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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, Lisbon
Edited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 233–258

Intervention or phasal locality?

Two ways of being local in French causative constructions

| Université Paris-Diderot, Laboratoire de linguistique formelle

The Minimalist Program claims that only two notions of locality are necessary: phasal locality and intervention locality (in the form of the Minimal Link Condition). This paper asks whether the unification of the two is possible or desirable. An argument against unification would consist in showing that a process A obeys one locality condition and doesn’t obey the other and that another process B does exactly the reverse. Two phenomena are considered, which fit this description – respectively interpretation (R-I) and clitic placement (CL-PL). Their contrasting behavior in the French faire-construction indicates that each one obeys a locality condition that the other does not: CL-PL obeys phasal locality, R-I some form of minimality. The theoretical implications of these findings for the theory of locality and the architecture of grammar are examined in the conclusion.

Keywords: Agree, Applicative head, Clitic Placement, Faire-construction, intervention, locality, Object Shift, phases, Quantifier Raising, Subject Raising
Published online: 8 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.12rou
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Cited by 2 other publications

Hu, Xiaoshi
2018. Explorer la structure interne des constructions causatives du français. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 63:1 ► pp. 70 ff. DOI logo
Hu, Xiaoshi
2023. Defectivity Matters: Cliticization in French Causatives Revisited. Linguistic Inquiry 54:4 ► pp. 759 ff. DOI logo

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