A New Look at French Liaison

Abstract

The phonology of French has attracted a great deal of attention from the theoreticians, especially for the phenomena connected with what is known as liaison (Trager 1944; Schane 1968; Hooper 1976; Klausenburger 1978; Gaatone 1979; Clements and Keyser 1983, Stemberger 1985, to mention only a selected few). What has largely been ignored, however, is that a given liaison may be either (a) obligatory, (b) optional or (c) forbidden. The purpose of this paper is to examine under what circumstances the requirement for liaison varies, and the probable underlying reason for this variation.