Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale
Journal issue | 57 | 2023
Research Article | An Accessibility hierarchy pattern for Resumptive pronouns in spoken French
An Accessibility hierarchy pattern for Resumptive pronouns in spoken French
Abstract
On the basis of the results of a corpus study on Colloquial French, which show that the distribution of resumptive pronouns globally matches the Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan, Comrie 1977), we argue that resumptive pronouns in French relative clauses are not intrusive and that resumptive and gapped relatives involve different syntactic derivations belonging to different registers. We explain the lack of the highest subject restriction in Colloquial French, in contrast with (other) languages displaying regular resumptive relatives, by the special nature of French subject clitics as agreement markers (Culbertson 2010). This conclusion and the distribution of subject clitics we found in the corpus reinforces the analysis of the relative complementizer qui as a grammaticalized form of que+obligatory resumption il (Rooryck 2000; Rizzi, Shlonsky 2007).
Submitted: April 13, 2023 | Accepted: June 11, 2023 | Published Oct. 30, 2023 | Language: en
Keywords Resumptive pronouns • Accessibility hierarchy • Spoken French • Relative clauses • Corpus
Copyright © 2023 Peijia Su, Caterina Donati. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOc/2499-1562/2023/11/005
