French Dislocation Interpretation, Syntax, Acquisition

by de Cat, Cécile

• ISBN13: 9780199230488
• ISBN10: 019923048X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780191528132
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-31
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The pervasive use of dislocations (as in Le chocolat, c'est bon) is a key characteristic of spoken French. This book offers various new and well-motivated insights, based on tests conducted by the author, on the syntactic analysis, prosody, and the interpretation of dislocation in spokenFrench. It also considers important aspects of the acquisition of dislocation by monolingual children learning different French dialects. The author argues that spoken French is a discourse-configurational language, in which topics are obligatorily dislocated. She develops a syntactically parsimonious account, which maximizes the import of interfaces involved with discourse and prosody. She proposes clear diagnostics, following areexamination of the status of subject clitics and a reevaluation of the characteristic prosody of dislocated constituents. The theoretical arguments throughout the book rest on data that comes from corpora of spontaneous production and from various elitication experiments.This book throws new light on French syntax and prosody and makes an important and original contribution to the study of linguistic interfaces. Clearly expressed and tightly argued, it will interest scholars and advanced students of French and of its acquisition as a first language as well aslinguistic theorists interested in the interfaces between syntax, discourse, and phonology.

Author Biography

Cecile De Cat is a senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Leeds. Her published work includes articles in Lingua, the Journal of French Language Studies, and the International Review of Applied Linguistics.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. x
List of Tables	p. xii
Abbreviations	p. xiv
Acknowledgements	p. xvi
Introduction	p. 1
Diagnostics for dislocated elements	p. 4
Defining the language under investigation: unmarked spoken French	p. 4
Advanced French: a questionable notion	p. 7
French subject clitics are not agreement morphemes	p. 9
Introduction and background	p. 10
Testing the predictions of the morphological analysis	p. 11
Implications for the system of agreement morphology in spoken French	p. 11
Subject clitics are available for syntactic movement	p. 13
Getting in the way: ne, en, y, and object clitics	p. 15
Ne is more than an affix	p. 15
Object clitics as affixes?	p. 18
En and y as affixes?	p. 18
Concluding remarks	p. 19
Spoken French does not allow subject doubling	p. 19
Distributional restrictions	p. 21
The presence of a subject clitic forces the topic interpretation of a coindexed XP	p. 22
Conclusion	p. 26
French subject clitics: grammatical or anaphoric 'agreement'?	p. 26
Locality	p. 27
Questioning of the related argument	p. 28
Topicalization of parts of idioms	p. 28
Peripheral vs. core status of the related argument	p. 29
Conclusion	p. 29
Information structure and syntactic structure	p. 29
The morpheme-like properties of French subject clitics are accidental	p. 32
Conclusion	p. 33
The prosodic characteristics of French dislocation	p. 34
Right-dislocation prosody in spoken French	p. 34
Prosodic differences between left-dislocated and heavy subjects in spoken French: a review of the literature	p. 43
The acoustic characteristics of LD	p. 47
The acoustic characteristics of heavy subjects	p. 50
Summary	p. 50
Diagnostics for LD? A preliminary acoustic analysis	p. 51
Clear cases of LD prosody	p. 51
Comparison with heavy subjects	p. 53
Interfering factors	p. 57
Summary	p. 60
Conclusion	p. 62
Interpretation	p. 63
Topics	p. 63
General definition	p. 64
The information structure partitioning of the sentence	p. 65
Topics do not have to correspond to old information	p. 67
The relevance condition	p. 70
Stage topics and aboutness topics	p. 71
The role of topics	p. 74
Summary	p. 76
Topics in spoken French	p. 77
A test case for topichood	p. 77
Indefinite topics	p. 81
Take 1: generic indefinites	p. 81
Take 2: specific and d-linked indefinites	p. 86
Topics in specificational pseudo-clefts	p. 91
Topics take wide scope	p. 92
Spoken French as a discourse-configurational language	p. 94
Conclusion	p. 96
Syntax	p. 98
A brief overview of the literature	p. 98
TopicP or no TopicP?	p. 99
Functional heads to derive peripheral syntax	p. 99
Alternatives to the functional projection approach	p. 100
What moves in narrow syntax (if anything)?	p. 101
The topic moves	p. 102
The resumptive moves	p. 103
Nothing moves in narrow syntax	p. 103
Some move, some don't	p. 105
Dislocated topics in spoken French: an overview	p. 108
Clause-peripheral topics	p. 108
Conclusion	p. 111
Caveat	p. 111
French dislocation is not generated by movement	p. 118
French LD does not yield Weak Crossover effects	p. 118
French LD does not license parasitic gaps	p. 119
No Relativized Minimality effects	p. 120
No reconstruction effects in the interpretation of French LD	p. 121
A variable in a left-dislocated XP cannot be bound by a clause-mate QP	p. 121
Absence of Principle C effects	p. 122
Wide scope with respect to negation	p. 123
Interpretation of variables	p. 124
French LD is not sensitive to islands	p. 124
Native speakers' judgements	p. 125
To what extent are islands a diagnostic for movement?	p. 129
On the status of the 'resumptive' pronoun	p. 131
CLLD or Hanging Topic?	p. 134
Which analysis for French RD?	p. 139
French RD is not an LF/PF phenomenon	p. 140
French RD is not LD lower in the tree	p. 144
French RD is not LD+IP-inversion	p. 146
Differences are unexpected if RD = LD	p. 147
French RD is not subject to the Right-Roof constraint	p. 148
Summary	p. 149
A first-merge adjunction analysis of French dislocation	p. 149
The analysis	p. 149
Discourse Projections	p. 150
D-subarrays	p. 153
Last-resort adjunction	p. 154
Topic interpretation	p. 154
On the relation between the dislocated element and its resumptive	p. 155
Predictions of the adjunction analysis	p. 155
Problematic predictions of the template approach	p. 155
French embedded Discourse Projections	p. 157
Deriving the differences between LD and RD from the properties of the peripheries	p. 160
Prosodic properties and their consequences	p. 161
General salience and its consequences	p. 163
Linear order and its consequences	p. 164
Theoretical consequences	p. 165
Reconciling syntax and information structure	p. 166
Conclusion	p. 169
Acquisition	p. 171
Introduction	p. 171
Identifying early dislocated elements	p. 172
Omissibility	p. 172
Resumption	p. 173
Word order and intervening material	p. 173
Context	p. 175
Prosody	p. 176
Dislocations emerge early	p. 179
Early dislocations and the CP projection	p. 180
Eight diagnostics for the implementation of CP	p. 181
Discussion	p. 194
Sentence fragments: mini root projections	p. 196
Primitives, learnability, and early discourse competence	p. 204
Early discourse competence	p. 205
Absence of violations of the relevant discourse rules	p. 205
ILP subjects	p. 205
Dislocated indefinites	p. 207
Positive evidence for the relevant pragmatic competence	p. 209
Learnability considerations	p. 212
Conclusion	p. 213
Concluding remarks	p. 215
Adult data	p. 217
Child data	p. 243
Judgement elicitation	p. 267
References	p. 278
Index	p. 293
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