Phrasal affixes and French morphosyntax

Abstract : A number of "minor" elements in French occupy the boundary between syntax and morphology and call for a special analysis. This paper presents an HPSG formalization of a proposal for treating "à", "de", and the definite article "le" as phrasal affixes. The mixed status of these forms requires a two-level analysis, with morphophonological realization at the lexical level (using lexical prefixation rules) and syntactic/semantic interpretation in the syntax (using non-branching ID rules). The two levels are linked by EDGE feature percolation. The proposed treatment accounts for a range of grammatical phenomena that are highly problematic for traditional analyses in which "à", "de", and "le" are considered to be independent syntactic words.