Open AccessThe syntax of French N$'$ phrases
Author(s) -
Anne Abeillé,
Olivier Bonami,
Danièle Godard,
Jesse Tseng
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2004.1
Subject(s) - oblique case , variety (cybernetics) , linguistics , syntax , quantifier (linguistics) , unitary state , computer science , syntactic structure , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , philosophy , political science , law
Of all French functional elements, the form de has without question the widestvariety of uses, and presents the greatest challenge for linguistic descriptionand analysis. Historically a preposition, it still has a number ofprepositional uses in modern French, but in many contexts it calls for analtogether different treatment. We begin by outlining a general distinctionbetween oblique and non-oblique uses of de. We then develop a detailedaccount of constructions where de combines with an N'. We provide a unitaryanalysis of de in three constructions (quantifier extraction, "quantificationat a distance", and negative contexts) which have been not been considered to berelated in previous accounts.