Abstract : Of all French functional elements, the form _de_ has without question the widest variety of uses, and presents the greatest challenge for linguistic description and analysis. Historically a preposition, it still has a number of prepositional uses in modern French, but in many contexts it calls for an altogether different treatment. We begin by outlining a general distinction between "oblique" and "non-oblique" uses of _de_. We then develop a detailed account of constructions where _de_ combines with an N'. We provide a unitary analysis of _de_ in three constructions (quantifier extraction, "quantification at a distance", and negative contexts) which have been not been considered to be related in previous accounts.
https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00100023
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Submitted on : Tuesday, September 26, 2006 - 10:13:25 AM Last modification on : Friday, February 26, 2021 - 3:28:03 PM
Anne Abeillé, Olivier Bonami, Danièle Godard, Jesse Tseng. The Syntax of French de-N' Phrases. 11th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar - HPSG'2004, Frank Van Eynde, 2004, Leuven, Belgium, pp.6-26. ⟨inria-00100023⟩