Introduction

Liaison in French is comparable to certain phenomena which occur in English. For example, the English indefinite article is a before a word beginning with a consonant (a book) and an before a word beginning with a vowel (an old book). In some English dialects (for instance British English), words which end in a ‘vowel + r’ sequence in the orthography (for example, far, never) are pronounced without a final [r], unless the next word begins in a vowel (compare far [fα:] and far away [fα:rǝwe], never [nεvǝ] and never again [nεvǝrǝgen]). The absence/presence of these consonants [n] and [r] in English is, on a reduced scale, similar to the pervasive phenomenon of liaison in French, where ordinarily silent word-final consonants may be pronounced before vowel-initial words (see Table 11.1).

In Chapter 5 (Section 5.7), liaison was briefly considered in its interaction with nasal vowels. The goal of this chapter is to take a closer and more comprehensive look at liaison. We shall first present a cursory history of the phenomenon, and then a fairly detailed examination of the conditions under which liaison (or linking) consonants may occur. We shall close the chapter on a set of practical rules which foreign students can use as convenient guidelines for their own speech.