Understanding cohesion in French liaison

This paper investigates the productivity of liaison contexts in French, on the basis of a conversational corpus of Laurentian French. A detailed study of liaison with invariable words (adverbs, prepositions, connectors) highlights the inadequacy of previous approaches to liaison contexts, which rely on syntactic or prosodic structure or various frequency measures. The productivity of liaison and lexical distinctions among invariable words are rather determined by the distributional characteristics of individual words: liaison is productive only with words that appear systematically in the same grammatical construction, as opposed to words that have a more flexible distribution. This factor is measured by transition probabilities. This result leads to a new understanding of cohesion in French liaison; it globally supports lexicalist and construction-based approaches to liaison contexts, while contributing to the characterization of the strength of liaison-related constructions.