Studies on Interrogative and Relative Syntax in French and Romance

This book provides a detailed study of the unusually large array of interrogative and relative grammars mastered by French speakers. Each of its eight chapters is devoted to one aspect of their interrogative competence and to the closely related syntax of their relative, exclamative, and cleft constructions. Jean-Yves Pollock draws on the rich traditional and generative literature devoted to this type of construction and makes use of all the theoretical tools of modern generative grammar, including the displacement known as remnant movement and the highly articulated high and low left peripheries of the clause developed within the cartographic approach. French speakers’ competence in these complex areas often seems to set them apart from speakers of other Romance languages: this book hence adopts a comparative approach to isolate those features of French that are responsible for the unique properties exhibited by the constructions under investigation. A greater understanding of French questions, clefts, free relatives, and exclamatives is achieved through comparison with the equivalent constructions in English and Romance - more specifically Italian and Northern Italian dialects - and those French constructions equally shed light on the syntax of English, Italian, and Northern Italian dialects.

Jean-Yves Pollock, Emeritus Professor, University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée

Jean-Yves Pollock is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. He has previously held teaching or research positions at Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis, the University of Rennes 2, Harvard University, and the University of Picardy Jules Verne, and as a CNRS researcher at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in Lyon. He specializes in comparative syntax, and has worked extensively on verb movement, the structure of the IP, impersonal sentences, questions, and relatives.