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Taking as a starting point the variation in introspective judgments on embedded gapping in English in the literature, the main goal of this paper is to test the ‘No Embedding Constraint’ experimentally. Building on a first experimental study designed to measure the interaction between that-omission and factivity in English embedded complement clauses, we conducted two experiments testing the role of the complementizer in embedded gapping, paying special attention to the semantic nature of the matrix predicates (non-factives vs semi-factives vs true factives). Our results show, on the one hand, that the ‘No Embedding Constraint’ makes too strong claims that are not backed up by our experimental findings, and, on the other hand, that embedded gapping is affected by both the presence/absence of that and by the semantic class of the matrix predicate in English. In particular, embedded gapping seems to be more acceptable under non-factive verbs, especially in the absence of a complementizer. Both constraints (that-omission and factivity) can be accounted for by a constructionist fragment-based analysis, where the gapped clause is a non-finite phrase that has to address the same Question Under Discussion as its source. This explains, in turn, why embedded gapping under true factive predicates is considered significantly less acceptable. We show that the acceptable cases of embedded gapping involve true syntactic embedding (so, the matrix clause has no parenthetical use). We conclude that English has the same sensitivity to the semantic class of the matrix predicate as other languages, but that the requirements on the presence/absence of that are English specific.

Additive fragments, comprising a nominal remnant and an additive adverb (e.g., too, either), are a particular type of stripping. On the basis of new corpus data in English and French, we show that such fragments do not always have a verbal clause as their antecedent, and that when they do, different kinds of mismatch are possible between a verbal equivalent and the actual fragment. This challenges most approaches based on syntactic reconstruction. We also show that their interpretation is more flexible than previously thought, since they can be used for interrogative, exclamatory, or ordering purposes. We distinguish between their contrastive (non-coreferent) use (A: John left. B: Me too.) and emphatic (coreferent) use (A: John left. B: HIM too!). We propose a direct interpretation analysis that resorts to no syntactic reconstruction of a verbal clause. The proposed analysis, developed within the framework of construction-based HPSG, allows us to capture not only their properties sharing with other fragments (short answers and negative stripping) but also their unique constructional properties.

Contrary to most French grammars claiming that French only allows masculine agreement when mixed-gender nouns are conjoined, we show that closest conjunct agreement (CCA) does exist in contemporary French, as in other Romance languages, and is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives. Using data from a large corpus (FrWac) and an acceptability rating experiment, we show that (feminine) CCA is well accepted in contemporary French, and should be distinguished from attraction errors, despite the norm prescribing masculine agreement. We also show the role of the adjective position, i.e. prenominal or post-nominal, and humanness. CCA is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives, and non-human nouns favour CCA for post-nominal adjectives. Assuming a hierarchical structure for coordination, the closest noun is the highest in A-N order, whereas it is the lowest in N-A order. Thus CCA in prenominal position may be favoured by a shorter structural distance. One can also see CCA with a prenominal adjective as ‘early’ agreement. Regarding humanness, grammatical gender is interpreted as social gender with human nouns, and a masculine plural can refer to a mixed group. This ‘gender neutral’ plural may favour masculine agreement for human nouns, or the prescriptive norm is more influential for human nouns.

Summary 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.

Coordination exhibits unusual syntactic properties: the conjuncts need not be identical but they must obey some parallelism constraints, and their number is not limited. Romance languages have conjunctive (‘and’), disjunctive (‘or’), adversative (‘but’), and negative (‘nor’) conjunctions, some of which have a correlative use, such as (French) soit . . . soit, (Italian, Spanish) o . . . o, (Portuguese) quer . . . quer, (Romanian) sau . . . sau (‘either . . . or’). They allow coordination of clauses and phrases but also of words (French: le ou la secrétaire ‘the.m.sg or the.f.sg secretary’) and even some word parts (Italian: pre- o post-moderno ‘pre- or post-modern’). Romance languages show intricate agreement patterns in case of coordination. For number agreement, disjunctive coordination allows for total or partial agreement (Paul ou Marie viendra/viendront. ‘Paul or Mary come.fut.sg/pl’). For gender agreement, conjunctive coordination obeys gender resolution (French: un garçon et une fille gentils ‘a boy.m.sg and a girl.f.sg nice. m.pl’) or closest conjunct agreement (Spanish: El idioma y literatura rusa ‘the language.m.sg and litterature.f.sg Russian.f.sg’). Coordination may also involve nonconstituents (Italian: Darò un libro a Giovanni e un disco a Maria. ‘I’ll give a book to Giovanni and a record to Maria’) and ellipsis, such as gapping (French: Paul arrive demain et Marie aujourd’hui. ‘Paul arrives tomorrow and Mary today’), with possible mismatches between the elided material and its overt antecedent.

International audience; Ross (1967) observed that “island” structures like “Who do you think [ NP the gift from __] prompted the rumor?” or “Who did you hear [ NP the statement [ S that the CEO promoted __]]?” are not acceptable, despite having what seem to be plausible meanings in some contexts. Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973) hypothesized that the source of the unacceptability is in the syntax. Here, we summarize how theories of discourse, frequency, and memory from the literature might account for such effects. We suggest that there is only one island structure—a class of coordination islands—that is best explained by a syntactic/semantic constraint. We speculate that all other island structures are likely to be explained in terms of discourse, frequency, and memory. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a declarative and monostratal version of Generative Grammar, in which linguistic expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. It seeks to develop detailed formal analyses using a system of types, features, and constraints. Constraints on types of lexicalsign are central to the lexicon of a language and constraints on types of phrase are at the heart of the syntax, and both lexical and phrasal types include semantic and phonological information. Different versions of the framework have been developed, including versions in which constituent order is a reflection not of constituent structure but of a separate system of order domains, and the Sign-Based Construction Grammar version, which makes a fundamental distinction between signs of various kinds and the constructions which license them. &nbsp

Coordination is a central topic in theoretical linguistics. Following GPSG, which provided the first formal analysis of unlike coordination, HPSG has developed detailed analyses of different coordination constructions in a variety of unrelated languages. Central to the HPSG analyses are two main ideas: (i) coordination structures are non-headed phrases, and (ii) coordinate daughters display some kind of parallelism, which is captured by feature sharing. From these ideas, specific properties can be derived, regarding extraction and agreement, for instance. Many HPSG analyses also agree that coordination is a cover term for a wide variety of different constructions which can be viewed as different subtypes of coordinate phrases, and which can be cross-classified with other subtypes of the grammar (nominal or not, with ellipsis or not, etc.). We present the description of various coordination phenomena and show that HPSG can account for their subtle properties, while integrating them into the general organization of the grammar.

The distinction between raising predicates and control predicates has been a hallmark of syntactic theory since the 60s. Unlike transformational analyses, HPSG treats the difference as mainly a semantic one: raising verbs (seem, begin, expect) do not semantically select their subject (or object) nor assign them a semantic role, while control verbs (want, promise, persuade) semantically select all their syntactic arguments. On the syntactic side, raising verbs share their subject (or object) with the unexpressed subject of their non-finite complement, while control verbs only coindex them. The distinction between raising and control lexeme types is also relevant for non-verbal predicates such as adjectives (likely vs. eager). The analysis of the complement of both control and raising verbs as phrasal, rather than clausal (or small clause), will be supported by creole data. The distinction between subject and first syntactic argument will be discussed together with data from ergative languages, and the HPSG analysis will be extended to cover cases of obligatory control of the expressed subject of some finite clausal complements in certain languages. The raising analysis naturally extends to copular constructions (become, consider) and most auxiliary verbs. &nbsp

A major goal of the quantitative study of syntax has been to identify factors that have predictive power on speaker choices in the face of word-order or valence alternations (e.g. Arnold et al. 2000; Bresnan et al. 2007; Bresnan & Ford 2010; Bader & Häussler 2010). In this paper, we study the role of animacy on the order of constituents in French. Animacy has been shown to affect sentence production in other languages, either directly (Feleki & Branigan 1999; Kempen & Harbusch 2004; Tanaka et al. 2011) or indirectly through grammatical role assignment (McDonald et al. 1993). Corpus studies however, have failed to find such an effect in French (Thuilier 2012a; Thuilier et al. 2014). Using a sentence recall task, we examined whether animacy has an impact on linear ordering or on grammatical function assignment. While we do find evidence for a role of animacy in the choice between active and passive voice, we do not find a preference to place animate arguments first with ditransitive verbs nor with nominal coordinations. While these findings tend to support the indirect hypothesis (McDonald et al. 1993; Kempen & Harbusch 2004), we also find what may look like an anti-animacy effect: inanimate direct objects tend to precede animate indirect objects. We propose that canonical mappings between syntactic function and semantic role play a role in putting (inanimate theme) direct objects before (animate recipient) indirect objects, thus overriding the animacy first tendency in French.

Nous étudions l’utilisation de la construction passive en français écrit, en mettant au jour des contraintes préférentielles. Nous avons extrait et annoté un échantillon de 500 phrases (250 actives et 250 passives) du corpus arboré du français (Abeillé et al., 2019) puis nous avons modélisé les données par régression logistique (Baayen, 2008). Si le passif court (sans complément d’agent) est plus fréquent que le passif long (77 % des passifs sont courts), nous observons que dans près de 80 % des cas de passif court, l’argument omis est récupérable en contexte. Nous montrons le rôle prépondérant de la longueur des arguments et de la structure informationnelle dans l’alternance actif / passif. Nous montrons également que la construction passive obéit à des contraintes plus générales sur l’alignement harmonique des arguments (Bresnan et al., 2001 et 2007). We study the active/passive alternation in written French to discover preference constraints. We have extracted and annotated a sample of 500 clauses (250 active and 250 passive) of the French Treebank (Abeillé et al., 2019) and modeled them with logistic regression (Baayen, 2008). Short passives (without a par-phrase) are more frequent than long passive (77% of passives are short); in 80% of short passives, the omitted argument is present in the context. We show that argument length and information structure are important factors in active/passive alternation. We also show that the passive construction obeys more general cross-linguistic harmonic argument alignment constraints (Bresnan et al., 2001 and 2007).

International audience

International audience

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstressed do, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.

Dont has been claimed to be an exception to the ‘subject island’ constraint (Tellier, 1991; Sportiche and Bellier, 1989; Heck, 2009) and to contrast with true relative pronouns such as de qui. We provide corpus data from a literary corpus (Frantext), which show that relativizing out of the subject is possible with dont and de qui in French relative clauses, and is even the most frequent use of both relative clauses. We show that it is not a recent innovation by comparing subcorpora from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We also show, with an acceptability judgement task, that extraction out of the subject with de qui is well accepted. Why has this possibility been overlooked? We suggest that it may be because de qui relatives in general are less frequent than dont relatives (about 60 times less in our corpus). Turning to de qui interrogatives, we show that extraction out of the subject is not attested, and propose an explanation of the contrast with relative clauses. We conclude that in this respect, French does not seem to differ from other Romance languages.

Right-Node Raising (RNR, Ross 1967; Chaves 2014) has been claimed to require phonological identity between the missing material and the shared element. Our corpus investigations provide examples of RNR with verb form mismatch with and without syncretism in English and French. Two acceptability experiments show that lack of phonological identity does not affect the acceptability of RNR. We argue further that RNR without phonological identity cannot be taken to be a case of cataphoric VP-ellipsis in French and that it should not be analyzed as such in English. As regards the status of RNR with verb form mismatch, two positions are available: either it is considered to be grammatical, in which case the phonological resolution principle of Pullum & Zwicky (1986) does not hold, or it is considered to be ungrammatical but repaired (or “recycled”, Arregui et al. 2006; Frazier 2013). The high acceptability of cases with mismatch compared with ungrammatical controls casts doubt on the applicability of the recycling hypothesis in such cases. In order to account for the broader range of data established by our corpus and experimental results, we propose a new analysis of RNR based on lexeme identity rather than form identity.

Le français contemporain est souvent considéré comme ayant perdu l’accord de proximité (Corbett, 1991), à la différence d’autres langues romanes, d’où des controverses sur la place du genre féminin dans la langue (Michel, 2016 ; Viennot, 2017). Nous présentons des données tirées de grands corpus écrits (Frantext, FrWaC), sur la coordination d’articles et de noms de nombre ou genre différents au sein du groupe nominal. Nous montrons que l’accord de proximité est bien vivant, et même favorisé dans certains cas. Nous concluons par quelques remarques sur la place du genre féminin dans l’ordre des mots. Contemporary French is often considered to have lost closest conjunct agreement, contrary to other Romance languages (Corbett, 1991), hence recent debates about French feminine visibility (Michel, 2016; Viennot, 2017). We consider the coordination of determiners and nouns in the Noun Phrase with different number or gender in large written corpora (Frantext, FrWaC). We show that closest conjunct agreement is alive and even favoured in some cases. We conclude by some remarks on gender agreement and word order.

In order to explain the unacceptability of certain long-distance dependencies – termed syntactic islands by Ross (1967) – syntacticians proposed constraints on long-distance dependencies which are universal and purely syntactic and thus not dependent on the meaning of the construction (Chomsky, 1977; Chomsky, 1995 a.o.). This predicts that these constraints should hold across constructions and languages. In this paper, we investigate the “subject island” constraint across constructions in English and French, a constraint that blocks extraction out of subjects. In particular, we compare extraction out of nominal subjects with extraction out of nominal objects, in relative clauses and wh-questions, using similar materials across constructions and languages. Contrary to the syntactic accounts, we find that unacceptable extractions from subjects involve (a) extraction in wh-questions (in both languages); or (b) preposition stranding (in English). But the extraction of a whole prepositional phrase from subjects in a relative clause, in both languages, is as good or better than a similar extraction from objects. Following Erteschik-Shir (1973) and Kuno (1987) among others, we propose a theory that takes into account the discourse status of the extracted element in the construction at hand: the extracted element is a focus (corresponding to new information) in wh-questions, but not in relative clauses. The focus status conflicts with the non-focal status of a subject (usually given or discourse-old). These results suggest that most previous discussions of islands may rely on the wrong premise that all extraction types behave alike. Once different extraction types are recognized as different constructions ( Croft, 2001 ; Ginzburg & Sag, 2000; Goldberg, 2006; Sag, 2010), with their own discourse functions, one can explain different extraction patterns depending on the construction.

This paper investigates the structure and agreement of coordinated binominals in the form Det N1 et N2 in French. We provide corpus data and experimental data to show that different strategies exist, depending on their readings: singular Det for joint reading (mon collègue et ami, 'my.MSG colleague.MSG and friend.MSG'), plural Det agreement (mes frère et soeur 'my.PL brother.MSG and sister.FSG') or closest conjunct agreement (mon nom et prénom, 'my.MSG surname.MSG and first name.MSG') for split reading. These results challenge previous syntactic analyses of binominals (Le Bruyn and de Swart, 2014), stating that Det combines with N1, forming a DP and the later coordinates with N2. We then propose an HPSG analysis to account for French binominals.