such syllables lose their stress, the lengthening effect may be absent. The vowel of is long in Regarde comme elle saute !, in which the word is phrase-final and therefore stressed, but not in Qu'est-ce qu'elle saute bien ! In accents wherein is distinguished from , however, it is still pronounced with a long vowel even in an unstressed position, as in fête in C'est une fête importante. The following table presents the pronunciation of a representative sample of words in phrase-final (stressed) position: Devoicing In Parisian French, the close vowels and the mid front at the end of utterances can be devoiced. A devoiced vowel may be followed by a sound similar to the voiceless palatal fricative : Merci. → ('Thank you.'), Allez ! → ('Go!'). In Quebec French, close vowels are often devoiced when unstressed and surrounded by voiceless consonants: université → ('university'). Though a more prominent feature of Quebec French, phrase-medial devoicing is also found in European French. Elision The final vowel (usually ) of a number of monosyllabic function words is elided in syntactic combinations with a following word that begins with a vowel. For example, compare the pronunciation of the unstressed subject pronoun, in je dors ('I am sleeping'), and in j'arrive ('I am arriving'). Glides and diphthongs The glides , , and appear in syllable onsets immediately followed by a full vowel. In many cases, they alternate systematically with their vowel counterparts , , and such as in the following pairs of verb forms: nie ; ('deny') loue ; ('rent') tue ; ('kill') The glides in the examples can be analyzed as the result of a glide formation process that turns an underlying high vowel into a glide when followed by another vowel: → . This process is usually blocked after a complex onset of the form obstruent + liquid (a stop or a fricative followed by or ). For example, while the pair loue/louer shows an alternation between and , the same suffix added to cloue , a word with a complex onset, does not trigger the glide formation: clouer ('to nail'). Some sequences of glide + vowel can be found after obstruent-liquid onsets, however. The main examples are , as in pluie ('rain'), , as in trois ('three'), and , as in groin ('snout'). They can be dealt with in different ways, as by adding appropriate contextual conditions to the glide formation