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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. 305–324

The status of subject pronouns in Modern Standard French revisited

| Universität Konstanz

This paper readdresses the long-standing debate on the morpho-syntactic status of subject pronouns in the contemporary formal variety of French by reinvestigating this issue along with those of the number of their paradigms and the null subject property. On the basis of the discussion of proposals challenging what has emerged as the received view on these issues, the paper essentially argues that a structural differentiation of prosodically weak subject pronouns as a function of their occurrence regarding the finite verb is unwarranted. From this and various other evidence which underpin the fundamental plausibility of the received view the paper concludes that Modern Standard French has two paradigms of prosodically strong and, respectively, phonologically clitic subject pronouns and represents a non null subject language.

Keywords: French, null subject property, paradigm, Subject pronoun
Published online: 8 December 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.15zim
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Zimmermann, Michael
2018. Changes in status and paradigms? On subject pronouns in medieval french. Transactions of the Philological Society 116:1 ► pp. 131 ff. DOI logo

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