Géraldine Legendre

When is less more? Faithfulness and minimal links in wh-chains

at Colorado; to Joseph Aoun, Luigi Burzio, Robert Frank, Jane Grimshaw, David Pesetsky and Alan Prince, for extremely helpful conversations; to audiences at Arizona, Brown, Cornell, Delaware, Georgetown, Hopkins, Maryland, UCLA, USC, and the MIT conference, for stimulating ideas and questions. For partial financial support, we gratefully acknowledge NSF grant BS-9209265, and then NSF grant IRI-9213894, both to Smolensky and Legendre; and the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins.

Unaccusativity in French

Abstract The Unaccusative Hypothesis states that intransitive predicates are of two types: unaccusatives and unergatives . As formulated originally within the framework of Relational Grammar, the argument of an unergative predicate is at the deepest syntactic level a subject while that of an unaccusative predicate is direct object. Although considerable cross-linguistic evidence has been amassed in favor of the Unaccusative Hypothesis, no detailed analysis of French intransitive predicates has been carried out though many analyses of French have assumed that some verbs are unaccusative while others are unergative. Nine arguments are presented here in support of recognizing two formally distinct classes of intransitives in French. These arguments are based on object raising, croire constructions, participial equi and absolute, reduced relatives, cliticization of the embedded indirect object in causative faire constructions, parallel transitive structures, auxiliary selection, nominalizations, and stativity. The present study concludes that it is possible to formulate a necessary and sufficient condition for unaccusativity in French.

Comprehension of Infrequent Subject–Verb Agreement Forms: Evidence From French-Learning Children

Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether young French-learning children (N = 76) are able to use a single number cue in subject-verb agreement contexts and match a visually dynamic scene with a corresponding verbal stimulus. Results from both preferential looking and pointing demonstrated significant comprehension in 30-month-olds with no preference for either singular or plural. These results challenge previous claims made on the basis of English and Spanish that comprehension of subject-verb agreement expressed as a bound morpheme is late, around 5 years of age (V. A. Johnson, J. G. de Villiers, & H. N. Seymour, 2005; A.-T. Pérez-Leroux, 2005). Properties of the adult input were also analyzed. Possible implications for theories of syntactic acquisition are discussed.

Optimality and Wh-Extraction

The study of wh-question formation has historically served as the empirical basis for major constructs in Government-Binding (GB) such as the Empty Category Principle (ECP), the existence of Logical Form (LF) as a separate level of representation— motivated in part by the abstract wh-movement at LF analysis of wh-in-situ in languages like Chinese (Huang, 1982)—and the central but controversial issue of which principles apply at which levels of representation. For example, Huang (1982) argues, based on Chinese, that the ECP applies at S-structure and LF while subjacency and his Condition on Extraction Domain (CED) apply only at S-structure.

SECONDARY PREDICATION AND FUNCTIONAL PROJECTIONS IN FRENCH

This paper focuses on the structural properties of secondary predication. It is argued, based on an analysis of French depictive and resultative secondary predicates, that secondary predicates are functional projections of the category Gender, they form constituents of their own, and they contain a PRO subject coindexed with a main subject or object. Configurationally, they are of two types: subject-oriented secondary predicates, which are adjoined to VP, and object-oriented secondary predicates, which are adjoined to VP (if resultative) or are sisters of V! (if depictive). Compared with previous analyses of secondary predication, the present one corroborates early proposals about the constituency and internal make-up of secondary predicates (Stowell 1981, 1983; Chomsky 1981). The main difference lies in the nature of the constituent itself: it is argued here that it is a functional projection, namely GenderP, a proposal which owes much to late 1980s and early 1990s explorations in the nature of syntactic categories. In particular, the present analysis leads to the proposal that Agr

INVERSION WITH CERTAIN FRENCH EXPERIENCER VERBS

_s

French impersonal constructions

and Agr

Object raising in French: A unified account

_o

Abstract Morphosyntax in Two- and Three-Year-Old Children: Evidence from Priming

(Chomsky 1991) should, at least in languages like French, be identified as Person and Gender, respectively. The lack of productive resultative constructions in French is also addressed.

On the Asymmetrical Difficulty of Acquiring Person Reference in French: Production Versus Comprehension

As in a number of other languages, certain psychological verbs in French display an interesting relation between thematic roles and surface grammatical relations: the theme appears as a superficial subject, while the experiencer acts as an indirect object. This paper argues that in French the superficial subject (theme) is a direct object at a deeper level, while the superficial indirect object (dative experiencer) is a subject at a deeper level. This contrasts with the analysis of Italian by Belletti & Rizzi 1988, which emphasizes that the dative experiencer is strictly an indirect object. In this paper, it is demonstrated that French dative experiencer verbs can be straightforwardly analyzed within Relational Grammar as INVERSION predicates occurring in multilevel structures whose initial subject demotes to indirect object. These results provide a challenge to GB analyses of psychological verbs; Belletti & Rizzis analysis, for example, does not extend from Italian to French.*