Testing speakers’ use of the social meaning potential of variable liaison in spoken French

Abstract The relation between perception and production in social meaning is often taken to be transparent, with social meaning associations learned from observations of language use. However, recent work has suggested that this relation is often more complex than previously thought. Here, we present new data comparing the social meaning of realized variable liaison in spoken French, couched within the framework of the pragmatic sociology of critique. We recall data from a recent matched guise experiment showing that listeners associate the realization of liaison with meanings like “professionalism”, specifically in social situations where efficacy and expertise are at issue. Basing ourselves on this finding, we use a production task, presenting these same social situations to amateur and professional actors. We find that our participants do not exploit the social meaning potential of variable liaison, producing liaison at lexically-determined rates on a par with previous corpus studies. We discuss this discrepancy between perception and production, which suggests that the link between the two is dependent on the linguistic variable under investigation.