On the Lack of Transparency Effects in French

Abstract

Cinque (2002) examines those transparency effects that have been claimed to point to the existence of restructuring in French and concludes that quantifier and adverb climbing depend not on restructuring but, rather, on an irrealis context. In this paper, we show that restructuring does not play an active role in explaining the existence of en ‘of-it’ and y ‘there’ climbing or long movement in ‘easy-to-please’ constructions either, which leads to the conclusion that Modern French has no transparency effects of the restructuring kind. We then present arguments against Cinque’s (2004) thesis that verbs of the restructuring class are universally functional verbs. Instead, we adopt the Cinque (2001)/Cardinaletti & Shlonsky (2004) approach according to which restructuring verbs can be merged either as lexical or functional verbs. We argue that this approach should be parameterized to yield three options that account for the cross-dialectal/linguistic variation associated with restructuring.

On the direction of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of object clitics in French and Italian

“…Section 2). Finding restructuring in French L1 in a child who fails to restructure in Italian L2 does not corroborate a parametric setting according to which there would be only lexical pseudo-modals (Authier & Reed, 2007). Rather, it seems as though the parameter value of Italian is set (5a), i.e.…”

“…The bidirectional cross-linguistic influence may be due to the ambiguous restructuring possibilities of Italian and French. Thus, if restructuring is parameterized (Authier & Reed, 2007), the Italian value (as in 5a), which is more open than the French, having both functional and lexical modal verbs, is open for French too, in the bilingual French/Italian acquisition, until the child has enough positive evidence that French only has lexical modal verbs. This might be exactly what happens in the case of the French L1/Italian L2 child who made placement errors in both languages by putting the OCL in the OCL position of the other language.…”

“…(5a) and (5b). The analysis of restructuring presented in Cardinaletti and Shlonsky (2004) and in Authier and Reed (2007) The so-called clitics mechanism (Seuren, 2009), i.e. the clustering of dative and accusative OCL, is a case of placement difference between French and Italian.…”

“…This suggests that the cutoff point between what comprises an instance of transfer from a previously or a simultaneously learned language, and what comprises an instance of options available to the child, possibly through UG, is not so clear (Hamann & Belletti, 2006: 31). Also considering the proposal of Authier and Reed (2007) regarding a parameterization of restructuring, the acquisition of OCLs becomes a question of choosing a parameter value, which makes it important to disentangle the options of the direction of cross-linguistic influence discussed in the literature.…”

“…The position of the OCL was, so to speak, in the French position, as it appeared between the modal and the infinitive. According to Authier and Reed (2007) this position is a lexical position, in accordance with the French parametric setting (cf. 5b).…”