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Parsing Language-Specific Constructions: The Case of French Pronominal Clitics

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Abstract

This paper describes the treatment of French pronominal clitics developed for the multilingual Fips parser. Following a brief description of the Fips parser with its object-oriented design and a short review of the basic facts about French clitics, an analysis is presented which distinguishes pronominal chains (in the unmarked case) and argument absorption (for reflexive-reciprocal clitics agreeing with the grammatical subject). Specific data structures and associated procedures are necessary to implement the clitic-trace chain in the first case and the argument absorption in the second case. Exploiting the object-oriented model, we argue that such specific mechanisms should not be part of the basic (universal) model of the parser, but rather should be introduced as a specialization of the base model for languages which display pronominal clitics, such as Romance languages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, for instance, Chomsky (1980, 1991), Pinker (1994). For a rather different view, see Sampson (2005), Sampson et al. (2009).

  2. 2.

    For instance, consider the following statement from Joos (1957:96), quoted by Sampson et al. (2009): “languages can differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways”.

  3. 3.

    See Zwicky (1997), Anderson (2005) for a general discussion and an overview of clitics; Borer (1986), Laenzlinger (1998) for pronominal clitics; Kayne (1975) for French pronominal clitics.

  4. 4.

    See Kayne (1984), Couquaux (1986) and Laenzlinger (1998) for arguments in favour of the distinction between phonological and syntactic clitics. The negative particle ne is also analyzed as a phonological clitic.

  5. 5.

    Notice that these sentences contain all the subject pronoun nous (‘we’), not to be confused with clitic nous.

  6. 6.

    Notice that the order given in condition 2 corresponds to the order of clitics in preverbal position. The order is slightly different in postverbal position.

  7. 7.

    For some speakers, sentence (9c) has a grammatical reading, with clitic l’ interpreted as subject of laver and les enfants as direct object.

  8. 8.

    See Kayne (1975) for a very detailed account of these two options and their semantic distinctions.

  9. 9.

    This statement is true for Modern French, assuming a mono-sentential analysis of French causatives. Clitic-climbing, i.e. clitic-chains crossing a sentence boundary, can be found in old French as well as in other Romance languages (e.g. Italian), in general restricted to embedded infinitival clauses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LATL/CUI, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Eric Wehrli

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  1. Eric Wehrli
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Correspondence to Eric Wehrli .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

    Joanna Blochowiak

  2. Batiment Landolt, 7th Floor, Univ of Geneva, Dept of Linguistics, Geneva, Switzerland

    Cristina Grisot

  3. Dept. of Psycholinguistics, University of Geneva Dept. of Psycholinguistics, Geneva, Switzerland

    Stephanie Durrleman

  4. Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva, Genève, Geneve, Switzerland

    Christopher Laenzlinger

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Wehrli, E. (2017). Parsing Language-Specific Constructions: The Case of French Pronominal Clitics. In: Blochowiak, J., Grisot, C., Durrleman, S., Laenzlinger, C. (eds) Formal Models in the Study of Language. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48832-5_25

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48831-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48832-5

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