Schedule 72. StuTS

It is quite common to consider that the adverb is placed after the verb in French. But this is not always true: and as Pollock (1989) and Cinque & Rizzi (2008) point out, adverb placement can especially vary when negation or verb finiteness modify the overall structure of the sentence. For instance, when playing with verb finiteness, we notice that some adverbs appear before the lexical verb, whereas some other are placed after it… And some are even allowed to appear in one or the other position!
This means that even though adverb order is not completely free, it exhibits some variation. Our talk aims to address this variation by investigating the different factors that play a role in adverb placement in French.
Using structures where the lexical verb is non-finite (like the perfect tense and serial verb constructions) and negative clauses, we will show that adverbs can be classified depending on their semantic categories. These semantic categories can then be used to create a cartography of French adverbs, i.e. a hierarchy predicting their linear order when they co-occur inside a single clause. Finally, we will see how scopes can shape further adverb order, especially when two adverbs of the same semantic category appear in the same clause.
By the end of the talk, participants should have learned how to place an adverb in a French sentence no matter the complexity of its structure.

Info

Day: 2022-11-04
Start time: 14:15
Duration: 00:30
Room: Wiwi-Bunker —Room 4099
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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