The Productive Status of Laurentian French Liaison: Variation across Words and Grammar
Published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of Phonology 2022, 2023
Recommended citation: Tessier, A.M., K. Jesney, R. Lo, K. Vesik and M.E. Bouchard (2023). The Productive Status of Laurentian French Liaison: Variation across Words and Grammar. To appear in Proceedings of AMP 2022.
This paper investigates prenominal liaison as it is used in contemporary Laurentian French, via an online production study that compares application of liaison in real vs. nonce nouns, We interpret our results as evidence that liaison behaviour is driven jointly by lexical representations and the abstract grammar, with properties of the real-word lexicon affecting the application of liaison to nonce words. We further show that there is considerable variation in the population in the extent to which speakers apply liaison with real h-aspiré words, but that all speakers nonetheless share an understanding of what types of words are more vs. less likely to undergo liaison.