French liaison

  • Martine ADDA-DECKER (Paris)
    French ‘liaison’ in casually spoken French, as investigated in a large corpus of casual French speech
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 113-128

    In this paper, the realisation of the French Liaison is investigated in a large corpus of casual speech. Considering that casual speech gives rise to a large range of pronunciation variants and that overall temporal reduction increases, one may hypothesize that French liaison tends to be less productive in this speaking style. We made use of automatic processing such as automatic speech alignments to evaluate when liaison is realized in the NCCFr corpus. Realized liaisons were examined and measured for the most frequent liaison consonants (/z/, /n/ and /t/) as a function of a liaison sites classified as mandatory, optional or forbidden. The relation between speech rate and liaison realization is also examined.


  • Julien EYCHENNE (Groningue, Pays-Bas)
    The Phonology of Contemporary French program: results and perspective
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 7-24

    This paper offers an overview of the work that has been done within the Phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés, structure (PFC) research programme. We first critically assess the relation between phonological research and data. We then move on to describe PFC's methodology and the coding schemes that have been devised for the analysis of schwa and liaison. We finish off by showing how the PFC programme makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phonology of French, by widening the scope and breadth of empirical descriptions and by offering new insights into theoretical problems such as the analysis of liaison or the role of usage frequency in grammar.