Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2006

We propose a new type of syntactic deficiency that we call “lightness”, which is relevant for all major syntactic categories. It applies to both words and phrases. Lightness is taken into account by different aspects of syntax (word order, extraction, adjunction sites, subcategorisation). Light forms differ from both incorporated and traditional “weak” forms, in the sense that they can be modified or coordinated. We show that lightness is relevant for French word order in the verbal domain. Light forms must be closer to the head (the verb) than other forms.

A locative inversion (LI) sentence is a distinct construction characterized by the presence in clause-initial position of a locative or temporal complement (which is either subcategorized by the verb or operates as an adjunct) followed by the verb itself followed by the subject . The discourse function of such a construction is to establish the spatial or temporal setting of a discourse-new entity (represented by the subject) within the framework of a more general context already presented in a preceding discourse. The verb is there only to provide and denote a specific manifestation of the existence, localisation or state of this entity, but the information it conveys can be often reduced to a minimum (to be, to be found) or even omitted. On the contrary, the subject in clause-final position is assigned a predicate-focus function (“presentational focus”) from which the following discourse is generally bound to develop. In this study, only LI constructions with spatial complements are given a description of their most salient syntactic properties and of their discursive effects.

The position and meaning of Modern French adjectives is discussed in the generative syntax framework. The classical analysis of Cinque (1995), by N-raising to some functional position, is rejected for a number of reasons, notably its inability to account for changes in position since the Old French period. After a brief discussion of some typological and diachronic facts, two ‘semantic’ analyses are considered, those of Bouchard (1998) and Larson (1998). Based on Larson’s mapping model, the present study proposes an analysis of the position and meaning of adjectives in French in terms of movement of ‘restrictive’ and ‘evaluative’ adjectives to the pre-N position and the presence of logical operators of existence and genericity within DP. This analysis is supported by both semantic and syntactic facts: constraints on the determiner, as well as on modification, stress and coordination, defective semantic features.

This contribution is devoted to the study of French « locative inversion » structures X V S (Sur la cheminée trônent deux chandeliers). It is argued that such structures are specific, and cannot be derived from X S V structures (Sur la cheminée, deux chandeliers trônent), since the syntactic relation between X and V is different — X being in the scope of the predicate in the former case, but not in the latter. Furthermore, the two structures cannot be considered, on the semantic level, as paraphrases deriving from a unique underlying representation, since the semantic values and interpretations attributed to the verbal item differ ; whereas on the pragmatic level, each construction enters a different type of discourse setting. Thus a formal theory is outsketched, based on a topological approach of word ordering in the process of utterance construction, which accounts for the specificity of the above mentioned structures.

This article aims at two objectives : We want to show that principal word order phenomena can be described in a topological approach to linearization, i.e. a linking of an (unordered) dependency tree and a ordered structure, the topological constituent tree. Moreover, we want to put forward the importance and naturalness of a particular constituent in the modeling of French word order, the verb cluster (amas verbal) : It is composed of one or more verbs, of necessary functional words (prepositions and complementizers), and of very constraint lexical elements other than the verbs as for example clitics and certain adverbs. The work is based on a rigorous formalization of the dependency-topology link in Gerdes & Kahane 2001. The verb cluster in the topological structure remains to be shown to be closely related to a prosodic constituent.

Linguistics studies on full inversion in French do not clearly state a difference between locative inversion (LI) and absolute inversion (AI) in independent clauses. In this corpus-based study, I demonstrate the relevance of drawing a line between the two word-order phenomena. I first outline the different formal constraints shared by the two inversions, and then show that some properties typical of LI — which have been put forward in previous work- do not apply to AI. In a final section, I relate the formal properties of both inverted structures to two different deictic functions in written discourse. Both inversions imply a deictic reference to the on-going discourse, but whereas LI refers directly to the situation that is represented, AI refers to the discursive strategy of the discourse.

The article gives an introduction to the concept of an independent topological level of description as developped by Danish grammarians. According to this approach topology (the linear ordering of constituents) and syntax (the hierarchical ordering of constituents) constitute two different levels with a certain, but not necessary, isomorphy between their elements. The topology of Danish and Old French, two V2 languages, is described and confronted with a proposal for a topological description of Modern French. It is proposed that whereas the verb constitutes the topological centre or pivot in V2 languages, it is the (nominal) subject which has this role in Modern French. Some consequences of this proposal are examined and it is shown that a description of word order based upon the syntactic structure necessarily amounts to a topological description because the syntactic trees needed to describe certain word order phenomena are so « flat » that they become indistinguishable from the linear and unidimensional sequence of topology.

In this article we show that the distribution of nominal inversion is not the same in all types of embedded adverbial clauses. We present a new descriptive generalization according to which the appearance of postverbal subjects must necessarily be favoured by the presence of a spatio-temporal topic or an indication of the subject’s focal interpretation in asserted clauses (including concessive and causal clauses), but not in non-asserted clauses (including temporal, comparative and final clauses and embedded clauses beginning with sans que). We argue that the factors which must necessarily be present to license nominal inversion in asserted clauses indicate that the subject is not interpreted as the topic with respect to which the clause is asserted. In non-asserted clauses, the postverbal subject can never be interpreted as the topic with respect to which the clause is asserted, and no additional factors are needed for nominal inversion to be acceptable.

The description of the French sentence structure is based on the contrast between arguments and adjuncts. In order to show that this contrast is confirmed by other linguistic facts, the organization of the French sentence is compared to that of Dutch. It is showed, firstly, how the comparison of French and Dutch contributes to improve the descriptive models of sentence structure used in the two languages. Secondly, it is argued that the opposition between adjuncts and arguments in French is confirmed by their differences in behaviour when placed in the initial extra-clausal position: whereas arguments have to be resumed by a coreferential pronoun that is intonationally integrated in the clause, adjuncts are not subject to this constraint. In Dutch, by contrast, arguments and adjuncts behave in the same way, in that they are both resumed by a coreferential element. The difference between French and Dutch, finally, can be ascribed to the V2 feature of Dutch and to the specific status of the initial intra-clausal position.

We provide an analysis of French clitic pronouns in multimodal categorial grammars. This analysis is a simplification of the one by Esther Kraak along the lines of Raffaela Bernardi and Richard Moot for quantifier scope. As expected from the categorial setting, our formalisation provides an easy way to compute semantic representations even when there are clitic climbing and control phenomena.

We examine the evolution of the syntax of the verb phrase in Middle French, in a topological framework. The V2 hypothesis can be maintained for this stage if we admit that V becomes a VP in Middle French, thus explaining that the non topicalised subject will be placed further after the verb, particularly after the past participle, understood as a verbal constituant ; in the same time, a final position of focus appears, leading to place a heavy subject in the last position of the clause. The other major position of the subject, just before the verb, is the most frequent in subordinate clauses. A major fact of the subsequent evolution is the restriction to the adverbials in the possibilities of insertions between verb and participles or infinitives, and also between a relative subject or a complementizer and the verb in subordinate clauses.

In this paper we try to explicit the specific and non specific constraints that govern the order of the constituents in French predicative noun phrases and compare them with those that govern the constituents of associated verbal clauses.

In modern French, Noun Groups which fulfill a function of non prepositional complements (ie. direct objects) are traditionnally said to have a strictly fixed position after the verb, in contrast with other types of complements which have a freer distribution. Using data mostly drawn from spoken language corpora, we show that, contrary to commun assumptions, non prepositional complements are likely to be placed before the verb. In order to give a precise account, it appears necessary to make a distinction between two different types of pre-verbal complements. Such a distinction is made through the theoretical frame of macro-syntax.

In the first part of the paper we give an overwiew of a natural syntactic class of constituents defined by means of a specific set of criteria : the “non régis” (NR) (non integrated in the grammatical structure of the utterance). This class, gathers, various kinds of grammatical units of non canonical syntactic status in traditional descriptions : sentence adverbials, appositions, interjections, non canonical subordinate clauses, discourse particles… In the second part of the paper we show that, contrary to current assumptions, these linguistic units are not randomly combined with the core elements of the sentence. They are inserted in the utterance according to specific ordering rules and distributional constraints. These constraints are studied at two levels : constraints on their possible insertions in grammatical structures (microsyntax), constraints on the positions they can occupy in relation with the “macrosyntactic” nucleus of the utterance (the part of the utterance bearing its illocutionnary force) as defined in Blanche-Benveniste (84, 90).