Discourse level variable licensing.Par exemplein Quebec French

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reports the existence of a type of lexical item that has gone unnoticed in the previous literature. We start from the observation that the phrasepar exemplein Quebec French has two possible meanings: an illustrative one and a contrastive one. We argue that contrastivepar exempleadjoins to constituents that are similar to polarity sensitive items and thus marks sensitivity of the respective XP to a certain property of the environment. The syntactic distribution of the XP to which contrastivepar exempleadjoins to, although similar to that of polarity sensitive items, actually differs from the latter in important respects. Just like polarity sensitive items, the [XPpar exemple] constituent must be in the scope of an operator. However, unlike polarity sensitive items, which are licensed by operators that are defined at sentence level, the licensor of contrastive [XPpar exemple] is a discourse level connector (i.e. a connector that relates the sentence that containspar exemplewith a previous, independently expressed sentence). This implies that discourse connectors do more than simply relate two propositions: given that they also licence variables, they also have operator properties.