La liaison : effets de fréquence et constructions

This paper views the alternation between liaison consonants and their absence as due neither to insertion nor deletion, but rather to the existence of alternant morphosyntactic constructions containing the liaison consonant. These alternate constructions can be viewed as irregular in much the same way as certain morphological paradigms are considered irregular. A certain level of token frequency is necessary to maintain these irregularities (as confirmed with data from Âgren, 1973), and the less frequent of such constructions tend to be lost. High frequency constructions (such as determiner + noun) are also felt to have a higher degree of syntactic cohesion; thus frequency can account for the intuition that liaison is maintained where there is tighter syntactic cohesion.Bybee Joan. La liaison : effets de fréquence et constructions. In: Langages, 39ᵉ année, n°158, 2005. La liaison : de la phonologie à la cognition. pp. 24-37