LingLunch : Alexander Martin et al.

Alexander Martin, Quentin Dénigot, Yiming Liang et al. (Université Paris Cité/CNRS/LLF)
Liaisons dangereuses: A pragmatic sociological treatment of variable liaison in spoken French

Variable liaison is a phenomenon in spoken French where a latent consonant at the end of a word may be pronounced if the following word begins with a vowel. Previous work has highlighted the link between variable liaison and the written form, but has left the social aspects of this link underdeveloped. Here, we examine the social meanings of variable liaison by mobilising Eckert’s conception of indexical fields within the framework of pragmatic sociology, a critical sociological approach that provides a model to understand precisely how social interpretation happens, namely by proposing that a given social interactional situation is governed by a specific, locally-meaningful value system (termed world) that actors refer to in order to justify their behaviours. We then test the link between liaison and the written form experimentally and show that it is only in the industrial world, where professionalism and expertise are valued as a way of establishing one’s place in a merit-based hierarchy, that listeners in our task interpret social meaning of realised variable liaison.