54

Liaison in French is commonly described as involving a “latent” consonant whose realization or suppression is determined by contextual factors. This is an oversimplified view of the phenomenon, but liaison consonants (when pronounced) do have distinctive properties that call for a special treatment. Furthermore, the same notion of latent consonant appears to be relevant for morphological derivation. In this paper we offer a new formalization that captures the special status of latent consonants, by representing them as an “appendix” to the phonological “body” of a linguistic sign. We present an analysis of liaison that makes use of phonological representations of this type (while remaining general enough to accommodate cases where liaison does not involve a latent consonant). We explain in detail how the phonology is constructed in phrasal combinations, incorporating syntactic and lexical constraints, giving rise to the observed inventory of obligatory, optional, and impossible liaison contexts. We also show that the phonological appendix can be used to account for the realization of latent consonants in morphological derivation (even when these consonants do not participate in the liaison alternation).