

The corpus data under scrutiny have been described elsewhere [START_REF] Hallé | Voicing assimilation in journalistic speech[END_REF]. We first summarize the main aspects that have already been reported, then present new distributional analyses.

The initial corpus consisted of over 100 hours of speech from radio and television news with several levels of transcription aligned on the speech signal (phonemic, lexical, and morphosyntactic). About 100,000 speech passages with word-final to word-initial obstruent contacts (C1#C2) were extracted. A few examples with possible assimilation are given in (3).

(3) avec des /avɛk#de/ neuf décembre /noef#desɑbr/ trouvent que /truv#kə/ quinze chars /kɛz#ʃar/ 3

Voicing ratios (v-ratios) were computed for both C1 and C2 in all the passages. V-ratio simply is the proportion of voicing, in duration, within an obstruent (see above). We focus here on the v-ratios on C1. As we discuss in section 5, the temporal extension of voicing within an obstruent is not the only cue to voicing but it is a primary one (cf. Jansen 2004). Moreover, v-ratio is relatively easy to measure in a large corpus, provided robust voiced-voiceless decision and alignment procedures are used. 4 Here, we relied on the automatic alignment system developed at LIMSI laboratories (Adda-Decker and Lamel 1999; [START_REF] Gauvain | Where are we in transcribing French broadcast news[END_REF], and the F0 extraction cross-correlation algorithm implemented in Praat [START_REF] Boersma | Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer[END_REF]): Glottal pulsing, that is, voicing was considered to occur wherever F0 could be computed. 5 We took the variation of v-ratio between the no-assimilation "control" situations and the potential assimilation situations as a measure of assimilation. Note that the control situations are all the more needed given that there is uncertainty with the measurements, as is unavoidable with automated procedures. The overall averaged results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. v-ratio for C1 in control vs. assimilating contexts in all possible C1#C2 contacts (UV and V for voiceless and voiced, respectively).

voicing assimilation devoicing assimilation

UV-UV UV-V Δ V-V V-UV Δ type

Baseline v-ratios

As can be seen in Table 1, the v-ratio of voiceless obstruents in a voiceless context is much larger than zero (between .22 and .47) and is larger for stops than fricatives (.46 vs. .28). In the case of stops preceded by a vowel, the closure portion overlaps with the voicing lag of the vowel. It usually begins with a short voiced portion of decreasing amplitude, which corresponds to the vowel offset. This makes the use of baseline voicelessvoiceless contacts necessary for quantifying assimilation. In the case of fricatives, the v-ratio observed might also reflect the voicing lag of a preceding vowel. But why is it smaller than for stops? In order to fully understand this pattern, we need to know where and how the glottal pulses occur within the closure portion of stops or in the entire constriction of fricatives. We address this point in the discussion of "voicing patterns."

The largest v-ratios are found for voiced obstruents in a voiced context: in average, .9 for stops and .85 for fricatives. The baseline v-ratio for V-V is thus much closer to the theoretical extreme (1) than the UV-UV baseline v-ratio is to the opposite extreme (0), in line with our previous comments.

v-ratios of assimilated obstruents

The change in v-ratio with respect to baseline when voiceless obstruents are followed by voiced obstruents is the largest for fricative-stop contacts. In average, it is about .27 for stops and .34 for fricatives. For voiced obstruents followed by voiceless obstruents, the change in v-ratio is rather modest for stops (-.13 in average) and about three times larger for fricatives (-.40 in average), the largest, again, in the case of fricative-stop contacts (-.49). Overall, then, voicing and devoicing assimilations induce more or less symmetrical changes in v-ratio for fricatives but not stops. For stops there is much less devoicing than voicing, confirming the earlier findings in Snoeren et al.'s (2006) study, although that study did not use appropriate baselines to estimate assimilation degrees.

The issue at stake in the present paper is whether assimilations are complete or not. The data in Table 1 seem to provide a possible answer to this question in that the v-ratios for assimilated C1s never reach those for plain C1s. For example, whereas v-ratio for plain voiceless C1s is .38, v-ratio for devoiced C1s is .61 (in average). Likewise, the v-ratios for plain voiced C1s and voice-assimilated, phonologically voiceless C1s are .88 and .68, respectively. Based on these averages, assimilations could be viewed as incomplete. Yet, as we already noted, intermediate averages may hide an all-or-none underlying reality: Assimilations may not occur all the time but nevertheless be complete when they do occur. It is of course also possible that assimilations, when they occur, are incomplete. Only distributional data can help decide which account is the most plausible. We present such data for v-ratio in sections 4.4 and 4.5 and argue that they support the former rather than the latter account.

Before we look at v-ratio distributions, however, we need to resolve the concern mentioned earlier as to what v-ratios tell us about voicing. Do changes in v-ratio reflect changes in the temporal extension of voicingchanges in the cumulated durations of glottal pulsation -or changes in the strength of glottal pulsation? Because our v-ratio data was based on F0 (or, alternatively, harmonicity) computation, they must be sensitive to signal amplitude. More specifically, a 0.5 v-ratio, for example, may reflect that periodicity indeed occurs on half of the segment under scrutiny, or that it occurs on the entire segment but with such intensity fluctuations that periodicity is detected only half of the time. In order to resolve this issue, we need to know where voicing occurs in segments.

v-patterns: Where does voicing lie?

When v-ratio indicates that a segment is not voiced throughout its entire duration, the question arises as to which portion or portions of the segment have been found to be voiced. In particular, we need to track situations in which voiced portions are scattered throughout the entire segment. Such situations would likely correspond to weak voicing but with full time extension rather than voicing with partial time extension. We considered four configurations in addition to fully voiced and fully voiceless: a single voiced portion located at the left edge, at the right edge, or in the middle of the segment, or scattered voicing with possible contact at one or both edges. We call these configurations "voicing patterns" or v-patterns. Table 2 shows the frequency of occurrence of each v-pattern according to C1 manner and to voicing contact, with the two last configurations pooled together under "scattered voicing." The v-pattern data clearly show that scattered voicing is rather infrequent. Most of the time, voicing lies on the entire segment duration or on the left edge (about 83% of the time). This suggests that decreases/increases in v-ratio are not due to an overall weakening/strenghtening of voicing (e.g., in terms of glottal pulsing amplitude) but, rather, to a reduction/increase in the time extension of voicing. Obstruents generally have a single voiced portion starting from obstruent onset and extending to the right, possibly until obstruent offset. The non-zero baseline v-ratios found for voiceless obstruents must therefore measure preceding vowel voicing lag in most situations, for fricatives as well as for stops. This resolves the concern expressed in 4.1. This finding is in stark contrast with the "VOT" data reported by [START_REF] Gow | A cross-linguistic examination of assimilation context effects[END_REF] for Hungarian fricatives, which seem to always begin with a voiceless portion and end with a voiced portion. 6 Do these patterns tell us something about the discrete nature of assimilations? They suggest a partial exchange from "fully voiced" to "left" and "no voicing": For voiceless fricatives, these "left" and "no voicing" populations decrease uniformly, to the benefit of the "full voicing" population. We examine this point in more detail in the next section.

v-ratio distributions: Changes induced by voice context

When voiceless obstruents are followed by voiced obstruents, their v-ratio globally increases. But how does the v-ratio distribution change? Figure 1 shows the v-ratio distributions for the UV-UV (baseline) and UV-V (assimilation) conditions. A striking aspect of these distributions is that, within the [0, 0.9] range, the v-ratio is not differently distributed for the baseline and assimilation conditions (χ 2 (8) = 1.22, p = .996). This suggests that voicing assimilations can be understood as a simple exchange between two categories, leaving unchanged the internal organization of each category. The two categories would be "fully voiced" (v-ratio > 0.9) on the one hand and "not fully voiced" (v-ratio in the [0, 0.9] range) on the other. However, the close similarity of the distributions within [0, 0.9] v-ratios between baseline and assimilation conditions does not hold across the board. It is found with stops, for both voicing and devoicing assimilation and with fricatives for voicing assimilation but not clearly for devoicing assimilation. In the latter situation, v-ratios tend to decrease within the [0, 0.9] range. This suggests a different process than a simple exchange between the two categories proposed above or, perhaps, different v-ratio definitions of these categories. In section 4.5, we adopt a modeling approach to test further the categorical and graded accounts of voice assimilation.

v-ratio distributions: Modeling the changes caused by assimilation

By a categorical, discrete account of voice assimilation, there are two phonetically definable categories -voiced and voiceless -and the voice assimilation process simply is a switch from one category to the other. From a radical view of categorical assimilation, category switch always occurs in assimilation-licensing contexts. From a less radical view, there is either category switch or no category change. By the gradient, continuous account, assimilation can be viewed as a phonetic shift toward one of the two categories. 7 How can we model these two contrasting views of assimilation with respect to the single parameter examined so far -vratio? Figures 2 and 3 illustrate possible "shift" and "switch" scenarios, respectively, in the case of voicing assimilations. Devoicing assimilations are assumed to yield symmetrical scenarios. In these hypothetical scenarios, phonetic shift is modeled by an increase in v-ratio along the entire range of v-ratio values. This basically entails a rightward shift of the initial distribution. In particular, the leftmost peak that corresponds to the lowest v-ratios in the baseline condition (UV-UV) is shifted to the right by a constant amount. In our modeling, we have incorporated limit conditions and stochastic variation around a constant v-ratio shift d, as shown in (4).

The categorical switch scenario is modeled as a partial exchange between two posited categories -voiced and voiceless -, with no categoryinternal changes with respect to v-ratio. In such a model, the definition of the two categories is critical: The category boundary between [-voice] and [+voice] must be specified in the v-ratio dimension. The data discussed in 4.4 suggested a category boundary at a rather high v-ratio (cf. Figure 1). This is illustrated as 'boundary 2' in Figure 3. For the sake of comparison, a low v-ratio boundary is illustrated as 'boundary 1', hence two variants of the switch model: 'switch 1' and 'switch 2' (see Figure 3). The exchange model shown in (5) ensures that the within-category distributions of v-ratio are left unchanged after assimilation has applied. predicted distributions for UV-V (assimilation) for two categorical boundaries (dashed line: boundary 1 at 0.2; dotted line: boundary 2 at 0.8).

(

) ! f a (v) = f b (v) " r, v < v c f b (v) " (1# s), v $ v c % & ' , ! s = (r "1) # f b (u) [0,v c [ $ f b (u) [v c ,1] 5
$ (where v c stands for a boundary v-ratio between the hypothetical voiceless and voiced categories; r and s specify the amount of "exchange" between the two categories with no change in cumulated frequency.)

Which of these models best predicts the observed data? We computed, for each model and each underlying voicing, the v-ratio distribution in the assimilation condition predicted from the baseline distribution. This was done separately for stops and fricatives. The parameters d for the shift model (amount of shift), and r and s for the switch models (amount of exchange) were estimated so that modeled and observed assimilations yield the same overall v-ratio. Figures 4A-C provides an illustration for the voicing assimilation of voiceless stops. shows the [0, .9] interval of (B) with zoomed in frequencies.

To compare the models, root mean square deviations between modeled and observed distributions were computed. The results are shown in Table 3. The switch model with [0, .9] and ].9, 1] v-ratios defining [-voice] and [+voice], respectively, clearly yields a better fit than the other two models, with a mean prediction error of about 2%. In detail, the adjustment is very good for all conditions excepted for devoicing in fricatives (5% error).

A closer inspection of the data reveals that assimilation does not affect within-category mean v-ratios except for this latter condition. Thus, for fricatives only, and for the devoicing direction of assimilation, there is a slight trend toward gradient assimilation in terms of v-ratio. Yet, for the most part, voice assimilations in French seem categorical in nature with respect to the voicing ratio parameter. Moreover, the data suggest a rather narrow phonetic definition of the categories. Voiced obstruents seem to be fully voiced in terms of v-ratio, whereas the voiceless category can be loosely specified as "not fully voiced." This points toward a default, unmarked [-voice] value of the [voice] feature. The marked value [+voice] is signaled phonetically by full voicing, with v-ratio = 1. But is v-ratio = 1 a sufficient condition for a segment to be [+voice]? Logically, that condition is necessary but perhaps not sufficient. The consequence in perception is that obstruents that are "not fully voiced" in terms of v-ratio (v-ratio < 1) should be perceived as [-voice], whereas obstruents that are fully voiced (v-ratio = 1) may be perceived as [+voice]. In the last section we examine recent perceptual data suggesting that v-ratio = 1 is not sufficient for the perceptual system to treat a segment as [+voice], at least in cases where the ambiguity between [+voice] and [-voice] cannot be resolved at the lexical level, that is, in cases where the surface form could correspond to different underlying forms, as in [sud] for either soude or soute.

Table 3. Adjustment scores (RMS prediction errors in %) for the three models examined; for the switch models, the [-voice] and [+voice] categories are defined by ranges of v-ratio variation: [0, .1] and ].1, 1] for 'switch 1,' [0, .9] and ].9, 1] for 'switch 2.'

Subtle traces of voicelessness

In a recent paper, [START_REF] Snoeren | On the role of regular phonological variation in lexical access: Evidence from voice assimilation in French[END_REF] used cross-modal associative priming to test for the effect of voice assimilation on lexical access. They used potentially ambiguous words such as soute /sut/ 'hold,' which is confusable with soude /sud/ 'soda' when strongly assimilated, that is, when pronounced close to [sud]. Other examples of minimal pairs for final consonant voicing included trompe, jatte, bec, rite, bac, rate, etc. (There are only about twenty such minimal pairs in French.) [START_REF] Snoeren | On the role of regular phonological variation in lexical access: Evidence from voice assimilation in French[END_REF] asked whether strongly voice-assimilated soute (pronounced close to [sud]) would activate the word "soute" not only at a phonological form level but further, at a lexical-conceptual level. In order to do so, they used natural assimilations of soute (pronounced in such utterances as une soute bondée 'a crammed compartment') that were very strongly assimilated (with v-ratio = 1). These word forms, extracted from the embedding utterances, were used as auditory primes in a cross-modal association priming experiment. For instance, "baggage" ('luggage') was paired with either soute pronounced [sud] or unrelated gratte. Other assimilated word forms such as jupe pronounced [ʒyb], which has no minimal pair for final consonant voicing, were used for comparison purposes: one possible outcome was indeed that only these unambiguous word forms would be accessed at a lexical-conceptual level. But the results clearly showed that unambiguous and potentially ambiguous word forms induced a comparable priming effect of about 40 ms. Hence, the lexical entry "soute" was activated by the strongly assimilated form [sud]. The critical question was of whether the word form [sud] for plain soude would also activate "soute." Indeed, spoken word recognition can be found to be relatively tolerant of mispronunciations [START_REF] Bölte | Domato primes paprika: Mismatching pseudowords activate semantic and phonological representations[END_REF][START_REF] Connine | Do the beginnings of spoken words have a special status in auditory word recognition?[END_REF]etc.). A second experiment showed that [sud] extracted from une soude brute 'a raw soda' did not prime "baggage" at all. The priming effect found with assimilated soute thus could not be due to form similarity with soude.

The only possible explanation of these data was that strongly assimilated forms (with v-ratio = 1), such as soute pronounced [sud], retain something of their underlying [-voice] specification. [START_REF] Snoeren | On the role of regular phonological variation in lexical access: Evidence from voice assimilation in French[END_REF] therefore set up to analyze the detailed acoustic characteristics of the assimilated stimuli they used. Table 4 summarizes the measurements that showed assimilated soute indeed retained something of /sut/. "V/(V+closure)"

summarizes the classic durational cues to voicing in obstruents: Longer preceding vowel and shorter closure for voiced obstruents, hence larger V/(V+closure). It seems virtually unaffected by voice assimilation. F0 on the preceding vowel offset seems to almost neutralize. Finally, the amplitude of glottal pulsing seems weaker for assimilated soute than for plain soude, suggesting that gradiency in voicing may be reflected not only by graded temporal extension, as found in several studies [START_REF] Barry | Temporal patterns in Arabic voicing assimilation[END_REF][START_REF] Gow | A cross-linguistic examination of assimilation context effects[END_REF][START_REF] Jansen | On sounds that like to be paired (after all): An acoustic investigation of Hungarian voicing assimilation[END_REF], but also by graded amplitude of glottal pulsing.

Table 4. Acoustic measurements of plain soute and soude (bold face) and of strongly assimilated soute (v-ratio=1) used in [START_REF] Snoeren | On the role of regular phonological variation in lexical access: Evidence from voice assimilation in French[END_REF]. Snoeren et al.'s (2008) study clearly suggested that v-ratio cannot account entirely for the patterns of assimilation that are found in natural speech. Whereas some acoustic parameters seem to vary in an allor-none manner -v-ratios change categorically, and durational parameters do not change -some others seem to vary in a graded manner (for example, amplitude of glottal pulsing). The picture of voicing assimilation is thus far more complex than previously thought.

V-V UV-V UV-UV

Discussion

Let us summarize the observations that our corpus study made possible. The v-ratio means computed for the four voicing contacts suggested that voice-assimilated obstruents have intermediate v-ratios between those observed for their underlying voicing and those for the opposite voicing (Table 1). We showed that these means masked a different reality which could only be uncovered by examining distributions. Distributional data indeed suggested that assimilation takes place only part of the time but is complete, with respect to v-ratio, when it does take place. More precisely, two voicing categories may be defined phonetically (again, with respect to v-ratio): Full-voicing and partial-voicing. Assimilation, when it takes place, is basically a switch between these two phonetic categories. How often does assimilation take place? A rough estimate can be obtained from the inspection, in Table 2, of the variation in frequency of the "fully voiced" pattern according to voicing contact. Since the frequency of this pattern increased by about 48% from UV-UV to UV-V contacts, for both stops and fricatives, we may infer that voicing assimilation takes place about 48% of the time. Likewise, devoicing assimilation seems to occur about 30% of the time for stops but 67% of the time for fricatives -an asymmetry already noted in 4.2. In section 5, we noted that secondary cues to voicing must remain unaffected or partially unaffected by assimilation since listeners can recover the intended voicing of fully voiced items, such as soute pronounced [sud]. Indeed, acoustic measurements revealed subtle differences between such items. In other words, apparently fully voiceassimilated forms retain traces of their underlying voicelessness. How can we reconcile the divergent observations for v-ratios and "secondary cues"?

Such dissociation between primary and secondary cues is reminiscent of the recent findings of [START_REF] Goldrick | Cascading activation from phonological planning to articulatory processes: Evidence from tongue twisters[END_REF] on tongue twisters inducing slips of the tongue. They found that when "k" was erroneously produced as [g] or "g" as [k], traces of the targeted consonant's VOT were found in the faulty productions. However, the "slip of the tongue" productions showed no traces of the targeted consonant in "local" secondary cues to voicing (F1 onset frequency, burst amplitude). As for the non-local cue examined -the following vowel's duration -it was faithful to the targeted consonant. For example, erroneous [k]s for targeted "g"s had a slightly shorter VOT than [k]s for plain /k/s, but had F1 and burst characteristics typical of /k/s, and maintained the long following vowel duration observed for plain /g/s. 8 (Symmetrical patterns obtained in the case of erroneous [g]s for targeted "k"s.) Goldrick and Blumstein claimed their data supported a "cascade" mechanism translating phonological planning into articulatory implementation: both the targeted and the slipped segment's representations were activated during phonological planning, resulting in a mix of both during articulation implementation. They also found evidence of cascading activations between the posited lexical level (or "lexeme selection") and phonological planning, all this supporting a cascade processing architecture across the board.

The assimilation data can be analyzed within the same framework of speech production planning and articulation [START_REF] Levelt | Phonological encoding in speech production[END_REF]. Following lexical selection, phonological planning may proceed in several steps: A first step may activate a canonical representation at level 1 posited in (1-2); when words are assembled together, contextual phonological processes may apply, activating level 2 representations in a subsequent step. Thus, similar to the tongue twister situation, the voice assimilation process (or, more generally, any phonological alternation process) entails the activation of several phonological representations and representation levels, cascading to the articulation implementation stage. Hence, the possible mixed articulation implementation. This, together with coarticulation effects, must contribute to phonetically mixed outputs. Like [START_REF] Goldrick | Cascading activation from phonological planning to articulatory processes: Evidence from tongue twisters[END_REF], [START_REF] Snoeren | On the role of regular phonological variation in lexical access: Evidence from voice assimilation in French[END_REF] found a dissociation of cues in the observed voice assimilations but at the same time, the observed patterns were quite different. In assimilating contexts, v-ratios changed categorically but F0 on the preceding vowel, and waveform amplitude during stop closure underwent incomplete change, whereas preceding vowel duration did not change at all (just like [START_REF] Goldrick | Cascading activation from phonological planning to articulatory processes: Evidence from tongue twisters[END_REF] following vowel durations). [START_REF] Goldrick | Cascading activation from phonological planning to articulatory processes: Evidence from tongue twisters[END_REF] interpreted the observed dissociation of cues as revealing the role of subsyllabic assembly mechanisms in articulatory implementation. They regarded the fate of secondary cues as explained by a lesser perceptual motivation. But this explanation obviously lacks consistency: Why should some perceptually unimportant cues be completely neutralized and some others entirely maintained? We propose instead that the dissociation of cues is due to different time-courses of phonological planning and articulation implementation. For instance, the resistance to assimilation for flanking vowel duration might be due to an early step of metric/prosodic planning completed before the assimilation process switches the [voice] specification of the assimilated segment. In the same way, we might interpret the weaker glottal pulsing during closure in voicing assimilations than in plain voicing as due to a later-occurring specification of voicedness in the assimilation case. We are of course aware that these interpretations are for the time being quite speculative and that more specific research is necessary to address, for instance, the issue of timing within the phonological planning stage and its possible consequences for articulation implementation.

Before closing, let us examine briefly the classical articulatory phonology account of assimilations in terms of gestural overlap (cf., for example, [START_REF] Browman | Articulatory phonology: an overview[END_REF]. Whatever the gestures involved for voicing in French -plausibly, glottal opening-closing for voiceless obstruents and glottal critical adduction for voiced ones (see [START_REF] Best | Perception of initial obstruent voicing is influenced by gestural organization[END_REF] for an overview) -the gestural overlap account predicts that assimilations occur in perception rather than in production, and are all the more likely to occur that speech rate is fast, or prosodic conditioning entails increased overlap.

In other words, according to standard articulatory phonology, no discrete modification of phonological specification ever occurs in "phonological alternations"; Gestural specifications are not deleted nor switched: gestures may only overlap and hide each other in perception, especially at fast rates.

One might want to test for this contention in corpus data: Assimilation degree should be stronger at faster rates. We attempted to do this by separating the data into four C1#C2 duration ranges (from less than 120 ms to more than 240 ms) and found near-categorical assimilation across the board with respect to v-ratio. This leaves little leeway for variations in assimilation strength according to, for example, speech rate.

To conclude, our data seems more readily amenable to a discrete rather than graded account of voice assimilation. In the scenario we propose, the classic description of assimilation, as found in (1), applies within the phonological planning stage in speech production: level 1 /sut/ produces level 2 [sud]. This takes us back to the typology of phonological alternations offered by Nick Clements: Voice assimilation belongs to the SINGLE-FEATURE type. The qualifications we propose to his typology are twofold. First, we propose, following [START_REF] Goldrick | Cascading activation from phonological planning to articulatory processes: Evidence from tongue twisters[END_REF], that a cascading architecture characterizes the translation from phonological code to articulation: Both /sut/ and /sud/ feed articulation implementation. In that view, the assimilations that are incomplete at the phonetic level, either quantitatively for a single cue (e.g., v-ratio, amplitude of glottal pulsing) or in terms of dissociation between cues, reflect cascading translation from phonological planning to articulation implementation, with different time courses of activation/deactivation for different levels of representation. In other words, whereas the classic description of the assimilation process in (1) offers a static picture, we propose to consider the dynamics of its component parts. As a second qualification, we introduced the notion of occurrence in the application of a phonological process. Immediate context determines whether assimilation is applicable or not. Yet, it seems that the actual occurrence of assimilation requires further determinants. What determines whether assimilation takes place or not? This question is indeed open to future investigation on the licensing factors that might operate beyond immediate context.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure1. v-ratio distributions for C1 in the (A) UV-UV and (B) UV-V conditions; the black bar roughly corresponds to fully voiced C1s and is truncated in (B) to enhance detail in the [0, 0.9] range of v-ratios.

Figure 2 .Figure 3 .

 23 Figure 2. shift model for underlyingly voiceless obstruents: Made up of v-ratio distribution in voiceless context (plain line: baseline condition) and predicted distribution in voiced context (dashed line: assimilation).

Figure 4 .

 4 Figure 4. v-ratio distributions for voiceless fricatives: (A) as observed in UV-UV (bold plain line) and UV-V (bold dashed line with triangles) contexts; (B) and (C) as observed in UV-V and predicted by the models; (C) shows the [0, .9] interval of (B) with zoomed in frequencies.

Table 2 .

 2 Percentages of v-patterns in C1 according to voicing contact for stops and fricatives (UV and V for voiceless and voiced, respectively).

			no	left	fully	right	scattered
	C1 manner	contact	voicing voicing voiced	voicing voicing
	stop	UV-UV	15.6	63.6	14.4	2.2	4.2
		UV-V	9.5	17.5	63.0	3.7	6.3
		V-V	1.9	5.3	88.5	1.6	2.7
		V-UV	8.5	29.2	58.9	1.2	2.2
	fricative	UV-UV	24.6	64.1	3.6	2.6	5.1
		UV-V	7.9	27.6	52.0	3.1	9.5
		V-V	1.5	16.0	77.1	0.7	4.6
		V-UV	10.7	74.7	10.8	0.6	3.2

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an ANR grant (PHON-REP) to the first author.

Notes

1 Coarticulation is viewed here as a mechanical consequence of temporal overlap in articulation between consecutive sounds [START_REF] Fowler | Coordination and coarticulation in speech production[END_REF]Browman andGoldstein 1990, 1992). Coarticulation occurs with vowels [START_REF] Öhman | Coarticulation in VCV utterances: spectrographic measurements[END_REF][START_REF] Magen | The extent of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English[END_REF] or tones [START_REF] Abramson | The coarticulation of tones: An acoustic study of Thai[END_REF][START_REF] Xu | Production and perception of coarticulated tones[END_REF], and indeed with consonants, in all the situations whereby sounds in contact differ in some phonetic dimension.

2 Should we consider the pronunciation [ɔptəniʁ] instead of [ɔbtəniʁ] for obtenir as a case of within-word voice assimilation? This is a matter of debate. From a synchronic point of view, we may argue that the lexical form of "obtenir" is simply stored as /ɔptənir/ and there is no phonological context around or within that word possibly licensing an alternation with the /ɔbtənir/ form. However, at the abstract morphophonemic level, obtenir contains the prefix {ob-}, hence the phoneme /b/. The fact that obtenir has a /p/ at a less abstract level can be captured by a transformation rule governing the alternation between /p/ and /b/ in {ob-}, that is, by an assimilation rule taking place between levels of representation. The case of médecin is different because its pronunciation can alternate between [medəsɛ] and [metsɛ] or [mɛtsɛ]. Interestingly, 'é' in médecin is pronounced [e] more often than [ɛ], although it should be [ɛ] in the closed syllable /mɛt/ of /mɛt.sɛ/. This deviant pronunciation is symptomatic of a morphophonemic level of representation in which 'é' is indeed /e/, as reflected in the surface forms of médical, médicament, etc.

3 Note that place assimilation may additionally occur in this example [START_REF] Niebuhr | On place assimilation in French sibilant sequences[END_REF]. 4 A discussion of the reliability and precision of the measurements presented here falls out the scope of this paper. There are indeed potential shortcomings in any automatic alignment system as well as in any automatic decision on acoustic voicing. (Manual labeling and measurement procedures are not error free either.) But the analyses proved to produce rather consistent and homogeneous patterns of results, which is about all what is needed for the present study. 5 We compared this voicing decision procedure with a procedure based on the harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR: a measure of acoustic periodicity) exceeding a fixed threshold. We set this threshold to 0 dB, which corresponds to equal energy in the harmonics and in the noise. The two methods yielded similar patterns of results. 6 The opposite pattern we observe for French is also contrary to the naive intuition about regressive voice assimilation that the right edge of C1 should be affected by a following C2 with a different underlying voicing. 7 Similar ideas have been offered by [START_REF] Massaro | Categorical or continuous speech perception: a new test[END_REF] in a different context. They proposed a new test for categorical perception in which listeners had to rate stimuli of a /b/-/d/ continuum on a 1-5 scale, as 1 if they heard /b/ until 5 if they heard /d/. Categorical perception predicts that subjects' ratings to a given stimulus be distributed along the 1-5 scale as two modes centered on the extreme ratings 1 and 5, whereas continuous perception predicts a single mode centered on a rating value depending on the stimulus, from 1 for /b/s to 5 for /d/s. That is, continuous perception predicts a distributional shift from one stimulus to another, whereas categorical perception predicts a switch between the two modes 1 and 5. 8 In this study, the speech materials were strictly controlled and "distributions" restricted to limited dispersion around mean values. In other words, virtually all observed slips had slightly non-canonic VOT values.