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French liaison has long been a favourite testing ground for phonological theories, a situation which can undoubtedly be attributed to the complexity of the phenomenon, involving in particular phonology/syntax, phonology/morphology, phonology/lexicon interfaces. Dealing with liaison requires stepping into all the components of the grammar, while at the same time tackling the quick sands of variation. The data on which a number of formal analyses are based have often been a source of concern since liaison, in part because of its intrinsic variable character, requires extensive and robust data. In the wake of the results from the study of other corpora, we present here extensive results based on the PFC database (Phonologie du français contemporain: usages, variétés et structures) and point to their implications for models of linguistic structure. While we do not believe that a motivated theoretical account can be mechanically extracted from the data, we conclude that future analyses will have to take explicitly into account the results of extensive corpus work as well as sociolinguistic surveys, acquisition studies, experimental phonetics and (neuro-)psycho-linguistic investigations, including the relationship between speech and writing. As stressed in Chevrot, Fayol and Laks (2005), these analyses will have to acknowledge that French liaison is not a homogeneous locus but a multi-faceted phenomenon requiring us to accept, without demur, the crossing of disciplinary boundaries.

Dans ce travail, nous tenterons de definir le domaine du mot phonologique en cadien et nous montrerons que ce domaine joue un role crucial dans la phonologie de cette langue puisque c'est a ce niveau que l'accent est fixe et que c'est le domaine pertinent aussi bien pour la liaison que pour l'ensemble des schwas rythmiques. Nous verrons aussi que les caracteristiques prosodiques du cadien par rapport au francais standard ne rappellent pas un stade anterieur de la langue pas plus qu'ils ne representent un caique systematique de l'anglais et que le cadien reste bien une langue dont le rythme a une base syllabique.