Advances in Sociophonetics

Chapter 2. French liaison and the lexical repository 47

As in the case of the analysis by age groups, the lexical environments represented in
each of the three bottom diagrams are not mutually exclusive by definition. Table 4
illustrates the twenty-five most frequent lexical environments occupying the head
of the curve. Figure 8 is a magnified representation of the tail of the curve.

5

10

0

141 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500

5

10

(^005001000150020002500)
AGE ≤ 50
5
10
0
141 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500
AGE > 50
OCCURRENCES
RANK
Figure 6 (a–c). Magnification of the tail for AGE ≤ 50 and AGE > 50.
102
104
(^100100101102103)
9,478 realizations
102
104
(^100100101102103)
2,769 realizations LOW EDUCATION
102
104
(^100100101102103)
3,449 realizations INTERMEDIATE
102
104
(^100100101102103)
3,260 realizations HIGH
OCCURRENCES
RANK
Figure 7 (a–d). Log-log plot of liaison environments (or ‘types’) in the PFC corpus (rank
order by number of occurrences) (a); split by education level (b–d).