Abstract
An examination of social factors affecting liaison use opens with a review of Labov’s pioneering approach to variation in the 1960s (Sect. 6.1), and of findings from fifty years of urban studies (Sect. 6.2). These provide a baseline set of assumptions for understanding variation in respect of liaison, as observed in the French language corpora (Sect. 6.3) from which findings have been drawn. Liaison is found to defy normal sociolinguistic expectations in respect of social class (Sect. 6.4) and gender (Sect. 6.5), but a greater consensus is found regarding change in apparent time (Sect. 6.6), for which most (but not all) studies suggest an overall decline in the use of liaison. The idiosyncratic behaviour of liaison as a variable phenomenon, and the surprising reluctance of commentators even to address this finding, are discussed in Sect. 6.7.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Labov does however acknowledge a debt to Gauchat (1905), whose study of variation in the Swiss village of Charmey he describes (2006: 12) as a ‘nonpareil investigation of change in progress…. full of astonishing insights’, even if its author would not have known or understood the term ‘sociolinguistic’ in its current guise.
- 2.
Extensions of the variable concept beyond phonological level to syntax or the lexicon can be problematic for precisely this reason: see for example Lavandera (1978).
- 3.
Cf. Labov (1972: 209):
the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation.
- 4.
In stark contrast with New York, Peter Trudgill (1974a: 51–52) in Norwich found almost no-one who had had a brush with death, ands soon abandoned this question, asking informants instead to recount a situation in which they had ‘had a good laugh’ recently. The rationale here was similar in that the informant, who stands in a poor light if the story fails to be humorous, is gently pressured to concentrate on presenting a good narrative rather than monitor his/her own speech.
- 5.
Labov (1972: 120):
The speech community is not defined by any marked agreement in the use of language elements, so much as by participation in a set of shared norms; these norms may be observed in overt types of evaluative behavior, and by the uniformity of abstract patterns of variation which are invariant in respect to particular levels of language.
- 6.
Cf. Labov (1972: 208): ‘Styles may be ordered along a single dimension, measured by the amount of attention paid to speech’.
- 7.
Similarly one might argue that Trudgill’s request that his Norwich informants recall a situation in which they ‘had had a good laugh’ appeals to an established British tradition, in which a working-class accent is an important part of the persona of professional comedians.
- 8.
‘L’hétérogénéité sociolinguistique des données disponibles rend périlleuse toute vision diachronique fiable’ (Durand et al. 2009: 18).
- 9.
Use of statistical methods presupposes comparability of data, which for the reasons outlined at the end of the previous chapter cannot be assumed in the case of liaison, and is therefore problematic here.
References
Armstrong, N. (2001). Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French: A Comparative Approach. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Ashby, W. J. (1976). The Loss of the Negative Morpheme Ne in Parisian French. Lingua, 39, 119–137.
Ashby, W. J. (1981a). The Loss of the Negative Particle Ne in French: A Syntactic Change in Progress. Language, 57, 674–687.
Ashby, W. J. (1981b). French Liaison as a Sociolinguistic Phenomenon. In W. W. Cressey & D. J. Napoli (Eds.), Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages 9 (pp. 46–57). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Bell, A. (1984). Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society, 13(2), 145–204.
Bell, A. (2001). Back in Style: Reworking Audience Design. In P. Eckert & J. R. Rickford (Eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (pp. 139–169). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Blanc, M., & Biggs, P. (1971). L’enquête socio-linguistique sur le français parlé à Orléans. Le Français dans le monde, 85, 16–25.
Blanche-Benveniste, C., & Jeanjean, C. (1987). Le français parlé: transcription et édition. Paris: Didier.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2016). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer. Retrieved from http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ [Computer Program. Version 6.0.10].
Cheshire, J. (1982). Variation in an English Dialect: A Sociolinguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coupland, N. (1980). Style Shifting in a Cardiff Work Setting. Language in Society, 9, 1–12.
De Jong, D. (1988). Sociolinguistic Aspects of French Liaison. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.
De Jong, D. (1993). Sociolinguistic Aspects of Montreal French Liaison. In W. Ashby, W. Mithun, G. Perisonotto, & E. Raposo (Eds.), Linguistic Perspectives on the Romance Languages (pp. 127–138). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
De Jong, D. (1994). La sociophonologie de la liaison orléanaise. In C. Lyche (Ed.), French Generative Phonology: Retrospective and Perspectives (pp. 95–130). Salford: European Studies Research Institute.
Delattre, P. (1966a [1947]). La liaison en français, tendances et classifications. In P. Delattre (Ed.), Studies in French and Comparative Phonetics: Selected Papers in French and English (pp. 39–48). The Hague: Mouton. First Published in French Review, 21(2), 148–157.
Delattre, P. (1966b [1955]). Les facteurs de la liaison facultative en français. In P. Delattre (Ed.), Studies in French and Comparative Phonetics: Selected Papers in French and English (pp. 55–62). The Hague: Mouton. First Published in French Review, 29(1), 42–49.
Delattre, P. (1966c [1956]). La fréquence des liaisons facultatives en français. In P. Delattre (Ed.), Studies in French and Comparative Phonetics: Selected Papers in French and English (pp. 49–54). The Hague: Mouton. First Published in French Review, 30(1), 48–54.
Durand, J., Laks, B., & Lyche, C. (2009). Le projet PFC (Phonologie du Français Contemporain): une source de données primaires structurées. In J. Durand, B. Laks, & C. Lyche (Eds.), Phonologie, variation et accents du français (pp. 19–61). Paris: Hermès.
Durand, J., Laks, B., Calderone, B., & Tchobanov, A. (2011). Que savons-nous de la liaison aujourd’hui? Langue française, 169, 103–135.
Eychenne, J. (2009). Une variété de français conservatrice en Languedoc. In J. Durand, B. Laks, & C. Lyche (Eds.), Phonologie, variation et accents du français (pp. 265–290). Paris: Hermès.
Eychenne, J., & Paternostro, R. (2016). Analyzing Transcribed Speech with Dolmen. In S. Detey, J. Durand, B. Laks, & C. Lyche (Eds.), Varieties of Spoken French: A Source Book (pp. D35–D52). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eychenne, J., Lyche, C., Durand, J., & Coquillon, A. (2014). Quelles données pour la liaison en français: la question des corpus. In C. Soum-Favaro, A. Coquillon, & J.-P. Chevrot (Eds.), La liaison: approches contemporaines. Bern: Peter Lang.
Fouché, P. (1959). Traité de prononciation française (2nd ed.). Paris: Klincksieck.
Gadet, F. (2007). La variation sociale en français (2nd ed.). Paris: Ophrys.
Gauchat, L. (1905). L’unité phonétique dans le patois d’une commune. In Aus Romanischen Sprachen und Literaturen: Festschrift H. Mort (pp. 175–232). Halle: Max Niemeyer.
Green, J., & Hintze, M.-A. (1990). Variation and Change in French Linking Phenomena. In M.-A. Hintze & J. N. Green (Eds.), Variation and Change in French: Essays Presented to Rebecca Posner on the Occasion of Her Sixtieth Birthday (pp. 61–88). London: Routledge.
Green, J., & Hintze, A.-M. (2001). The Maintenance of Liaison in a Family Network. In M.-A. Hintze, T. Pooley, & A. Judge (Eds.), French Accents: Phonological and Sociological Perspectives. London: AFLS/CILT.
Hornsby, D. (2011). Getting It Wrong: Liaison, Pataquès and Repair in Contemporary French. In D. Lagorgette & T. Pooley (Eds.), On Linguistic Change in French: Studies in Honour of R. Anthony Lodge (pp. 69–83). Chambéry: Presses Universitaires de Savoie.
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: Social Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Labov, W. (2006). The Social Stratification of English in New York City (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, W., Weinreich, U., & Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. In W. P. Lehmann & Y. Malkeil (Eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium (pp. 95–188). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Laks, B. (1983). Langage et pratiques sociales: étude sociolinguistique d’un groupe d’adolescents. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 46, 73–97.
Laks, B. (2009). Les hommes politiques et la liaison (1908–1998). In L. Baronian & F. Martineau (Eds.), Le français d’un continent à l’autre: mélanges offerts à Yves-Charles Morin (pp. 237–269). Quebec: Presses Universitaires de Laval.
Lavandera, B. (1978). Where Does the Sociolinguistic Variable Stop? Language in Society, 7(2), 171–182.
Le Page, R., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Léon, P. (1992). Phonétisme et prononciations du français avec des travaux d’application et leurs corrigés. Paris: Nathan.
Léon, P. (1993). Précis de phonostylistique: Parole et expressivité. Paris, France: Fernand Nathan.
Léon, P., & Tennant, J. (1990). “Bad French” and Nice Guys: A Morphophonetic Study. French Review, 63, 763–778.
Lyche, C., & Østby, K. (2009). Le français de la haute bourgeoisie parisienne: une variété conservatrice? In J. Durand, B. Laks, & C. Lyche (Eds.), Phonologie, variation et accents du français (pp. 203–230). Paris, France: Hermès.
Malécot, A. (1972). New Procedures for Descriptive Phonetics. In Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics to the Memory of Pierre Delattre (pp. 345–355). The Hague: Mouton.
Malécot, A. (1975a). The Glottal Stop in French. Phonetica, 29, 51–63.
Malécot, A. (1975b). French Liaison as a Function of Grammatical, Phonetic and Paralinguistic Variables. Phonetica, 32, 161–179.
Mallet, G.-M. (2008). La liaison en français: descriptions et analyses dans le corpus PFC. Doctoral thesis, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense, Paris, France. Retrieved from http://www.projet-pfc.net.
Martinet, A. (1945). La Prononciation du français contemporain. Paris: Droz.
Meinschaeffer, J., Bonifer, S., & Frisch, C. (2015). Variable and Invariable Liaison in a Corpus of Spoken French. Journal of French Language Studies, 25, 367–396.
Milroy, L. (1980). Language and Social Networks. Oxford: Blackwell.
Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. (1985). Linguistic Change: Social Networks and Speaker Innovation. Journal of Linguistics, 21, 339–384.
Milroy, J., Milroy, L., Hartley, S., & Walshaw, D. (1994). Glottal Stops and Tyneside Glottalization: Competing Patterns of Variation and Change in British English. Language Variation and Change, 6, 327–357.
Mullineaux, A., & Blanc, M. (1982). The Problems of Classifying the Population Sample in the Sociolinguistic Survey of Orléans in Terms of Socio-Economic, Social and Educational Categories. Review of Applied Linguistics, 55, 3–37.
Pustka, E. (2009). PFC et la phonologie du français en Vendée. In J. Durand, B. Laks, & C. Lyche (Eds.), Phonologie, variation et accents du français (pp. 307–335). Paris, France: Hermès.
Ranson, D. (2008). La liaison variable dans un corpus du français méridional: l’importance relative de la fonction grammaticale. In J. Durand, B. Habert, & B. Laks (Eds.), Congrès mondial de linguistique française. Recueil des résumés et CD-ROM des actes. Paris: Institut de Linguistique Française & EDP Sciences, 1657–1671.
Rickford, J. R., & McNair-Knox, F. (1994). Addressee- and Topic-Influenced Style Shift: A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study. In D. Biber & E. Finegan (Eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register (pp. 235–276). New York: Oxford University Press.
Sankoff, D., Sankoff, G., Laberge, S., & Topham, M. (1976). Méthodes d’échantillonage et utilisation de l’ordinateur dans l’étude de la variation grammaticale. Cahiers de Linguistique de l’Université du Québec, 6, 85–125. Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec.
Thibault, P., & Vincent, D. (1990). Un corpus de français parlé. Montréal 84: historique, méthodes, et perspectives de recherche. Quebec: Department of Languages and Linguistics, Laval University.
Trudgill, P. (1974a). The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trudgill, P. (1974b). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Trudgill, P. (1983). Acts of Conflicting Identity: The Sociolinguistics of British Pop-Song Pronunciation. In P. Trudgill (Ed.), On Dialect: Social and Geographical Perspectives (pp. 141–160). Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
Trudgill, P. (1988). Norwich Revisited: Recent Changes in an English Urban Dialect. English World-Wide, 9, 33–49.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hornsby, D. (2020). Liaison and Social Factors. In: Norm and Ideology in Spoken French. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-49299-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-49300-4
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)