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Title:
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French Dislocation
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Author:
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Cécile de Cat
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~lnpcd/
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Degree Awarded:
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York University
, Linguistics and Language Studies Programme
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Degree Date:
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2002
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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French
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Director(s):
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Bernadette Plunkett
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Abstract:
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This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of dislocations in spoken French. In dislocated constructions, an element appears in the left- or right-periphery of the sentence and is usually resumed by another element inside the sentence. Most dislocated elements are topics. Topics usually encode what the sentence is about:
(1) Tintin, il est connu.
Tintin he is famous
The foundations of this research lie in the establishment of solid diagnostics for dislocated constructions and a detailed description of the distribution of dislocated elements in a corpus of spontaneous speech. This required resolving two controversial issues in the study of spoken French: (i) I argue that subject clitics are arguments in the most common varieties of spoken French (against the claim that such elements are agreement morphemes, e.g. Auger 1994); and (ii) I show that prosodic diagnostics traditionally used in syntactic analyses to identify left-dislocated elements are partly unfounded.
This thesis develops a theoretical, modular account of dislocated constructions in spoken French in terms of syntax and pragmatics. I provide arguments against previous assumptions on Clitic Left Dislocation (as in (1)) and demonstrate that dislocated elements are base-generated. The restrictions on the distribution of dislocated elements are shown to be pragmatic in nature, and the interpretation of topics not to be exclusively encoded in syntax, contra Rizzi (1997). Dislocated topics are argued to be adjoined to a 'performative' maximal projection and interpreted as the frame within which the predication holds true (following Erteschik-Shir 1997).
The picture is completed by investigations into the acquisition of dislocated structures in child French. These investigations demonstrate among other things that (i) what have been claimed to be target-deviant non-nominative subjects (Schutze 1997) are in fact target-compliant dislocated subjects with a missing resumptive clitic; (ii) the presence of dislocated topics expressing the subject has no effect on the realisation of subjects during the null subject stage; (iii) the pragmatic knowledge required to encode XP topics is available from the outset of word combinations, hence children display signs of 'pragmatic' competence earlier than previously assumed (e.g. Wexler 1998).
Ultimately, this research suggests that Information Structure (the module responsible for topic encoding and decoding) is an integral part of Universal Grammar and not part of a separate component.
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