On the Syntax of Direct Quotation in French

Olivier Bonami (1) , Danièle Godard (1)

1 LLF UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

Direct quotation raises three major problems for grammatical modelling: (i) the variety of quoted material (which can be a non linguistic behavior, or a sign in a different language), (ii) the embedding of an utterance inside another one, (iii) a special denotation, the content of the quotation being the utterance itself. We propose a unary rule, which turns the quoted material into a linguistic sign whose content is itself a behavior, which entertains a resemblance relation to the behavior demonstrated by the speaker. Syntactically, direct quotation comes in two varieties: it can be the complement of a quotative verb, or constitutes a head sentence, modified by an adjunct containing a quotative verb whose complement is extracted and identified with its local features.

Mots clés: C-ACTI

Domaines: Linguistique

Olivier Bonami, Danièle Godard. On the Syntax of Direct Quotation in French. 15th International Connference on HPSG, 2008, Stanford, United States. pp.358-377. ⟨halshs-00751080⟩