Reinvestigating Feature-Agree in Minimalist Program:A Case Study of French Cliticization
This study focuses on the syntactic distribution and the licensing strategy of French clitics.Previous studies attribute cliticization in French either to structural deficiency or to feature defectivity of clitics.Nevertheless,neither of these two approaches can offer a unified explanation for the clitics'various morphological externalizations of features as well as their different distributions in the causative construction.Within the generative framework,by further dividing feature-Agree into three independent syntactic operations,the present study investigates different clitics in French,and attributes their distributions and syntactic licenses to both structural deficiency and feature defectivity.The analysis shows that cliticization is essentially triggered by the structural deficiency of clitics,while the landing site of clitics is determined by clitics'feature contents and the different applications of the three different operations.
feature-Agreecliticization in Frenchcausative constructionsyntactic dependencythe generative framework
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
