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The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: four apparent counterexamples in French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1997

PHILIP H. MILLER ,
GEOFFREY K. PULLUM  and
ARNOLD M. ZWICKY
PHILIP H. MILLER
Affiliation:
Author's address: 40 rue Scarron, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. E-mail: [email protected] Université de Lille 3 and URA 382 SILEX du CNRS
GEOFFREY K. PULLUM
Affiliation:
Author's address: Stevenson College, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] University of California, Santa Cruz
ARNOLD M. ZWICKY
Affiliation:
Author's address: 63 West Beaumont Road, Columbus, OH 43214, U.S.A.. E-mail: [email protected] The Ohio State University and Stanford University
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Abstract

The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the alleged relevance of syllable count to the description of attributive adjective placement; section 2 addresses the validity of a rule mentioning consonantality in stating the agreement rule for adverbial tout; section 3 turns to the issue of preposition choice (e.g. en vs. au) with geographical proper names; and section 4 takes a look at a purported case of phonological reference in stating the rule for ellipsis of a clitic pronoun and an auxiliary in a coordinate structure. In each case we bring independent evidence to bear on the problem in order to show that the analyses employing phonology-sensitive syntactic statements are in error and the prediction of the PPFS is confirmed.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , March 1997 , pp. 67 - 90
Copyright
1997 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors' names are listed alphabetically; equal shares of credit and responsibility attach to each. French grammaticality judgments where sources are not cited are those of the first-named author, a native speaker. English translations from French sources are also his. We thank Bernard Fradin, Aaron Halpern, Jean-Paul Lang, Marc Plénat, and two anonymous referees for their comments, and we acknowledge the following sources of support: Miller's work on this paper while he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, where the facilities of the Center for the Study of Language and Information proved most useful (special thanks to Trudy Vizmanos); Pullum's work on the paper began while he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during 1990–1991 and completed during a sabbatical leave provided by the University of California, Santa Cruz in Fall 1995; and Zwicky's work was completed with the assistance of a Distinguished University Professorship grant from The Ohio State University. An earlier discussion of some of this material was previously published in French (Miller, Pullum & Zwicky 1992); this paper supersedes that one, including additional material and incorporating some substantive revisions.