Abstract
This article presents experimental data assessing the acceptability status of long subject questions (LSQs) in French. It shows that their suboptimal score does not reflect dialect variation and it fails to detect a change in progress. An analysis, developing further the rescuing strategy proposed in Rizzi and Shlonsky's freezing account, is presented. The crux of the proposal is that a Case mismatch obtains within the embedded complementizer, which is shown to be necessarily syncretic in LSQs. The full acceptability of embedded subject questions is then discussed and accounted for within this framework.
Acknowledgments
I am particularly grateful to Luigi Rizzi for his priceless observations on different versions of this research. I would also like to thank Giuliano Bocci for his considerable help with the experimental part of my work. Finally, I benefited greatly from some insightful remarks of Ur Shlonsky and helpful comments of one anonymous reviewer. Needless to say the proposal expressed here, as well as any inaccuracies and mistakes, are my sole responsibility.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Original Articles
- Introduction: On the Role of Romance in Cartographic Studies
- a-Topics in Italian/Romance and the Cartography of Children’s Inventions
- Long Subject Questions in French: An Insight into the Left Periphery of Selected CPs
- On Two Sub-projections of the Nominal Extended Projection: Some Romance Evidence
- The Syntactic Encoding of Conventional Implicatures in Sicilian Polar Questions
- On French Est-ce que Yes/No Questions and Related Constructions
- Criterial V2: ModP as a Locus of Microvariation in Swiss Romansh Varieties
- On the Raising of the Finite Main Verb in Angolan Portuguese and in Mozambican Portuguese: Cartographic Hierarchies, Microvariation and the Use of Adverbs as Diagnostics for Movement
- Microvariation and Change in the Romance Left Periphery
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Original Articles
- Introduction: On the Role of Romance in Cartographic Studies
- a-Topics in Italian/Romance and the Cartography of Children’s Inventions
- Long Subject Questions in French: An Insight into the Left Periphery of Selected CPs
- On Two Sub-projections of the Nominal Extended Projection: Some Romance Evidence
- The Syntactic Encoding of Conventional Implicatures in Sicilian Polar Questions
- On French Est-ce que Yes/No Questions and Related Constructions
- Criterial V2: ModP as a Locus of Microvariation in Swiss Romansh Varieties
- On the Raising of the Finite Main Verb in Angolan Portuguese and in Mozambican Portuguese: Cartographic Hierarchies, Microvariation and the Use of Adverbs as Diagnostics for Movement
- Microvariation and Change in the Romance Left Periphery