French Subject Islands

This book examines extractions out of the subject, which is traditionally considered to be an island for extraction. There is a debate among linguists regarding whether the “subject island constraint” is a syntactic phenomenon or an illusion caused by cognitive or pragmatic factors. The book focusses on French, that provides an interesting case study because it allows certain extractions out of the subject despite not being a typical null-subject language. The book takes a discourse-based approach and introduces the “Focus-Background Conflict” constraint, which posits that a focused element cannot be part of a backgrounded constituent due to a pragmatic contradiction. The major novelty of this proposal is that it predicts a distinction between extractions out of the subject in focalizing and non-focalizing constructions. The central contribution of this book is to offer the detailed results of a series of empirical studies (corpus studies and experiments) on extractions out of the subject is French. These studies offer evidence for the possibility of extraction out of the subject in French. But they also reveal a clear distinction between constructions. While extractions out of the subject are common and highly acceptable in relative clauses, this is not the case for interrogatives and clefts. Finally, the book proposes a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis of subject islands. It demonstrates the interaction between information structure and syntax using a representation of information structure based on Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS).

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject French Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Leipzig (Faculty of Philology, Department of British Studies), language: English, abstract: The goal of this term paper is to examine the ongoing influence of Norman and Standard French on CIE. To present the French influence on CIE, articles in the local online press were studied to find utterances, either grammatical or lexical, that were derived from Norman French. The Guernsey Press and Jersey Evening Post were searched for examples. Starting with an introduction to the geographical situation and the historical background of the Channel Islands, the term paper will provide an insight into the features of the English of the Channel Islands. Moreover, a short overview about the current linguistic situation will be given. The second part relates to the analysis of newspaper articles regarding the ongoing of the French influence in the local press. Lastly, after summarising the gained findings the term paper provides an outcome on where CIE is headed. The history of the Channel Islands and their specific geographical situation between France and Great Britain caused the emergence of a lesser known variety of the English language - the English of the Channel Islands. The closeness to France raised various Norman French dialects and arouses the interest in investigating the current linguistic situation. For someone the Channel Islands are clearly an English speaking region; for others, they represent a francophone territory due to their proximity to France. Viereck characterises the Channel Islands as an “Anglicist’s no-Man’s land”. This underlines the ambiguous linguistic situation and provides opportunities for hypotheses concerning the use of the language.

French is a syntactically interesting language, with aspects of its word order and clause structure triggering a variety of important developments in syntactic theory. This is a concise and accessible guide to the syntax of Modern French, providing a clear overview of those aspects of the language that are of particular interest to linguists. A broad variety of topics are covered, including the development and spread of French; the evolution of its syntax; syntactic variation; lexical categories; noun, verb and adjective phrases; clause structure; movement; and agreement. Drawing on the work of a wide range of scholars, it highlights the important role of French in the development of syntactic theory and shows how French challenges some fundamental assumptions about syntactic structure. An engaging and in-depth guide to all that is interesting about French, The Syntax of French will be invaluable to students and scholars of syntactic theory and comparative linguistics.