Proper name-marking vialiaisonin French

Abstract

AbstractTheliaisonconsonant [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 ofexaptation, 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 withliaison, and proper name-marking vialiaisonshould also become possible with otherliaisonconsonants. On the other hand, we may be dealing with a (completed) diachronic process, in that only those NA-combinations which allowedliaisonat the relevant point in time may have aliaisonconsonant in their univerbalized form. That is, new NA-combinations, even though they are used as proper names, do not display aliaisonconsonant, becauseliaisonis no longer possible. The purpose of this paper was to investigate, based on empirical studies, whetherliaisonproductively 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.