Variable and invariable liaison in a corpus of spoken French

Using texts selected from the C-Oral-Rom corpus, this study considers how linguistic and sociolinguistic variables affect liaison. In the majority of cases, liaison appears on monosyllabic function words. Individual lexemes differ greatly in rate of liaison. With regard to sociolinguistic variation, female speakers realize liaison consonants more often than male speakers, younger speakers realize it more often than older speakers, and liaison rates for speakers without university degree are higher than for speakers with university degree. Results are discussed in the light of models of prosodic structure and with respect to their implications for models of socio-linguistic variation.