Advances in Sociophonetics

chapter 2

French liaison and the lexical repository

Bernard Laks*, Basilio Calderone** and Chiara Celata***

* Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense,

Institut Universitaire de France

** CLLE-ERSS, CNRS & Université de Toulouse – Le Mirail

*** Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

In this paper we propose a frequency analysis of French liaison that focuses

on the liaison environments attested in the PFC database. The results of the

analysis show the existence of a significant relationship (statistically interpreted

as a power-law distribution) according to which a very restricted set of liaison

environments has very high frequency of occurrence in the corpus and is sub-

stantially untouched by phonological and sociolinguistic variation, while a large

“periphery” of infrequent uses appears to show significant aspects of style- and

speaker-dependent variation. The study therefore demonstrates the importance

of basing any variationist analysis on very large data sample, such as those pro-

vided by contemporary, well-reasoned linguistic corpora.

1. Introduction: Datum and exemplum approaches in the study
   of phonological variation

That the phonology of a living language should be based on the description and
analysis of actual usage, as manifested by the concrete occurrences in the language
in question, is a proposition which may seem to be self-evident. In the contempo-
rary period, however, scientific practice does not support it entirely, and the use
of corpora appears to be a minority option among many research orientations
(Laks 2008, 2011).
With the Chomskyan critique of the finite nature of corpora and the limits of
the syntagmatic model (Chomsky 1957, 1965), the paradigm of the exemplum (Laks
2008) was to dominate the field for a period of more than thirty years. Whatever the
question to be addressed, it sufficed to invoke a small number of examples deemed
to be pertinent, or even crucial for a given reasoning, to support specific hypotheses
as well as broad theoretical assumptions. The phonology of French did not remain
untouched by the generative drift of the period. Even before the publication of SPE,