Article published in:
Structures, Strategies and Beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti
Edited by Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann and Simona Matteini
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 223] 2015
► pp. 209–236

A case of focal adverb preposing in French

This article is about a specific case of focal adverb preposing in French, i.e. preposing of the adverb ainsi ‘in this way’, which is necessarily followed by subject inversion, resulting in the word order [focal ainsi – V – S]. This construction appears in a very specific discourse context and, just as other cross-linguistic types of focus preposing, is the result of the movement of this adverb to a focus projection in the left periphery. I show that this correctly predicts the construction to be a main clause phenomenon and provide a syntactic analysis in terms of Relativized Minimality.
Keywords: Focus preposing, Focus projection, left periphery, main clause phenomenon, Relativized Minimality, subject inversion
Published online: 27 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.223.10lah
References
Abels, Klaus
2012 The Italian Left Periphery: A view from locality. Linguistic Inquiry 43(2): 229–254. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, Godard, Danièle & Sabio, Frédéric
2008 Two types of NP preposing in French. In The Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Stefan Müller (ed.), 306–324. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
2009 The dramatic extraction construction in spoken French. Bucharest working papers in Linguistics 11(1): 135–148.Google Scholar
Authier, Jean-Marc
2011 A movement analysis of French modal ellipsis. Probus 23: 175–216. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Authier, Jean-Marc & Haegeman, Liliane
2014a French adverbial clauses. Rescue by ellipsis and the truncation versus intervention debate. Probus. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2014b No such thing as ‘parameterized structural deficiency in the left periphery’. In Language Use and Linguistic Structure, Joseph Emonds & Markéta Janebová (eds), 33–46. Olomouc: Palacký University Press.Google Scholar
Aelbrecht, Lobke, Haegeman, Liliane & Nye, Rachel
(eds) 2012 Main Clause Phenomena. New Horizons [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 190]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Barbosa, Pilar
2001 On inversion in wh-questions in Romance. In Romance Inversion, Aafke Hulk & Jean-Yves. Pollock (eds), 2–59. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Belletti, Adriana
2001 ‘Inversion’ as focalization. In Inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal Grammar, Aafke Hulk & Jean-Yves Pollock (eds), 60–90. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2004 Aspects of the Low IP Area. In The Structure of CP and IP: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2, Luigi Rizzi (ed.), 16–51. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2008 The CP of clefts. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 33: 191–204.Google Scholar
2009 Structures and Strategies. New York NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
2011 Focus and the predicate of clefts. Paper presented at GIST3: Cartographic Structures and Beyond workshop at Ghent University.
2012 Focusing on clefts. Paper presented at the Workshop Cleft Sentences in Romance and Germanic, Going Romance, Leuven, December.
2013 On fin: Italian che, Japanese no, and the selective properties of the copula in clefts. In Deep Insights, Broad Perspectives. Essays in Honor of Mamooru Saito, Yoichi Miyamoto, Daiko Takahashi, Hideki Maki, Masao Ochi, Koji Sugisaki & Asako Uchibori (eds), 42–55. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.Google Scholar
2014 The Focus map of clefts: Extraposition and Predication. To appear in Beyond Functional Sequence, Ur Shlonsky (ed.). Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Benincà, Paola
2001 L’ordine degli elementi della frase e le costruzioni marcate. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, Vol. 1, Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi & Anna Cardinaletti (eds) 129–208. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina
2004 Resumptive relatives and LF chains. In The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 2, Luigi Rizzi (ed.), 76–114. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2013 On Focus movement in Italian. In Information Structure and Agreement [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 197], Victoria Camacho-Taboada, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández, Javier Martín-González and Mariano Reyes-Tejedor (eds), 194–215. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire
2006 Les clivées françaises de type : C’est comme ça que, C’est pour ça que, c’est là que tout a commencé. Moderna Språk 100(2): 273–287.Google Scholar
Bocci, Giuliano
2007 Criterial positions and left periphery in Italian. Evidence for the syntactic encoding of contrastive focus. Nanzan Linguistics 3(1): 35–70. Special issue.Google Scholar
2013 The Syntax–Prosody Interface: A Cartographic Perspective with Evidence from Italian [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 204]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Boeckx, Cédric & Jeong, Youngmi
2004 The fine structure of intervention in syntax. In Issues in Current Linguistic Theory: A Festschrift for Hong Bae Lee, Chungja Kwon & Wonbin Lee (eds), 83–116. Seoul: Kyungchin.Google Scholar
Camacho-Taboada, Victoria & Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel L
2014 Focus fronting and root phenomena in Spanish and English. In Language Use and Linguistic Structure, Joseph Emonds & Markéta Janebová (eds), 41–60. Olomouc: Palacký University Press.Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna
2010 On a (wh-)moved topic in Italian, compared to Germanic. In Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 141], Artemis Alexiadou, Jorge Hankamer, T. McFadden, J. Nuger & Florian Schaeffer (eds), 3–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
1990 Types of A–bar Dependencies. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1999 Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-linguistic Perspective. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Clech-Darbon, Anne, Rialland, Annie & Rebuschi, Georges
1999 Are there cleft sentences in French? In The Grammar of Focus [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 24], Lauri Tuller & Georges Rebuschi (eds), 83–118. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cruschina, Silvio
2010 Syntactic extraposition and clitic resumption in Italian. Lingua 120: 50–73. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections [Oxford Comparative Studies in Syntax). Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Culicover, Peter W. & Robert, Levine D
2001 Stylistic inversion in English: A reconsideration. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19: 283–310. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
De Cat, Cécile
2012 Towards an interface definition of root phenomena. In Main Clause Phenomena. New Horizons [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 190], Lobke Aelbrecht, Liliane Haegeman & Rachel Nye (eds), 135–158. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Delais-Roussarie, Elisabeth, Jenny Doetjes & Sleeman, Petra
2004 Dislocation. In Handbook of French semantics, Francis Corblin & Henriëtte de Swart (eds), 505–530. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joe
1970 Root and Structure-preserving Transformations. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
2004 Unspecified categories as the key to root constructions. In Peripheries: Syntactic Edges and their Effects, David Adger, Cécile de Cat & Georges Tsoulas (eds), 75–121. Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Enç, Mürvet
1991 The semantics of specificity. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 1–25.Google Scholar
Escandell-Vidal, Victoria & Leonetti, Manuel
2009 Fronting and irony in Spanish. In Focus and Background in Romance Languages [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 214], Andreas Dufter & Jacob Daniel (eds), 155–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flament-Boistrancourt, Danièle
1999 Quelques aspects d’ainsi et aussi consécutifs à la lumière d’un point de vue de non-francophone. Le Gré des Langues 15: 142–180.Google Scholar
Floricic, Franck
2009 Negation and ‘focus clash’ in Sardinian. In Information Structure and its Interfaces, Lunella Mereu (ed.), 129–152. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara & Ramaglia, Francesca
2009 Pseudo cleft constructions at the interfaces. http://​ling​.auf​.net​/lingBuzz​/000841
2013 (Pseudo)clefts at the syntax-prosody-discourse interface. In Cleft Structures [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 208], Katharina Hartmann & Tonje Veenstra (eds), 97–140. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, Naama, Belletti, Adriana & Rizzi, Luigi
2009 Relativized relatives: Types of intervention in the acquisition of A-bar dependencies. Lingua 119: 67–88. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Green, Giorgia. M
1976 Main clause phenomena in subordinate clauses. Language 52: 382–397. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Guimier, Claude
1997 La place du sujet clitique dans les énoncés avec adverbe initial. In La place du sujet en français contemporain, Catherine Fuchs (ed), 43–96. Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane
1996 Negative inversion, the NEG-criterion, and the structure of CP. GenGenP 4.2: 93–119.Google Scholar
2000 Inversion, non-adjacent inversion and adjuncts in CP. Transactions of the Philological Society 98: 121–160. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2003a Conditional clauses: External and internal syntax. Mind and Language18: 317–339. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2003b Notes on long adverbial fronting in English and the Left Periphery. Linguistic Inquiry 34: 640–649. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2006a Argument Fronting in English, Romance CLLD and the Left Periphery. In Negation, Tense and Clausal Architecture: Cross-linguistic Investigations, Raffaella Zanuttini, Hector Campos, Elena Herburger & Paul Portner (eds), 27–52. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
2006b Conditionals, factives and the left periphery. Lingua 116: 1651–1669. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 The movement derivation of conditional clauses. Linguistic Inquiry 41(4): 595–621. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena, and Composition of the Left Periphery: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 8. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane, Meinunger, André & Vercauteren, Aleksandra
2013 The architecture of it-clefts. Journal of Linguistics 50 (2): 269–296. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane, Meinunger, André
Aleksandra Vercauteren. 2014. Against the matrix left peripheral analysis of English it-clefts. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2012 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 6], Karen Lahousse & Stefania Marzo (eds) Amsterdam John Benjamins Crossref
Haegeman, Liliane & Ürögdi, Barbara
2010a Referential CPs and DPs: An operator movement account. Theoretical Linguistics 36: 111–152. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010b Operator movement, referentiality and intervention. Theoretical Linguistics 36: 233–246. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heggie, Lorrie
1988 The Syntax of Copular Structures. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern California.
Heycock, Caroline
2006 Embedded root phenomena. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Vol II, Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds), 174–209. Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hooper, Joan B. & Thompson, Sandra A
1973 On the applicability of root transformations. Linguistic Inquiry 4(4): 465–497.Google Scholar
Hybertie, Charlotte
1996 La conséquence en français. Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Jiménez-Fernández, Angel
2010 Discourse-agreement features, phasal C and the edge: A minimalist approach. Diacrítica – Language Sciences Series 24(1): 25–49.Google Scholar
2013 Microvariation at the IS-syntax interface: The case of focus fronting. Workshop on syntactic variation, Barcelona, June 26–28.
Jonare, Brigitta
1976 L’inversion dans la principale non-interogative en français contemporain. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
Karssenberg, Lena
2013 L’adverbe ainsi en tête de phrase: Une analyse de corpus. MA thesis, KU Leuven. Crossref
Karssenberg, Lena & Lahousse, Karen
2014 Ainsi en tête de phrase + inversion: Une analyse de corpus [Actes du 4e Congrès Mondial de la Linguistique française]. SHS Web of Conferences 8: 2413–2427. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kayne, Richard
1972 Subject inversion in French interrogatives. In Generative Studies in Romance Languages, Jean Casagrande & Bohdan Saciuk (eds), 70–126. Rowley MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
1994 The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kayne, Richard & Pollock, Jean-Yves
1978 Stylistic inversion, successive cyclicity, and move NP in French. Linguistic Inquiry 9: 595–621.Google Scholar
Kerleroux, Françoise & Marandin, Jean-Marie
2001 L’ordre des mots. In Cahier Jean-Claude Milner, Jean-Marie Marandin (ed.), 277–302. Paris: Verdier.Google Scholar
E. Kiss, Katalin
1998 Identificational focus versus informational focus. Language 74: 245–273. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lahousse, Karen
2006 NP subject inversion in French: Two types, two configurations. Lingua 116: 424–46. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 Information structure and epistemic modality in adverbial clauses in French. Studies in Language 34: 298–326. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 Quand passent les cigognes. Le sujet nominal postverbal en français moderne. Paris: PUV.Google Scholar
2014 Low sentence structure in (DP subject inversion in) French. Talk presented at GLOW, Brussels, 4 April 2014.
Lahousse, Karen, Laenzlinger, Christopher & Soare Gabriela
2014 Contrast and intervention at the periphery. Lingua 143: 56–85. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud
1994 Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Le Bidois, Robert
1952 L’Inversion du sujet dans la prose contemporaine (1900–1950). Paris: Artrey. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Le Goffic, Pierre
1997 Forme et place du sujet dans l’interrogation partielle. In La place du sujet en français contemporain, Catherine Fuchs (ed.), 15–42. Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot.Google Scholar
Leonetti, Manuel & Escandell-Vidal, Victoria
2009 Fronting and verum focus in Spanish. In Focus and Background in Romance Languages, Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds), 155–204. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lutz, Uli, Müller, Gereon & von Stechow, Arnim
(eds) 2000 Wh-Scope Marking [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 37]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Maki, Hideki, Kaiser, Lizanne & Ochi, Masao
1999 Embedded topicalization in English and Japanese. Lingua 109: 1–14. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McDaniel, Dana
1989 Partial and multiple wh-movement. Natural Language &Linguistic Theory 7: 565–604. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meinunger, André
1996 Speculations on the syntax of (pseudo-)clefts. Ms, Berlin, ZAS.
Molinier, Christian
2013 Ainsi: Deux emplois complémentaires d’un adverbe type. In Adverbes et compléments adverbiaux/Adverbs and Adverbial Complements [Special issue of Lingvisticae Investigationes 36(2)], Jan Radimský & Ignazio Mauro Mirto (eds), 311–327. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Molnár, Valeria
2002 Contrast in a contrastive perspective. In Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective, Hilde Hasselgård, Stig K.A. Johansson, Bergljot Behrens & Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (eds), 147–161. Amsterdam: Rodopi. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pesetsky, David
1987 Wh-in-situ: Movement and unselective binding. In The Representation of (In)definiteness, Eric Reuland & Alice ter Meulen (eds), 98–129. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Reeve, Matthew
2011 The syntactic structure of English Clefts. Lingua 121: 142–171. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 Clefts and their Relatives [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 185]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Reinhart, Tanya
1981 Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27: 53–94.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi
1990 Relativized Minimality. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1997 The fine structure of the left periphery. In Elements of Grammar, Liliane Haegeman (ed.), 289–330. Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2001 On the position of interrogative in the Left Periphery of the clause. In Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays Offered toLorenzo Renzi, Guglielmo Cinque & Giampaolo Salvi (eds), 287–296. Oxford: North-Holland. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2004 Locality and left periphery. In Structures and Beyond. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 3, Adriana Belletti (ed.), 223–251. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2010 Some consequences of criterial freezing. In Functional Structure from Top to Toe, Peter Svenonius (ed.), 19–45. Oxford: OUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi & Shlonsky, Ur
2006 Satisfying the subject criterion by a nonsubject: English locative inversion and heavy NP shift. In Phases of Interpretation, Mara Frascarelli (ed.), 341–362. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ruwet, Nicolas
1975 Les phrases copulatives en français. Recherches Linguistiques 3: 143–191.Google Scholar
Sabio, Frédéric
1995 Micro-syntaxe et macro-syntaxe: L’exemple des “compléments antéposés” en français. Recherches sur le Français Parlé 13: 111–155.Google Scholar
2006 L’antéposition des compléments en français contemporain: L’exemple des objets directs. Linguisticae Investigationes 29: 173–182. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sleeman, Petra
2011 Quantifier–focalization in French and Italian. Handout presented at department of linguistics, KU Leuven.
Starke, Michal
2001 Move Dissolves into Merge: A Theory of Locality. Ph.D. Dissertation. Université de Genève.
Togeby, Knud
1982–1985 Grammaire française. Copenhague: Akademisk Vorlag.Google Scholar
Torregrossa, Jacopo
2012 Towards a taxonomy of focus types: The case of information foci and contrastive foci in Italian. In UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers in Semantics, Denis Paperno (ed.), 151–172. Los Angeles CA: University of California.Google Scholar
Uribe-Etxebarria, Miriam
1991 On the structural positions of the subject in Spanish, their nature and their consequences from quantification. In Syntactic Theory and Basque Syntax, Joseba A. Lakarra & Jon Ortiz de (eds), 447–493. San Sebastián: ASJU.Google Scholar
Wood, Jim
2008 So-inversion as polarity focus. In Proceedings of the 38th Western Conference on Linguistics, Michael Grosvald & Dianne Soares (eds), 304–317. Fresno CA: University of California.Google Scholar
Zribi-Hertz, Anne
1984 Prépositions orphelines et pronoms nuls. Recherches linguistiques 12: 46–91.Google Scholar
Zubizarreta, María Luisa
1998 Prosody, Focus, and Word Order. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Lahousse, Karen
2022.  In When Data Challenges Theory [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 273], ► pp. 148 ff. Crossref logo
Wolfe, Sam
2022. Microvariation and Change in the Romance Left Periphery. Probus 0:0 Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 may 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.