Chapter 30: French

Anne Dagnac (1)

1 CLLE-ERSS - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie

This chapter is a case study of elliptical constructions in French. It reviews the elliptical constructions that French does and doesn’t display, and the language-specific properties some of them show. It argues that French does not display predicate ellipses but only predicate anaphors, including in comparatives. It also so shows that not all clausal ellipses may rely on the same mechanism: while the gap following modal verbs in French, known as French Modal Ellipsis, is an ellipsis based on clausal deletion, some cases of sluicing and fragment answers resist such an analysis, while stripping and gapping subsume different types of elliptical phenomena which cannot be given an homogeneous analysis. It also briefly presents the main properties of nominal ellipses and of the various short structures in comparative clauses.

Mots clés: stripping; gapping; noun phrase ellipsis; comparatives; sluicing; coordination; Coordinate ellipsis; clausal ellipsis; French Modal ellipsis; VP-ellipsis

Domaines: Linguistique

Anne Dagnac. Chapter 30: French. Jeroen van Craenenbroech; Tanja Timmermann. The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis, Oxford University Press, pp.785-814, 2019, 9780198712398. ⟨halshs-01673698⟩