When learners know more than linguists: (French) direct object clitics are not objects

Abstract

This article draws on empirical findings from child language in order to evaluate syntactic analyses of object clitic constructions in adult French, focusing on two long-standing issues in the literature: (i) the argumental status of direct object clitics, and (ii) the site of their first merge. Two sets of acquisition data bearing on these questions are discussed: the persistent occurrence of object (clitic) omission, and the lack of clitic misplacement observed in child French. I argue that the former can only be adequately explained if object clitics are not argumental, and that the latter presents evidence against a first merge of the clitic in the verbal complement. This leads to the conclusion that the developmental data considered here are fully consistent only with syntactic analyses of object clitics as inflectional markers generated outside the complement of the verb, as proposed, for example, in Roberge (1990) and Sportiche (1996).