Quels compléments de nom peut-on extraire en français ?
Danièle Godard, Ivan A. Sag · Langue française · 1996
Daniele Godard & Ivan A. Sag : Which Complements of a Noun can one Cliticize or Relativize in French ? It is well-known that certain, but not all complements of a noun can be extracted (cliticized, relativized or turned into a question) in French. We examine a variety of facts which support the following generalization : only the first argument on a noun's argument list can be extracted (un livre dont j'ai aimé la fin /j'en ai aimé la fin), or can function as a wh-complement (included in a larger phrase in pied-piping constructions, as in un livre à la fin duquel je ne me suis pas intéressé). A second observation is that an element extracted from an NP must function as the complement of the highest noun (the head) in that phrase. By contrast, wh-expressions may be more deeply embedded within an NP. Casting our analysis in the HPSG framework, we propose two simple constraints on the lexical representation of (non-predicative) nouns. These constraints, which make reference to non-local features, interact with independently motivated aspects of the HPSG treatment of unbounded dependency constructions (e.g. relative and interrogative clauses) to predict the surprisingly complex domain of facts we survey.