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The liaisonconsonant [z] in French noun phrases has traditionally been assumed to function as a plural marker. The realization of “plural [z]” in N(oun)-A(djective)-combinations is becoming, however, very rare in naturalistic data – except for contexts which allow a proper-name reading. On the one hand, one might think that we are dealing with a recent phenomenon, the beginning of a potential linguistic change in French in the sense of exaptation, reuse of former morphophonological material such as plural markers to signal proper-namehood in the sense of ‘frozen morphology’. If this turns out correct, we expect the productivity of the new synchronic function to increase: New NA-combinations which function as proper names should be realized systematically with liaison, and proper name-marking via liaisonshould also become possible with other liaisonconsonants. On the other hand, we may be dealing with a (completed) diachronic process, in that only those NA-combinations which allowed liaisonat the relevant point in time may have a liaisonconsonant in their univerbalized form. That is, new NA-combinations, even though they are used as proper names, do not display a liaisonconsonant, because liaisonis no longer possible. The purpose of this paper was to investigate, based on empirical studies, whether liaisonproductively marks NA-combinations which function as proper names and distinguishes them from NA-combinations that count as common nouns, or whether we are dealing with a completed diachronic process. In view of the poor productivity observed, we argue that we are dealing with cases of univerbation.

The aim of this contribution is to reposition a key notion to the centre of Wulf Oesterreicher’s theoretical disciplinary reasoning: grammar, or more generally, ‘rules and norms’ specific to single languages and varieties the linguist deals with. This includes contingent, non-motivated structures, and claiming the necessity to analyse their existence ‘as such’ (i.e., also independently of communicative, social etc. factors) as the core task of linguistics. This point is illustrated with a much debated variable in French descriptive linguistics: past participle agreement. Combining theoretical and corpus linguistic observations, the distribution of the two variants (absence vs. realization of agreement) in constructions with the auxiliary avoir shows that a grammatical analysis interested in the derivation of certain rules and their application in actual language usage permits to understand the logic of linguistic variation - at least the one observable alongside the standard - non-standard opposition in French.

AbstractBased on a quantitative empirical analysis of more than 4600 French text messages from the newly established Swiss reference corpus of text messages (cf. www.sms4science.ch), we show that the (graphic) realization of past participle agreement, often considered to be particularly prone to orthographic errors and indicative of more formal registers of contemporary French, is realized in the overwhelming majority of cases in our data (89,9 %). This holds independently of the sometimes heavily deviant graphic character of the respective text messages and the (very rare) phonic realization of past participle agreement in contemporary French. Significant triggering linguistic factors for the absence of (full) past participle agreement are type and distance of the controller of the agreement (more deviant realizations with relative pronouns than with cliticized objects, more deviant realizations with the controller following the past participle in constructions with être as the auxiliary), and the features of agreement (more deviant realizations of gender than of number features on the past participle), this being in line with important universal typological and theoretical findings. External factors such as sex and education play a certain role, too, which makes past participle agreement in French a sociolinguistic rather than a stylistic variable bound to graphic forms of communication.