Abstract
Attention turns in this chapter to professionnels de la parole publique, a group for whom speaking in public is an occupational requirement, and whose use of liaison has been found to significantly exceed that of the general population (Sect. 8.1). Ågren’s early study of radio broadcasters is reviewed in Sect. 8.2, and findings for the twentieth- and twenty-first century political figures are considered in Sect. 8.3. While factors such as the social background or political allegiance appear to have some influence, there is no consistent relationship between these extralinguistic factors and overall liaison use, or the use of liaison sans enchaînement (Sect. 8.4). Newsreaders (Sect. 8.5) are found signalling scripted speech through liaison when reading from autocue, while in the case of audiobooks (Sect. 8.6), where the relationship between the speaker and the written word is more overt, some unexpected liaisons are used. The implications of the findings for this special group of speakers are discussed in Sect. 8.7.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Encrevé (1988: 76 fn):
Par professionnels de la parole publique nous entendons toutes les catégories de locuteurs dont la profession implique régulièrement la prise de parole en public.
- 2.
The terms ‘style’ and ‘register’ are used inconsistently in French linguistics, each being deployed by anglophone linguists to denote intraspeaker variation linked to sociosituational formality. As this book attempts to examine liaison through the prism of quantitative sociolinguistic methodology, it seems appropriate to use ‘style’ in Labov’s sense, and reserve ‘register’ for reference to language associated with a particular profession or activity, e.g. ‘the register of sports reporting’.
- 3.
Pierre Léon (1971: 134) reports an even wider range of variability—between 9% and 100%—for ten speeches by Charles De Gaulle recorded between 1959 and 1961.
- 4.
While this was also true of Marchais, Lecanuet and Garaud, none of these had a serious chance of election to the Elysée Palace. Jospin himself would be a more credible presidential candidate for the Parti Socialiste (PS) later in his career (in 1995 and 2002), losing the second-round run-off to Jacques Chirac in 1995.
- 5.
Compare for example an overall liaison rate of 47.7% for the socially mixed PFC corpus and 41.4% for Laks’ working-class Villejuif adolescents, who as we saw above, realized only a miniscule number of variable liaisons.
- 6.
For Encrevé (1988: 262), this found expression in a breakdown of rigid social distinctions and codes: from male teachers no longer feeling obliged to wear ties at work, to the first swear words published in Le Monde. A marked decline in non-reciprocal use of V and T pronouns had also been reported by Brown and Gilman (1960).
- 7.
Cf. Laks and Peuvergne (2017: 68):
Il s’agit bien d’un phénomène catégorique, constant, stable dans l’espace temporel comme dans l’espace social ou l’espace stylistique. Ce phénomène est si catégorique que l’on peut en effet défendre avec de très nombreux grammairiens l’existence en français, et pour tous les français, de mots uniques composés par figement de liaisons toujours réalisées.
- 8.
Laks and Peuvergne admit to having had difficulties in balancing their HPOL2 sample, which includes 17 women and 24 men. Women barely figure at all in Encrevé’s 21-speaker sample, which includes only two female politicians: Marie-France Garaud and Simone Veil.
- 9.
Encrevé’s remarks came two years before the modest reforms set out in the 1990 Rectification de l’Orthographe, which would be widely condemned by France’s elite (see Ball 1997: 191–92). These followed a long line of tepid and largely unsuccessful proposals including those of the Beslais commissions of 1952 and 1965 which, in spite of their ‘caractère incontestable de modération’ were quietly shelved (see Désirat and Hordé 1976: 220–21).
- 10.
Encrevé (1988: 281–82) cites the famous first dictée scene from Pagnol’s Topaze (2004 [1928]) in which Topaze stresses implausibly the final consonants (‘Des moutonsse…étai-eunnt’), as an example of how spelling pronunciation was inculcated in schools. Concern over over-emphasis on the daily dictation had been expressed by none other than Jules Ferry, in a speech to Directors of Ecoles Normales in April 1880: ‘A la dictée—à l’abus de la dictée—il faut substituer un enseignement plus libre […]. C’est une bonne chose assurément que d’apprendre l’orthographe (…) mais épargnons ce temps si précieux qu’on dépense trop souvent dans les vétilles de l’orthographe, dans les pièges de la dictée, qui font de cet exercice une manière de tour de force et une espèce de casse-tête chinois’ (quoted by Chervel 2006).
- 11.
The dangers to credibility of an inappropriate newsreading style are well illustrated by the experience of the United Kingdom, where authority is associated with the accents of power, and in particular RP (see Hornsby 2019). Citing the example of the wartime broadcaster Wilfred Pickles, Lynda Mugglestone (2003: 270–72) recalls an experiment in which he was asked by the BBC to read the news in the accent of his native Yorkshire, apparently in an attempt to confuse the Nazis. This led to complaints from listeners—not infrequently from Yorkshire themselves—that they could no longer believe the news they were hearing. While broadcasters in recent years have striven for greater inclusivity (estimates put the number of RP speakers at only 3–4% of the UK population), objections to news presenters with marked regional accents continue to be heard. In 2014 a viewer sent the BBC Breakfast presenter Steph McGovern £20 towards ‘correction therapy’ for her Middlesbrough accent, which the viewer called a ‘terrible affliction’ (https://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2014/nov/25/viewer-offered-bbcs-steph-mcgovern-20-to-correct-her-northern-accent; accessed 24.7.2019).
- 12.
In the PFC reading exercise, the only preposition in a liaison context was dans, which was liaised in 30/30 cases.
- 13.
Hornsby (2019) asks whether professionnels de la parole publique are ever truly ‘off the record’: the question remains open but the evidence of Pustka et al.’s data suggests that there is indeed a significant gap between their scripted and non-scripted performance.
- 14.
Coutenson (forthcoming 2021) observes a similar pattern among another group of professionnels de la parole publique. Her survey of chart-topping French language pop songs between 1956 and 2017 shows a sharp fall in use of variable liaison by francophone artists over this period.
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Hornsby, D. (2020). Professionnels de la Parole Publique. In: Norm and Ideology in Spoken French. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_8
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