French subject island constraint?

Abstract

<jats:title>Summary</jats:title> <jats:p>We present new experimental results (corpora and experiments) showing that extraction out of subject, compared with extraction out of object, obeys a pragmatic constraint and not a syntactic constraint. We show how such a constraint can be formalized in an <jats:sc>hpsg</jats:sc> grammar of French which views relative clauses, <jats:italic>wh</jats:italic>-questions and <jats:italic>it</jats:italic>-clefts as different constructions.</jats:p>