48 Bernard Laks, Basilio Calderone and Chiara Celata
As in the case of age grouping discussed above, the diagrams relative to edu-
cational level showed that the global distribution of the data across the curve was
approximately the same for the three groups, particularly as far as the head was
concerned, while the tail showed that some of the types featuring a frequency
value equal to or lower than 10 were evenly distributed across the three groups.
These particular environments differentiated the production of the three groups
and indicated that variation in the low-frequency zone may arise according to the
social characterization of the speakers.Table 4. Number of occurrences (frequency), percent and cumulative percent for the 25
highest ranked liaison types in the PFC corpus, separately for the low, intermediate and
high education levels.
Realizations of liaison specified by education level
LOW, INTERMEDIATE and HIGH LEVEL
RankLiaison FrequencyCumulative
percentLOW INTER-
MEDIATEHIGH1 on_L_a 786 8.3 204 326 256
2 on_L_est 367 12.2 97 155 115
3 ils_L_ont 301 15.3 70 125 106
4 en_L_a 220 2.3 59 94 67
5 on_L_avait 210 19.9 90 73 47
6 on_L_était 174 1.8 53 75 46
7 quand_L_on 157 23.4 61 54 42
8 dans_L_un 122 24.7 38 40 44
9 est_L_a 121 25.9 34 52 35
10 dans_L_une 112 27.1 22 31 59
11 est_L_un 105 28.2 26 57 22
12 vous_L_avez 105 29.3 25 26 54
13 deux_L_ans 102 30.4 38 31 33
14 les_L_énfants 87 31.3 22 25 40
15 quand_L_il 82 32.2 25 37 20
16 les_L_autres 80 33.0 14 30 36
17 ils_L_étaient 78 33.9 24 31 23
18 tout_L_à 77 34.7 28 24 25
19 trois_L_ans 75 35.5 22 27 26
20 est_L_une 74 36.2 18 34 22
21 vous_L_etes 73 37.0 13 15 45
22 n_L_ai 69 37.7 25 24 20
23 nous_L_a 67 38.4 17 34 16
24 ils_L_avaient 66 39.1 22 31 13
25 on_L_allait 60 39.8 35 19 6