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

The relation between perception and production in social meaning is often taken to betransparent, with social meaning associations learned from observations of language use.However, recent work has suggested that this relation is often more complex than previouslythought. Here, we present new data comparing the social meaning of realized variable liaisonin spoken French, couched within the framework of the pragmatic sociology of critique. Werecall data from a recent matched guise experiment showing that listeners associate therealization of liaison with meanings like"professionalism", specifically in social situationswhere efficacy and expertise are at issue. Basing ourselves on this finding, we use aproduction 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. Wediscuss this discrepancy between perception and production, which suggests that the linkbetween the two is dependent on the linguistic variable under investigation.