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Part of
Advances in Sociophonetics
Edited by Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
[Studies in Language Variation 15] 2014
► pp. 31–56

French liaison and the lexical repository

| 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 substantially 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 provided by contemporary, well-reasoned linguistic corpora.

Published online: 12 June 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.15.02lak
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