LINGUIST List 11.2572

Wed Nov 29 2000

Qs: Australian Aboriginal Lang, French Anaphor/UG

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. colkittosprint.ca>, Australian Aboriginal Language
2. Tosh, UG parameters in French anaphor binding

I seem to remember that there is an Australian Aboriginal language which has
special markers depending on where a certain item is located along a certain
specific river. Could someone please enlighten me?

Thanks in advance,

Robert Orr

I'm working on a paper, and a section of it involves a syntactic analysis of
the person I interviewed.

The subject is a native speaker of French who is learning English and I
wanted to see how her syntactic competence differ from that of a native
speaker. I adminstered a grammaticality judgment test and she had trouble
with the following items: (* indicates ungrammaticality)

1-1 *Jane hopes that Fred has her own keys.
1-2 Jane hopes that Fred has his own keys.
1-3 The boys promised their mothers to behave themselves.
1-4 Jane expects that picture of herself will be on sale.
1-5 *Jane expects that picture of her will be on sale. (Jane=her)

My aim is to find some explanations through contrastive analysis of English
and French UG parameters.
I asked two native speakers of French and they came up with the following
translation:

2-1 Jane (Jeanne) esp�re que Fred ses cl�es (� elle).
2-2 Jane esp�re que Fred � ses cl�e (� lui).
2-3 Les gar�ons on promis leurs m�res de se bien conduire.
 Les gar�ons promettent a leurs m�res de bien se conduire.
2-4 Jane s'attend que la photo d'elle m�me sera � vendre.
2-5 Jane s'attend que la photo d'elle vas sera � vendre.

My questions are:

1. Are all the French sentences grammatical?
2. If I delete the parentheses in 2-1 and 2-2, can the 'keys' belong to Fred
and be grammatical?
3. If I delete the parentheses in 2-1 and 2-2, can the 'keys' belong to
Jane and be grammatical?
4. Is there any ambituity as to what 'se' in 3-3 refer to? (les gar�ons /
leurs m�res)
5. Can 'elle' in 2-5 be 'Jane' or does it ALWAYS have to refer to somebody
else?
6. What is the UG (Universal Grammar) parameter that governs anaphor binding
in French?

If you know answers to any of those questions, I really appreciate it.

- 
Tosh

e-mail: lastcreatureyahoo.com
homepage: http://www.freespeech.org/lastman/index.html