Pour une approche herméneutique de la liaison : les discours épilinguistiques et métalinguistiques des étudiants universitaires parisiens

The study tested the epilinguistic and metalinguistic awareness of French liaison by university students who were native speakers of French (N=18). The task consisted in listening to an oral passage that included deviant realizations of liaisons and other phonological phenomena, spotting the anomalies and commenting on them freely with the interviewer. A first aim was to investigate whether speakers’ epilinguistic awareness of liaison was affected by the classification of liaison contexts as obligatory, optional or forbidden liaisons. The classification was based on grammatical descriptions and real production data from the PFC corpus, with which the epilinguistic judgments of our informants were compared. A second goal was to determine if native speakers had high or low metalinguistic awareness of liaison phenomena, compared to metalinguistic phonological awareness of different phenomena like vowel alternations. The findings showed that epilinguistic awareness for liaison was not predictable from traditional classifications nor from quantitative production data; moreover, metalinguistic awareness was lower than for other phonological phenomena. These results were interpreted as evidence of the multidimensional nature of the liaison phenomena, which provides additional challenges to the speakers compared to purely phonological processes. Moreover, corpus-based frequency patterns of liaison production cannot be considered as a direct representation of the speakers’ explicit perception of the phenomenon. It is argued that, in addition to production corpora, explicit perception corpora should be collected to further develop our understanding of the relationship between language input and speakers’ representations..