Date: 22-Jun-2010
From: Robert Reichle <rreichleniu.edu>
Subject: French Dislocation: Interpretation, Syntax, Acquisition
E-mail this message to a friend
Discuss this message
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/20/20-2825.html
AUTHOR: De Cat, CécileTITLE: French DislocationSUBTITLE: Interpretation, Syntax, AcquisitionPUBLISHER: Oxford University PressYEAR: 2007 (hardcover), 2009 (paperback)
Robert V. Reichle, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, NorthernIllinois University
SUMMARY
This book aims to account for the syntax, interpretation, information structure,and acquisition of French right and left dislocations. De Cat explores thisphenomenon using empirical data from the York and Cat corpora, which containspontaneous and elicited spoken data from children and adults from France,Belgium and Quebec. The book systematically addresses the identification ofdislocations, their interpretation as markers of topic, their syntax, and theiracquisition in child learners of French as a first language.
After a brief introduction, the work begins in earnest with a discussion ofdiagnostics for dislocated elements (Chapter 2). De Cat first limits the scopeof inquiry to informal spoken French, contrasting it with Standard French andZribi-Hertz's (1994) Advanced French. Much of the chapter is dedicated toarguing for a syntactic (as opposed to morphological) analysis of French subjectclitics. The chapter continues with a discussion of the prosodic characteristicsof dislocation in French, first focusing on the prosodic contours of rightdislocations, and then discussing those observed for left dislocations. Relevantexamples from the corpora provide evidence for different prosodic signatures forthe two types of dislocation, with left dislocation having a prominent peak inintonation at the end of the dislocated element, and right dislocationdisplaying a variety of prosodic signatures. The author concludes the chapter bypointing out that, as a consequence of these prosodic and syntacticcharacteristics, dislocations are not essential to the well-formedness of asentence, and can even be removed altogether without rendering the sentenceungrammatical.
Chapter 3 frames the investigation of dislocations within the larger context ofinformation structure. First addressing the notion of topic, the author presentsseveral definitions that have previously been proposed, from those based on the'aboutness' of a sentence to Reinhart's (1981) file card metaphor for relatingpredications to topics. The ensuing discussion of topics touches on suchproperties as their newness and relevance. The crux of the chapter is ademonstration of the topichood of dislocated phonologically non-weak elements inspoken French, with special attention given to the case of indefinites as topics(specifically, indefinites introduced by presentational constructions). Thechapter concludes with observations about the status of French as adiscourse-configurational language, using the presentational 'il y a'construction as an example of a thetic statement being realized in a specializedsyntactic structure.
In Chapter 4, De Cat argues for a generative analysis of right and leftdislocation as a single unified syntactic phenomenon. The proposed analysisconsiders dislocated elements as adjoined by first-merge to a maximal projectionwith root properties (p. 149), and proposes no syntactic movement, agreement orfeature checking. After touching on prior analyses of which elements (if any)move in narrow syntax for right and left dislocation, De Cat addresses thequestion of resumptive elements in French left dislocation. Special cases ofdislocation are also discussed, such as 'very local' right dislocation(consisting in French of 'de' + a bare noun). In arguing that French leftdislocation is insensitive to strong islands, De Cat presents results from twoacceptability judgment tasks. She concludes that dislocated elements mark thetopic of the utterance, that a resumptive element can be found within an island,and that dislocations do not involve movement as they do not license parasiticgaps, do not create weak crossover or minimality effects, and are notreinterpreted via reconstruction (p. 169).
Chapter 5 primarily addresses three questions: whether child acquisition datacan inform the analysis of dislocations in adults; the degree of target-likenessin early dislocation data; and learnability and the initial state of the child'sgrammar as they relate to dislocations. Approaching these questions with theassumption that the child makes limited use of UG from the earliest stages ofacquisition, the author applies the relevant diagnostics for dislocationdeveloped earlier in the book to identify dislocations in corpus data from fourFrench-speaking children. Of the previously developed diagnostics (omissability,presence of a resumptive element, word order, context, and prosody), particularattention is given to context and prosody with respect to the child data. De Catargues that the children in her corpora used dislocations productively beforethe implementation of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) layer. In discussing thesentence fragments present in the corpus data, the author argues for an analysisunder which fragments only contain as much structure as is seen in their overtstructure (i.e., ''what you see is what you get'', p. 200). Finally, De Catpresents positive evidence that children productively employ right and leftdislocation at an early age in the same way adults do to mark topic.
After a summary of conclusions, three appendices summarize the empiricalfindings used to support the author's analyses. Appendix A presents data fromthe adult speakers in the York and Cat corpora. Appendix B discusses the childdata from the same corpora. Appendix C details the judgment elicitation tasksmentioned in Chapter 4.
EVALUATION
This volume contributes to the study of spoken French on three levels. Foremost,the fact that De Cat has written such a thorough and well supported analysis ofa complex and often overlooked feature of spoken French is significant in and ofitself. As she rightfully points out in Chapter 2, numerous factors (e.g. thedistinction between spoken and written French, dialect and register differences,conflicting accounts of the syntax and prosody of dislocation, etc.) have longled to difficulty in demarcating the phenomenon under investigation. Despitethis obstacle, De Cat clearly and succinctly shows when and why Frenchdislocation is relevant.
Secondly, this work provides a coherent syntactic analysis of dislocation, andthis account is strengthened by the fact that it relies equally on syntacticdiagnostics as well as corpus and judgment data. As the information structuralsimilarities between right and left dislocation in French have long been known,it is satisfying to see an analysis of their syntax that treats them as one andthe same phenomenon.
Thirdly, while this work will be of the greatest interest to those concernedwith a generative account of the syntax of French dislocation, it will also beworthwhile to the growing number of scholars engaged in experimental research onthe processing and acquisition of information structure. The author is primarilyconcerned with the theoretical implications of her findings, and therefore theempirical evidence plays a supporting role in the main body of the book.However, the appendices offer much more detail about her corpus-based andexperimental evidence, and should provide those interested in these methods ofresearch with an exciting picture of current and future directions for research.
That being said, there are some minor shortcomings. In the discussion of asyntactic versus morphological analysis of French subject clitics, De Cat citesthe productivity and distribution of the negative particle 'ne' as evidenceagainst Auger's (1994) analysis of clitics as agreement morphemes. In claimingthat 'ne' is more productive in spoken French than has been previously argued,De Cat states that it was used productively by the speakers in the York and Catcorpora. However, the examples provided are not fully convincing, and herargument would have been better served by more examples taken directly from thecorpora. Similarly, the context of certain examples used to support otherarguments is occasionally unclear in the text. The two judgment tasks signal alaudable effort to support the author's arguments with quantitative dataelicited from a large number of native speakers (thirty-two in the first task,seventy-five in the second). Unfortunately, the results from these tasks are notalways presented clearly, with crucial information relating to the procedure andresults split between the body of the book and an appendix. Additionally, thesmall number of items tested do not uniformly control for syntactic structure.While a more in-depth analysis and a larger number of items tested would havebeen preferable, the included judgment tasks are nonetheless worthwhile forthose interested in psycholinguistic examinations of dislocation phenomena, andsuggest intriguing directions for further research.
These minor criticisms aside, the volume adeptly tackles the complex question ofFrench dislocation. This book will be of interest primarily to those working ingenerative syntax; those concerned with psycholinguistics, corpus linguisticsand language acquisition will also find the empirical evidence and methodsrelevant to their interests.
REFERENCES
Auger, J. (1994). ''Pronominal clitics in Québec colloquial French: Amorphological analysis.'' Doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Reinhart, T. (1981). ''Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentencetopics.'' Philosophica 27: 53-94.Zribi-Hertz, A. (1994). ''The syntax of nominative clitics in standard andadvanced French.'' In Cinque, G., Koster, J., Pollock, J.-Y., Rizzi, L., andZanuttini, R., editors, ''Paths Towards Universal Grammar: Studies in Honor ofRichard S. Kayne.'' Georgetown University Press: Washington, D.C. 453-72.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Robert V. Reichle is assistant professor of French linguistics at Northern Illinois University. He recently completed his dissertation on the acquisition and processing of L2 French focus structure at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include ERP investigations of L1 and L2 processing, and age-related effects on L2 acquisition.
Page Updated: 22-Jun-2010
|