No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Obviating the Disjoint Reference Effect in French
Abstract
This paper investigates the phenomenon of the “subjunctive disjoint reference effect” or “obviation” in French. Object-Subject Obviation (OSO) occurs when the dative clitic object of a directive predicate cannot be coreferential with the subject of an embedded subjunctive clause. I propose to build on a previous account in which obviation results from an antilogophoricity effect arising from the co-occurrence of two logophoric centres within an embedded subjunctive clause: an expressive operator and the referent of the dative clitic. I also argue that obviation is best accounted for by competition theories and that subject-subject obviation (SSO), in the complement clauses of direc- tive predicates, in which the subject of the directive cannot be coreferential with the subject of the embedded subjunctive clause, is not a real instance of obviation.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Some languages like French and Spanish exhibit coreference restrictions on clitic clusters in certain configurations: in the French example Anne croit qu’on va la lui présenter ‘Anna thinks that they will introduce her to him’, the accusative clitic la ‘her’ cannot corefer with ‘Anne’ when a dative clitic, lui ‘to him’, co-occurs in the cluster. The only previous account of this constraint (Bhatt & Šimík 2009) attributes this to a binding restriction. Based on new data disentangling binding and logophoricity, we instead make the generalization that an accusative clitic cannot be clustered with a dative clitic if the accusative clitic refers to a logophoric center and is read de se. We derive this antilogophoricity effect from perspective conflicts, which we represent as intervention effects in the presence of a single logophoric operator in the relevant domain. Specifically, we argue that dative clitics generally occupy a position encoding ‘empathy’, and that when an accusative clitic is an attitude holder and co-occurs in the same cluster it results in a conflict of perspective. This analysis furthermore provides a semantic motivation for intervention effects that have been postulated for the Person-Case-Constraint (PCC), which we hypothesize also derives from conflicting centers of perspective.
This book investigates the properties of a phenomenon occurring in the main Western Romance languages, subjunctive obviation, the unavailability of coreference involving the subject of a subjunctive clause and the experience of the main clause.
The subject of nonfinite clauses is often missing, and yet is understood to refer to some linguistic or contextual referent (e.g. ‘Bill preferred-to remain silent’ is understood as ‘Bill preferred that he himself would remain silent’). This dependency is the subject matter of control theory. Extensive linguistic research into control constructions over the past five decades has unearthed a wealth of empirical findings in dozens of languages. Their proper classification and analysis, however, have been a matter of continuing debate within and across different theoretical schools. This comprehensive book pulls together, for the first time, all the important advances on the topic. Among the issues discussed are: The distinction between raising and control, obligatory and nonobligatory control, syntactic interactions with case, finiteness and nominalization, lexical determination of the controller, and phenomena like partial and implicit control. The critical discussions in this work will stimulate students and scholars to further explorations in this fascinating field.
The papers in this volume address the general question what type of lexical specifications we need in a generative grammar and by what principles this information is projected onto syntactic configurations, or to put it differently, how lexical insertion is executed. Many of the contributions focus on what the syntactic consequences are of choices that are made with respect to the lexical specifications of heads. The data in the volume are drawn from diverse languages, among which: Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Polish, Russian.
A CHARACTERISTIC PROPERTY OF CERTAIN TYPES OF SENTENCE EMBEDDING IN ENGLISH IS THE DELETION OF THE INITIAL NOUN PHRASE OF THE EMBEDDED SENTENCE WHEN THE NOUN PHRASE IS IDENTICAL TO SOME NOUN PHRASE IN THE MAIN SENTENCE. EXAMPLES OF THIS PHENOMENON ARE SENTENCES LIKE "JOHN CONDESCENDED TO GO" AND "JOHN DEFIED BILL TO GO." BECAUSE THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE RELEVANT NOUN PHRASE IN THE MAIN SENTENCE WITH RESPECT TO THE EMBEDDED SENTENCE VARIES, THE DELETION CANNOT EASILY BE SPECIFIED IN TERMS OF A SINGLE TRANSFORMATION. THE PRINCIPLE OF MINIMAL DISTANCE IS ADVANCED TO EXPLAIN NOUN PHRASE DELETION IN EMBEDDED SENTENCES AS A SINGLE SYNTACTIC PROCESS. (KL)
This paper examines the obviation which holds between the pronominal subject of a subjunctive complement to desiderative/ directive predicates in Romance and proposes that this obviation is due to the effect of a quasi-imperative operator, located in the head of FinP, on semantic binding of the pronominal subject. True imperatives yield an interpretation ''anyone other than the speaker'', while embedded imperatives yield an interpretation ''anyone other than the matrix subject''. In addition, such lexically selected subjunctive complements host an uninterpretable W(orld) feature in Force, which must be checked and deleted by the Mood head. In non-lexically selected subjunctive, the W feature is interpretable. It is argued that the core case of subjunctive complements are embedded imperatives; different languages may grammaticalize the interpretable W feature in other complement contexts such that subjunctive becomes the only option and the W feature is uninterpretable. This characterization of subjunctive complement clauses is supported by acquisition and attrition data, which shows that subjunctive is acquired first and lost last in contexts where the W feature is uninterpretable and hence must be deleted by the syntax in order to yield an interpretable structure at the interface.
On the grammar of optative constructions. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Hornstein, Norbert. 1999. Movement and control
- Patrick Grosz
- Georg
Grosz, Patrick Georg. 2011. On the grammar of optative constructions. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Hornstein, Norbert. 1999. Movement and control. Linguistic Inquiry 30:69-96.
The sense of self: topics in the semantics of de se expressions
- Hazel Pearson
Pearson, Hazel. 2013. The sense of self: topics in the semantics of de se expressions. Doctoral dissertation,
Harvard University.
Evaluative subjunctive and veridicality. Ms. for Mood, Aspect and Modality: What is a linguistic category?
- Anastasia Giannakidou
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2015. Evaluative subjunctive and veridicality. Ms. for Mood, Aspect and Modality:
What is a linguistic category?, ed. J. Blaszack, A. Giannakidou, D. Klimek-Jankowska and K. Mygdalski.
The lazy Frenchman's approach to the subjunctive (speculations on reference to worlds, presuppositions, and semantic defaults in the analysis of mood) In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected Papers from " Going Romance XVII
- Philippe Schlenker
Schlenker, Philippe. 2005. The lazy Frenchman's approach to the subjunctive (speculations on reference to
worlds, presuppositions, and semantic defaults in the analysis of mood). In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected Papers from " Going Romance XVII " Nijmegen, 20-22 November 2003, ed. T. Geerts,
I. van Ginneken, and H. Jacobs, 269–310.
Je veux partir/*Je veux que je parte: on the distribution of finite complements and infinitival complements in French
- Nicolas Ruwet
Ruwet, Nicolas. 1984. Je veux partir/*Je veux que je parte: on the distribution of finite complements and
infinitival complements in French. Cahiers de Grammaire 7:75-138.
Obviating obviation in French ditransitive clauses
- Laurence B-Violette
B-Violette, Laurence. to appear. Obviating obviation in French ditransitive clauses. In Proceedings of the
Poster Session of the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 8-17.
On person agreement. Ms., Scuola Normale Superiore
- Valentina Bianchi
Bianchi, Valentina. 2001. On person agreement. Ms., Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.