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Voice mismatch and contrast in French Right-Node Raising

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2023

ANNE ABEILLÉ ,
AOI SHIRAISHI  and
BARBARA HEMFORTH
ANNE ABEILLÉ
Affiliation:
Université Paris Cité, CNRS, anne.abeille@u-paris.fr
AOI SHIRAISHI
Affiliation:
University of Tokyo, Japan, ioaaoi430@gmail.com
BARBARA HEMFORTH
Affiliation:
Université Paris Cité, CNRS, barbara-edith.hemforth@cnrs.fr
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Abstract

Right-Node Raising is generally considered to impose stricter identity conditions than other kinds of ellipsis, such as VP ellipsis, according to Hankamer & Sag 1976 and Hardt 1993. In this paper, we investigate voice mismatch in French Right-Node Raising (RNR) through a corpus study and two experiments. We show that RNR with voice mismatch can be found in a written corpus (frTenTen 2012) and that many examples involve coordination of a reflexive active and a short passive form. We suggest this is because semantic contrast (here, between self and external agent) plays a role according to Hartmann (2000) and Abeillé and Mouret (2010). We ran two acceptability judgement experiments to test voice mismatch and semantic contrast. We did not find any penalty for voice mismatch with VP ellipsis but an interaction with semantic contrast. We also found an effect of semantic contrast when coordinating an active and a passive VP without participle ellipsis. We conclude that voice mismatch is acceptable with RNR and propose a Head-driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis, following Chaves (2014) and Shiraïshi et al. (2019).

Keywords

contrastellipsisFrenchpassivereflexiveRight-Node Raisingvoice mismatch
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 59 , Special Issue 2: Experimental and corpus-based approaches to ellipsis , April 2023 , pp. 361 - 388
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This work has been supported by the LabEx Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (ANR 10-LABX-0083). Part of this work was presented at the 2015 CSSP Conference in Paris, AMLaP 2016 Conference in Bilbao, the 2019 ECBAE Conference at UC Davis, and at the Linguistics Department of UC San Diego in 2019. We thank the participants at those events for their comments, as well as the JofL anonymous reviewers and the special issue editors.

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