A lexicalist collocation analysis of sentential negation and negative concord in French

Frank Richter and Manfred Sailer

In: Valia Kordoni (ed): Tübingen Studies in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340, Nr. 132, Volume 1. Universität Tübingen. pp. 231-300

This paper started as part of Manfred's and my work on negative concord in Polish. However, we realized very soon that the corresponding French data were so complex and exciting that we could not treat them as a mere side issue of our investigation of Polish. The point of this paper is to show that the techniques and architecture developed for Polish are applicable to other languages. We defend a strictly lexicalist view of negative concord and argue that an interestingly broad range of data can only be analyzed if we admit that distributional idiosyncrasies of words play and important role. In addition to modern Standard French we also discuss Canadian French (Acadien) and Haitian Creole. The final analysis builds on our collocation theory: N-words that participate in negative concord constructions impose conditions on admissible logical forms in certain licensing domains.
The paper might also be of interest to readers of the Polish paper, since it contains an appendix that formalizes the semantic representation language and the collocation theory of both papers in RSRL.

Electronically available file formats (66 pages):

• french.ps.gz (179850 bytes)
• french.ps (495951 bytes)

Bibtex entry:

@inproceedings{richter:sailer:french,
          author = {Frank Richter and Manfred Sailer},
          title = {A lexicalist collocation analysis of sentential negation and
                   negative concord in French},
          booktitle = {T\"ubingen Studies in Head-Driven Phrase Structure
                       Grammar},
          editor = {Valia Kordoni},
          publisher = {Universit\"at T\"ubingen},
          year = 1999,
          pages = {231--300},
          series = {{Arbeitspapiere des SFB 340, Nr. 132, Volume 1}}
}