French subject island? Empirical studies ofdontandde qui

Anne Abeillé,Elodie Winckel

doi:10.1017/s0959269520000137

Anne Abeillé, Elodie Winckel

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959269520000137

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Abstract

AbstractDonthas been claimed to be an exception to the ‘subject island’ constraint (Tellier, 1991; Sportiche and Bellier, 1989; Heck, 2009) and to contrast with true relative pronouns such asde qui. We provide corpus data from a literary corpus (Frantext), which show that relativizing out of the subject is possible withdontandde quiin French relative clauses, and is even the most frequent use of both relative clauses. We show that it is not a recent innovation by comparing subcorpora from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We also show, with an acceptability judgement task, that extraction out of the subject withde quiis well accepted. Why has this possibility been overlooked? We suggest that it may be becausede quirelatives in general are less frequent thandontrelatives (about 60 times less in our corpus). Turning tode quiinterrogatives, we show that extraction out of the subject is not attested, and propose an explanation of the contrast with relative clauses. We conclude that in this respect, French does not seem to differ from other Romance languages.

Highlights

Dont and de qui There are several possibilities in French in order to extract a complement introduced by de, among which dont (‘of which’) and de qui (‘of who’)
Using literary texts from Frantext, which are very well written and edited, we found that de qui relatives corresponding to the complement of the subject are well attested in both twentieth and twenty-first century French, even though they are less numerous than with dont
To see whether there really is a difference between corpus data and acceptability data in this domain, we ran a controlled acceptability experiment (Hemforth, 2013; Sprouse and Almeida, 2017) on de qui relative clauses

Summary

Introduction

Dont and de qui There are several possibilities in French in order to extract a complement introduced by de, among which dont (‘of which’) and de qui (‘of who’) (and de quel, duquel, etc.) The use of these two expressions obeys syntactic and semantic constraints: dont is restricted to relative clauses, whereas de qui can be used in interrogatives; de qui is restricted to animates, whereas dont is not:. B. cet homme loin de qui / *dont je suis ‘the man who I am far from’. To account for these differences, it has been proposed that dont is a complementizer (Godard, 1988; Tellier, 1990) while qui is a wh-pronoun (Tellier, 1991; Le Goffic, 2007). French is a challenging case, since it is not a pro-drop language, contrary to other Romance languages. Godard (1988) has shown that dont allows extraction out of the subject (3b), and this can be related to the fact that it is a complementizer and not a true relative pronoun (see Sportiche, 1981)

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