Evolving Tobler-Mussafia Effects in the Placements of French Clitics (original) (raw)
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Clitic placement in L2 French: evidence from sentence matching
Journal of Linguistics, 2002
In this paper, we argue in favour of the NO IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS, whereby L2 functional categories, features and feature values are attainable, and against the NO PARAMETER RESETTING HYPOTHESIS, according to which L2 learners are restricted to L1 categories and features, as well as against the LOCAL IMPAIRMENT HYPOTHESIS, which claims that the interlanguage grammar is characterized by inert feature values. An online experiment was conducted, investigating adult learners' knowledge of properties relating to clitic projections. Advanced learners of French (L1s English and Spanish), together with a native speaker control group, were tested on a variety of constructions involving clitics by means of the SENTENCE MATCHING procedure (Freedman & Forster 1985). L2 learners distinguished in their response times between certain kinds of grammatical and ungrammatical clitic placement, as did the native-speaker controls, suggesting the attainability of L2 properties distinct from the L1.
In this paper I propose a phase-theoretic analysis of French Clitics. This analysis predicts that enclitics, which are found in imperatives, are spelled out is a phase distinct from their host verb. Since phases are understood as fairly independent pieces of sound and meaning, then this analysis predicts that verbs and their proclitics, which stand in the same phase, should form a closer prosodic unit that verbs and their enclitics. The results of a production experiment testing this claim are presented, and these suggest that the syntactic asymmetry is indeed mirrored in the prosodic structure.
Journal of French Language Studies, 2007
This article examines the phonological status of schwa in clitics, in particular whether or not schwa should be included in their lexical representation. Several distributional and experimental arguments pointing to the lexical status of clitic schwas are reviewed and are shown to be inconclusive, due to the existence of additional data that suggest a different interpretation not involving underlying schwas. The discussion includes experimental results that fail to show residual lip rounding in the vicinity of an omitted schwa at clitic boundaries, contra Barnes and Kavitskaya's (2002) previous claim. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the non-contrastive nature of clitic schwas militates against their underlying status.