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Subject Doubling in Spoken French by Eleonore Blanquart a Thesis View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ASU Digital Repository Subject Doubling in Spoken French by Eleonore Blanquart A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Approved April 2012 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Helene Ossipov, Co-Chair Mariana Bahtchevanova, Co-Chair Elly Van Gelderen ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY May 2012 ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to explore the syntax and pragmatics of subject doubling in spoken French. Many prescriptivists have considered it a redundant and ungrammatical form, but over the years, it has gained more interest from syntacticians. It is widely acknowledged that dislocations involve topics, but the position of these structures is very disputed. Some linguists believe in base generation while others state there is movement. The status of subject clitics also comes into play and their role as arguments or agreement markers is crucial to understanding the issues at stake with a topic analysis. It is often argued that the clitics are undergoing a linguistic cycle whereby they lose their function of argument, and need to be reinforced by disjunct pronouns. In this study, I examined which analyses support my data and I attempted to determine what structures tend to be most dislocated by looking at the environment of the discourse in a corpus of spoken French. i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am greatly indebted to the patience, knowledge and support of Dr. Elly Van Gelderen and Dr. Mariana Bahtchevanova throughout this experience. I am also very grateful to Dr. Helene Ossipov. I would also like to thank my family along with my friends and co-workers Naomi Danton and Nallely Morales for believing in me and encouraging me when I needed it the most in this process. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER Page 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................... 1 2 THE SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE OF THE SENTENCE: THE THREE LAYERS, THE CP LAYER AND THE POSITIONS FOR THE TOPIC AND FOCUS PHRASES ...................................................... 5 2.1 The Syntactic Structure of the Sentence: the Three Layers ......... 5 2.2 The Topic and the Focus .............................................................. 7 2.3 The Topic: Syntactic Theory ......................................................... 9 2.4 Types of Topics in French ........................................................... 11 2.5 Pragmatic Properties of Topics ................................................... 13 3 THE STATUS OF DOUBLED SUBJECTS IN FRENCH: IS THE PRONOUN A CLITIC OR AN AGREEMENT MARKER? DOES THE DP GET A THETA-ROLE AND IS IT MOVED FROM ITS ORIGINAL POSITION? .................................................................. 15 3.1 Attitudes toward Subject Doubling ............................................. 15 3.2 Frequency of Subject Doubling ................................................... 16 3.3 The Syntax behind Doubled Subjects: the Role of Clitics .......... 16 3.4 Properties of Clitic Pronouns in Standard and in Non-Standard French: Agreement Markers ............................................................. 17 3.5 Van Gelderen’s and Auger’s Points of View: the Case of Spoken Swiss French and Picard French ...................................................... 20 3.6 De Cat’s arguments ..................................................................... 23 4 CORPUS ANALYSIS ............................................................................. 25 4.1 De Cat’s Corpus: Findings .......................................................... 25 iii CHAPTER Page 4.2 Preliminary Observations .......................................................... 26 4.3 First-person Pronous: “moi, je” and “nous, on” ........................ 27 4.4 Second-person Pronouns: “toi, tu” and “vous, vous” ................ 29 4.5 Third-person Pronouns : ‘lui, il/c’’, ‘elle, elle’, ‘eux, ils’, ‘elles, elles’ .................................................................................................... 31 4.6 The Case of “ça, c’est” ................................................................. 33 4.7 Nonpersonal Anaphor: NP + c’est .............................................. 34 4.8 Nonpersonal Pronouns: “ça” ...................................................... 36 5 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................... 40 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 41 iv Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION The focus of my thesis is the status of subject doubling in spoken French. I will attempt to assess whether this phenomenon is very widespread or if it only concerns certain aspects of colloquial French. Subject doubling is not a French specificity; it is also common in some dialects of Northern Italy and many other languages such as Greek, Lebanese Arabic, etc. French is a Romance language that has lost pro-drop and some verbal agreement and has developed clitic subjects (van Gelderen, 2011), which has led some linguists to argue that French is a synthetic language with an analytic orthography. Most prescriptivist grammarians used to consider double subjects ungrammatical and redundant, but over the past couple of decades, notably throughout the works of Lambrecht, the status of this structure in the literature has started to change. Lambrecht (1981) and Calvé (1985) mention that dislocation used to be regarded as a superficial or surface feature. However, the fact that it can influence the way a sentence is interpreted made syntacticians re-evaluate the place of this phenomenon in terms of syntactic theory. The pragmatics associated to it, for instance the speaker’s presuppositions, also come into play in the way a sentence is interpreted. Topic and comment have thus gained the status of universal concepts, present in the underlying structure of all statements in a similar way as noun phrase and verb phrase. In this thesis, I will be looking at theoretical perspectives on subject doubling and left dislocation through the works of Lambrecht (1981), Roberge(1990), Auger (2003) and Van Gelderen (2011) for the so-called ‘morphological analysis’ as well as those of De Cat (2007) and Frascarelli (2000) 1 among others who refute that analysis. One of my goals is to investigate whether or not this phenomenon is due to the evolution of clitics that tend to attach to the verb and thus become agreement markers encoding uninterpretable features. This loss of phonetic and semantic content of the subject pronoun requires the insertion of a new pronoun to reinforce it. Culbertson (2010) points out that the status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated by numerous researchers. Subject clitics have distributional properties that have been analyzed by linguists as argument-bearing elements occupying a canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of phonology. French subject clitics are categorized as true syntactic subjects generated in canonical subject position. However, this hypothesis has been debated since it “fails to capture patterns of subject-clitic use in colloquial French dialects/registers (Culbertson, p 85).” Other evidence provided by analyses on prosody and corpora as well as speaker judgments and crosslinguistic typology established that there are “differences from Standard French that impact how subject clitics are best analyzed, and more specifically subject clitics in European Colloquial French appear to be affixal agreement markers, and not phonological clitic arguments”(Culbertson, 2010). On the other hand, Cécile De Cat (2007) clearly states that French subject clitics are not agreement morphemes and that they are available for syntactic movement. She also argues that Spoken French does not allow subject doubling 1, which seems surprising considering that I have observed it many times in spoken language. I will thus attempt to see if that argument is confirmed by my analysis. 1 She does not believe that clitics are becoming grammatical agreement markers (morphemes) but rather anaphoric agreement markers (incorporated pronouns) 2 The main issues at stake when looking at subject doubling are whether the clitic is an agreement marker or still an actual argument and whether the NP is the actual subject or if it becomes a topic. Auger (2003) points out that it is difficult to differentiate actual grammatical subjects from dislocated phrases since both favor definite and specific noun phrases, and identifiable referents. Another important point is whether the subject is undergoing a linguistic cycle, whereby the clitic becomes an agreement marker, thus requiring a new argument in subject position, which could be null. Semantics via theta-roles therefore come into play as well. Most researchers still disagree on that subject, thus I am going to give an overview and synthesis of their points of view in the next two chapters. Although my focus in this thesis is syntax, pragmatics, semantics and phonology are also important aspects that I am going to be looking at. Dislocation is a phenomenon that has always been difficult to analyze in terms of syntax since it very often implies a different word order and a move away from the sentence level. The very name dislocation brings to mind a certain disruption of the sentence structure, a “syntactic anomaly” associated to spoken language. Calvé (1985) defines dislocation as “a construction in
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