French subject island? Empirical studies of dont and de qui

French Language Studies

2021

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Contrary to most French grammars claiming that French only allows masculine agreement when mixed-gender nouns are conjoined, we show that closest conjunct agreement (CCA) does exist in contemporary French, as in other Romance languages, and is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives. Using data from a large corpus (FrWac) and an acceptability rating experiment, we show that (feminine) CCA is well accepted in contemporary French, and should be distinguished from attraction errors, despite the norm prescribing masculine agreement. We also show the role of the adjective position, i.e. prenominal or post-nominal, and humanness. CCA is the preferred strategy for prenominal adjectives, and non-human nouns favour CCA for post-nominal adjectives. Assuming a hierarchical structure for coordination, the closest noun is the highest in A-N order, whereas it is the lowest in N-A order. Thus CCA in prenominal position may be favoured by a shorter structural distance. One can also see CCA with a prenominal adjective as ‘early’ agreement. Regarding humanness, grammatical gender is interpreted as social gender with human nouns, and a masculine plural can refer to a mixed group. This ‘gender neutral’ plural may favour masculine agreement for human nouns, or the prescriptive norm is more influential for human nouns.

Closest conjunct agreement with attributive adjectives

French Language Studies

2021

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French subject island constraint?

Winckel

2020

Structural, Functional, and Processing Perspectives on Linguistic Island Effects

Liu

Winckel

et al. 2022

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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Ross (1967) observed that “island” structures like “Who do you think [NP the gift from __] prompted the rumor?” or “Who did you hear [NP the statement [S that the CEO promoted __]]?” are not acceptable, despite having what seem to be plausible meanings in some contexts. Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973) hypothesized that the source of the unacceptability is in the syntax. Here, we summarize how theories of discourse, frequency, and memory from the literature might account for such effects. We suggest that there is only one island structure—a class of coordination islands—that is best explained by a syntactic/semantic constraint. We speculate that all other island structures are likely to be explained in terms of discourse, frequency, and memory. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.