35.2195, Books: French subject islands: Winckel (2024)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2195. Tue Aug 06 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2195, Books: French subject islands: Winckel (2024)

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Date: 02-Aug-2024
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [sebastian.nordhoff at langsci-press.org]
Subject: French subject islands: Winckel (2024)


Title: French subject islands
Subtitle: Empirical and formal approaches
Series Title: Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax
Publication Year: 2024
Publisher: Language Science Press
                http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/362

Author: Elodie Winckel
eBook: ISBN: 978-3-96110-477-2 Pages: 588 Price: Europe EURO 0
Abstract:

This book examines extractions out of the subject, which is
traditionally considered to be an island for extraction. There is a
debate among linguists regarding whether the “subject island
constraint” is a syntactic phenomenon or an illusion caused by
cognitive or pragmatic factors. The book focusses on French, that
provides an interesting case study because it allows certain
extractions out of the subject despite not being a typical
null-subject language. The book takes a discourse-based approach and
introduces the “Focus-Background Conflict” constraint, which posits
that a focused element cannot be part of a backgrounded constituent
due to a pragmatic contradiction. The major novelty of this proposal
is that it predicts a distinction between extractions out of the
subject in focalizing and non-focalizing constructions.

The central contribution of this book is to offer the detailed results
of a series of empirical studies (corpus studies and experiments) on
extractions out of the subject is French. These studies offer evidence
for the possibility of extraction out of the subject in French. But
they also reveal a clear distinction between constructions. While
extractions out of the subject are common and highly acceptable in
relative clauses, this is not the case for interrogatives and clefts.

Finally, the book proposes a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
(HPSG) analysis of subject islands. It demonstrates the interaction
between information structure and syntax using a representation of
information structure based on Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS).

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): French (fra)

Written In: English (eng)



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