37.1166, Reviews: Morphosyntaxe du français: Omar Gamboa Gonzalez & Juvénal Ndayiragije (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1166. Sun Mar 22 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1166, Reviews: Morphosyntaxe du français: Omar Gamboa Gonzalez & Juvénal Ndayiragije (2025)

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Date: 22-Mar-2026
From: Ferid Chekili [feridchekililg at yahoo.fr]
Subject: General Linguistics: Omar Gamboa Gonzalez & Juvénal Ndayiragije (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1591

Title: Morphosyntaxe du français
Subtitle: Approche générative
Series Title: LINCOM Coursebooks in Linguistics 35
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Lincom GmbH
           https://lincom-shop.eu/
Book URL:
https://lincom-shop.eu/epages/57709feb-b889-4707-b2ce-c666fc88085d.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/57709feb-b889-4707-b2ce-c666fc88085d/Products/%22ISBN%209783969392362.%22

Author(s): Omar Gamboa Gonzalez & Juvénal Ndayiragije

Reviewer: Ferid Chekili

Summary
The course book, entitled ‘Morphosyntaxe du français- Approche
générative’, co-authored by Omar Gamboa Gonzalez and Juvenal
Ndayiragije, consists of a foreword, an introduction and ten chapters.
Each chapter begins with a summary of its objectives and ends with a
section of concluding remarks and a section of exercises. The ten
chapters are followed by an appendix, a bilingual glossary, the
exercise solutions, the references and an index.
The target audience of the book is said to be students learning French
as a second language who are not familiar with linguistic analysis, in
particular, morphology and syntax.
Finally, the focus of the book is said to be explaining the principles
of generative grammar, using French data.
Summary
Introduction: ‘La Linguistique” (linguistics).
Here, the authors explain the concept and goals of linguistics as a
scientific discipline belonging within the cognitive sciences. They
also narrow the focus of the book to the study of the structure of the
word and the sentence, investigated respectively, by morphology and
syntax.
Chapter 1: ‘Structure des mots’ (the structure of words) deals with
the concept of ‘word’ and its internal structure. Complex words are
said to fall into two types; derived and compounded. The concept of
the ‘morpheme’ (derivational and inflectional)  is also examined. The
chapter concludes with how to identify words and morphemes.
Chapter 2: ‘Formation de lexèmes’ (word formation) introduces the
concept of the mental dictionary (lexicon) and that of word formation.
The authors argue that there are three major processes of word
formation used in French, namely, affixation, compounding and
conversion. As far as affixation is concerned, rules of word formation
are believed to be stored in the lexicon. Each affix is stored with
information about its meaning, syntactic category, pronunciation and
subcategorisation. Regarding the second process, different ways of
classifying compounds in French are cited, e.g. whether they are
endocentric or exocentric, and the type of internal structure and
semantic relations they display. The process of conversion is also
addressed, in particular, the criteria for determining its direction.
Finally, the minor processes of word formation in French are
identified, including clipping, acronym and blending.
Chapter 3: ‘Catégories syntaxiques’ (syntactic categories). Here it is
argued that words belong to grammatical categories. They are
classified according to their morphological and syntactic properties
and their distribution. Words are said to fall into two types: lexical
and functional. The morphological and syntactic properties and
distribution of these categories and their differences are explained.
Chapter 4: ‘Syntagmes et règles de réécriture (phrases and phrase
structure (PS) rules). In this chapter the concept of ‘phrase’ is
identified and tested using a number of constituent structure tests,
including pronominalisation, substitution, autonomy, movement and
coordination. The different types of constituents, namely NP, VP, AP,
AdvP and PP, are also investigated. The structure of the simple
sentence is then explained using PS rules and the corresponding PS
trees. Finally, the differences between lexical and structural
ambiguity are clarified.
Chapter 5: ‘Théorie X-barre’ (X-bar theory). Here, problems of the
previous model of PS grammar are argued to motivate the introduction
of a new model, X-bar theory, which is explained using the distinction
between complements and adjuncts. In order to understand the
structural differences between complements and adjuncts, syntactic
tests are used. Finally, the components of universal grammar (UG),
namely, the lexical component vs. the computational component, are
described.
Chapter 6: ‘Théorie X-barre appliquée à des catégories fonctionnelles’
(X-bar theory applied to functional categories).  In this chapter, the
authors motivate and explain the structure of the constituents DP and
CP. The different French complementizers are identified, including Ø,
que, à, and de. Complex sentences containing finite and non-finite
complement clauses are also investigated. With non-finite complement
clauses, the existence of a null PRO subject is postulated.
Chapter 7: ‘Restreindre la théorie X-barre: sous-catégorisation et
critère thématique’ (constraining X-bar theory: subcategorisation and
the thematic criterion). Here, each lexical item is said to select
specific complements, and, therefore, two selectional constraints,
namely, subcategorisation and thematic roles, are introduced and
explained. The idea that sentence structure is affected by lexical
properties is formalised in a principle known as the Projection
principle. Similarly, the fact that every sentence must have a subject
is known as the Extended projection principle (EPP) . Finally, the
behaviour of expletive ‘il’ is explained.
Chapter 8: ‘Mouvements de tête à tête’ (head movement). On the basis
of the distribution of frequency adverbs in English and French, a
‘move alpha’ tool is added to the computational component, whereby the
verb in French is moved from a head position to another head position
(V to T). This results in a distinction between two levels of
structure: D-structure and S-structure. Similarly, questions in French
are argued to motivate another instance of head movement known as T to
C. Finally, negation in French is said to illustrate another head
movement operation, namely, NEG to T.
Chapter 9: ‘Théorie des cas et mouvement du DP’ (Case theory and DP
movement). The Case filter is here introduced and explained. The
different French cases are identified. Owing to locality constraints,
subjects are shown to be generated inside VP rather than TP: the
VP-internal-subject hypothesis (VISH). This, it is argued, requires
movement of the DP from ‘Spec, VP’ to ‘Spec, TP’ in order to justify
the assignment of nominative case. The floating quantifier ‘tous’ is
argued to be another argument in favour of the VISH. Finally, two
types of intransitive verbs are identified and distinguished:
unaccusative and unergative.
Chapter 10: ‘Mouvement des syntagmes Qu-’ (wh-movement). In this
chapter, direct and indirect wh-questions are investigated. It is
argued that C hosts a [+_ wh] feature which signals the presence of a
question element in the sentence. In case [wh] is positive, this may
result in movement to ‘Spec,CP’ labelled wh-movement. Another instance
of wh-movement, is found in relatives, which are claimed to
instantiate a null operator [Op]. This contains a [+wh] feature which
moves a phrase to ‘Spec,CP’.
Evaluation
In this coursebook, the presentation is clear, simple and easy to
understand by learners of French. The chapters are of a reasonably
high standard, accessible to the target audience, namely, second
language learners of French.
The major contribution of the book is in clarifying the principles and
parameters model of generative grammar, using French data.
On the negative side, there are a few weaknesses:
1) Certain choices are made by the authors with no explanation: on
p.14, for instance, they choose (without any justification) to analyse
morphology and syntax differently; the generative model is used only
for syntax. Similarly, on p.15 (again with no justification), they say
that the approach used is principles and parameters but, at times,
with certain minimalist elements.
2) We cannot speak of a strong original contribution as the book is
mostly a replication/reproduction of prior research (Milkowski et al.,
2018), where the only difference from other introductory books is in
the choice of the data. Similarly, the structure of the book follows
that used in most introductory books in linguistics.
3) The target audience of the book is claimed to be non-native
speakers of French with little knowledge of linguistics. However, the
audience could just as well be native speakers of French with little
knowledge of linguistics.
4) On p.70, in connection with example (60), the authors could have
made a remark about an important feature of French direct object
pronouns, namely, the fact that they occupy a preverbal position (cf.
Chekili, 2023). This is important as the audience of the book is
non-native speakers of French whose mother tongues may not have this
feature (In fact most non-romance languages do not) and therefore,
such an explanation could prevent many cases of transfer. Similarly,
on p.172, in connection with auxiliaries, it would have been
interesting to show the differences  between French and English
unaccusative and unergative verbs. (ibid., 2023).
5) Finally, there are a few language mistakes; e.g. p.55 (1); p.120,
para. 2, L.6; p.123, para.2, L.1; p.124, para. last, L.1… .
To conclude, notwithstanding these weaknesses, the book, I believe,
has succeeded in achieving its stated goal, namely, to serve as a text
for an introductory course which introduces, in a clear and concise
way, the principles of French morphosyntactic analysis.
References
Chekili, F. (2023). Generative comparative syntax & language
education; with special reference
to the teaching of English to French & Arab learners. Journal of
Second and Multiple
Language Acquisition
–JSMULA Vol 11, Issue 2, 407-431.
Milkowski, M., Hensel, W. M., & Hohol, M. (2018). Replicability or
reproducibility? On the
replication crisis in computational neuroscience and sharing only
relevant detail. Journal of
computational neuroscience, 45 (3), 163-172.



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