This book is the first extensive study on French Quantification in the field of Syntax. It provides a typology of four main quantified noun phrases in French (existential, universal, negative and wh-), detailing their syntactic, semantic and prosodic behaviors and showing that they can be reduced to two classes—Split-DP structures or Floating quantification. Relying on syntax and semantics, the book establishes a three-way structural typology of wh in-situ phrases and extends it to existentials. It pays special attention to the prosodic properties associated with their different readings and proposes an analysis of the distribution of subextraction and pied-piping. Similarly based on semantic and syntactic tests, the book reveals N(egative) words to be universal Quantifiers. It proposes a new structure of N-words in terms of constituent negation and includes a detailed analysis of the difference between not an N and not all the N in French.

This book offers a series of studies that come together in their concern for furthering an understanding of the French language, of its uses, its forms, its variation, and its acquisition. Other than contributing to a general understanding of French, this book also addresses the use of corpora for the study of language and the links between tools, methods, analyses and applications. What data are used, and how? What are the underlying theoretical and/or methodological considerations? How have these changed our way of formulating linguistic descriptions? What are the implications for descriptive accounts of French today? What are the applications of corpus studies? These questions (and many more) are addressed here in a series of scholarly contributions grouped into four broad areas: diachrony, syntax, sociolinguistics, and the learning and teaching of French. The book provides an up-to-date and challenging account of French for researchers in French linguistics. It will also be suitable for use on post-graduate and some undergraduate courses, providing useful information not only for students and teachers of French, but also for language and linguistics students in general. Many of the issues addressed are not specific to the French language and can be accounted for within a more general area of reflection within linguistics on changing relations between data, theory and methods.

The book Constructions in French is the first collected volume to focus on French syntax from a constructionist perspective. It has been written with two kinds of readers in mind: for readers interested in the relationship between the French linguistic tradition and cognitive linguistics, and for readers who would like to examine how constructional analysis can be applied to a variety of French language phenomena. The eleven papers illustrate the insights generated by combining lexicalist and constructionist approaches, focusing on syntax as a dynamic system and using corpus data from a variety of speech genres. The contributions provide new findings about French usage trends (in linguistics and in psycholinguistics), including insights into new, nonstandard and poorly studied constructions.

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Over the last two decades, functional heads have been one of the privileged objects of research in generative linguistics. However, within this line of inquiry, two alternative approaches have developed: while the cartographic project considers crosslinguistic evidence as crucial for a complete mapping of functional heads in universal grammar, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as literally involving a reduction in the number of available heads. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self-contained case studies. The contributions cover all the main layers of recently studied syntactic structure, including such major areas of empirical research as grammaticalization and language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects of syntactic structure according to the cartographic approach, and in doing so demonstrates that the differences between cartography and minimalism are perhaps more superficial than substantial.

Learn the French grammar with this easy French textbook full of examples and exercises! This course is divided into 7 chapters and includes 200 exercises and free video lessons for each point. The method is simple: start from a simple sentence and add slowly more elements to it. Then practice after each new element with one or more exercises.

The cartographic project considers evidence for a functional head in one language as evidence for it in universal grammar. In this volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self contained case studies.

This Handbook represents the development of research and the current level of knowledge in the fields of syntactic theory and syntax analysis. Syntax can look back to a long tradition. Especially in the last 50 years, however, the interaction between syntactic theory and syntactic analysis has led to a rapid increase in analyses and theoretical suggestions. This second edition of the Handbook on Syntax adopts a unifying perspective and therefore does not place the division of syntactic theory into several schools to the fore, but the increase in knowledge resulting from the fruitful argumentations between syntactic analysis and syntactic theory. It uses selected phenomena of individual languages and their cross-linguistic realizations to explain what syntactic analyses can do and at the same time to show in what respects syntactic theories differ from each other. It investigates how syntax is related to neighbouring disciplines and investigate the role of the interfaces especially the relationship between syntax and phonology, morphology, compositional semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon. The phenomena chosen bring together renowned experts in syntax, and represent the consensus reached as to what has to be considered as an important as well as illustrative syntactic phenomenon. The phenomena discuss do not only serve to show syntactic analyses, but also to compare theoretical approaches with each other.

This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler’s diverse and visionary research over the years. The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal models can be applied to the analysis of such diverse problems as the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of tense, aspect and deictic expressions, syntax and pragmatics of quantifiers and semantics and pragmatics of connectives and negation. The second part presents the application of formal models to the treatment of cognitive issues related to the use of language, and in particular, demonstrating cognitive accounts of different types of human interactions, the context in utterance interpretation (salience, inferential comprehension processes), figurative uses of language (irony pretence), the role of syntax in Theory of Mind in autism and the analysis of the aesthetics of nature. Finally, the third part addresses computational and corpus-based approaches to natural language for investigating language variation, language universals and discourse related issues. This volume will be of great interest to syntacticians, pragmaticians, computer scientists, semanticians and psycholinguists.

The grammar of focus has been studied in generative grammar from its inception. It has been the subject of intense, detailed cross-linguistic investigation for over 20 years, particularly within the Principles and Parameters framework. It is appropriate at this point, therefore, to take stock. Appraisal at this particular point is all the more legitimate because it comes at a time of general evaluation of the results of the profound activity that has characterized the Principles and Parameters framework. This general assessment has produced a radical new direction within that framework. The volume starts off with an introductory chapter that aims to provide an outline for the assessment, to be followed by an overview of the evolution of the study of focus in generative grammar, and a recapitulation of the principal issues associated with focus. These issues are taken up in the remaining chapters of the book, where various grammatical means of marking focus (as well as grammaticalization of focus marking) are analyzed in a wide variety of languages.