An Accessibility hierarchy pattern for Resumptive pronouns in spoken French

Abstract

On the basis of the results of a corpus study on Colloquial French, which show that the distribution of resumptive pronouns globally matches the Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan, Comrie 1977), we argue that resumptive pronouns in French relative clauses are not intrusive and that resumptive and gapped relatives involve different syntactic derivations belonging to different registers. We explain the lack of the highest subject restriction in Colloquial French, in contrast with (other) languages displaying regular resumptive relatives, by the special nature of French subject clitics as agreement markers (Culbertson 2010). This conclusion and the distribution of subject clitics we found in the corpus reinforces the analysis of the relative complementizer qui as a grammaticalized form of que+obligatory resumption il (Rooryck 2000; Rizzi, Shlonsky 2007).

Keywords

• Accessibility hierarchy. Corpus. Relative clauses. Resumptive pronouns. Spoken French