Karen Lahousse (KU Leuven)

The encoding of Information Structure in Syntax: French as a test case

This talk is about the way in which information structure (IS) is encoded in syntax and the extent to which language variation can be explained by the interaction between syntax and IS. It is well-known (and acknowledged in both functional and formal approaches) that IS-articulations such as topic-comment and focus-background closely interact with word order. However, the exact way in which syntax and IS interact, and the extent to which IS is encoded in syntax, are still subject to debate.

In this talk I use verb-subject (VS) word order in (standard, i.e. non-colloquial) French as a test case. Although French is an almost generalized SVO language, it allows VS word order in some specific (hitherto unexplained) contexts:

(1)      a. *(Alors) est arrivé un homme. (lit. Then has arrived a man.)

  b. *(Quand) partira ton ami? (lit. When will-leave your friend?)

  c. *(Ainsi) écrivait Alexandre (lit. In this way wrote Alexandre.)

The fact that French VS word order, in contrast with Spanish and Italian, needs a (supposedly syntactic) trigger, has often been related to the non-null-subject nature of French, which has lead to a parametric division between French on the one hand and Spanish and Italian on the other.

In this talk, I will first show that the ‘triggers’ for VS in French, although they do satisfy (whatever version of) EPP, are not purely syntactic, but determine the IS of the whole construction, and reflect basic IS-articulations. Moreover, I will show that these triggers are a subset of those in Spanish and Italian. This does not warrant a parametric opposition between these languages, which is a welcome conclusion in the light of the challenging of the null subject parameter. I will argue that the cross-linguistic variation can be explained by IS-restrictions on the same syntactic template.

Secondly, on the basis of new and (a revisitation of) old data, I will compare existing syntactic analyses of VS in French, which make fundamentally different assumptions and predictions about the encoding of IS in syntax. I will argue that the empirical facts can only be captured by an analysis which (i) crucially involves the mixed syntactic-IS nature of the ‘trigger’ of VS, and (ii) which does not rely on a one-to-one correspondence between the IS of the postverbal subject and its syntactic position (as in cartographic analyses), but leaves the IS of the postverbal subject underspecified.

The general conclusion of the talk will be that IS (and specifically the topic/non-topic distinction, rather than the focus-background articulation) is encoded in syntax at the left periphery of the clause, and that it is there that variation takes place.