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Article published In:
Interfaces in Romance: A constraint-based approach
Edited by Gabriela Bîlbîie
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 43:1] 2020
► pp. 95–128

French subject island constraint?

A discourse-based HPSG account

| Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS
| Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS
We present new experimental results (corpora and experiments) showing that extraction out of subject, compared with extraction out of object, obeys a pragmatic constraint and not a syntactic constraint. We show how such a constraint can be formalized in an HPSG grammar of French which views relative clauses, wh-questions and it-clefts as different constructions.
Keywords: island constraints, HPSG, French, relative clauses, it-clefts, questions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The subject island constraint
    • 1.2The subject island in Head-Driven Phrase-Structure Grammar
  • 2.New empirical evidence for French
    • 2.1Some French corpus data
    • 2.2Experimental data on French
  • 3.A discourse-based account
  • 4.An HPSG account of French extraction constructions
    • 4.1A lexicalist view on extraction
    • 4.2Locality constraints in HPSG
    • 4.3A classification of extraction constructions
    • 4.4Cross-classification of French relative clauses
    • 4.5 C’est clefts
  • 5.A discourse-based HPSG account
    • 5.1Encoding information structure in HPSG
    • 5.2Information structure in extractions
    • 5.3Our proposal
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.00041.win
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