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title: Partitions and Atoms of Clause Structure : Subjects,
Agreement, Case, and Clitics
author: Sportiche, Dominique.
publisher: Taylor & Francis Routledge
isbn10 | asin: 0415169267
print isbn13: 9780415169264
ebook isbn13: 9780203982372
language: English
subject Grammar, Comparative and general--Clauses.
publication date: 1998
lcc: P297.S68 1998eb
ddc: 415
subject: Grammar, Comparative and general--Clauses.
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PARTITIONS AND ATOMS OF CLAUSE STRUCTURE
This collection brings together some of Dominique Sportiche’s best work, including essays that are
published here for the first time. The articles build on the theory of Principles and Parameters and its
Economy/Minimalist descendants. They progressively develop a view of syntactic structures in which
syntactic properties are increasingly analyzed as atomized in progressively smaller elementary components
and partitioned in the way these elementary components are represented. As a consequence of this view,
it is suggested that languages do not differ at all in their syntactic organization.
The author develops his argument through the analysis of a variety of syntactic configurations. Successive
articles examine what it means to be a subject, how Case-marking functions, how it relates to agreement,
and how pronominal clitic constructions should be analyzed. In each case, it is concluded that the notions
involved should be broken down into smaller elements. In turn, these elements form subgroups of
syntactic structures. The composition of these subgroups obeys a partitioning principle that groups
together elements having similar interpretative functions.
After specializing in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Paris 7, Dominique Sportiche studied
Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where, in 1984, he received a Ph.D.
supervised by Professor Noam Chomsky. After working for a few years in Montreal, Canada, mainly at the
University of Quebec in Montreal, he is now Professor of Linguistics at UCLA.
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Page ii
ROUTLEDGE LEADING LINGUISTS
Series editor: Carlos Otero
1 On Syntax and Semantics
James Higginbotham
2 Partitions and Atoms of Clause Structure Subjects, agreement, case and clitics
Dominique Sportiche
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PARTITIONS AND ATOMS OF CLAUSE STRUCTURE
Subjects, agreement, case and clitics
Dominique Sportiche
London and New York
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First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of
eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Chapters 2 and 8 © 1998 Dominique Sportiche and Hilda Koopman
All other chapters © 1998 Dominique Sportiche
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sportiche, Dominique.
Partitions and atoms of clause structure: subjects, agreement,
case, and clitics/Dominique Sportiche.
A collection of the author’s essays, most of which were previously
published in various sources.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Clauses. I. Title.
P297.S68 1998
415–dc21 97–30512
ISBN 0-203-98237-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-16926-7 (Print Edition)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 A theory of floating quantifiers and its corollaries for constituent structure 16
2 The position of subjects 44
with Hilda Koopman
3 Movement, agreement and case 88
4 Clitic constructions 244
5 Subject clitics in French and Romance: Complex Inversion and clitic doubling 308
6 French predicate clitics and clause structure 342
7 Sketch of a reductionist approach to syntactic variation and dependencies 379
8 Appendix: Theta theory and extraction 420
with Hilda Koopman
Index 423
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Chapter 1 first appeared in the journal Linguistic Inquiry 1988, 19:3, 425–49 © 1988 the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and is reproduced here with the kind permission of MIT Press Journals,
Massachusetts.
Chapter 2 first appeared in the journal Lingua 1991, 85:1, 211–58 and is reproduced here with the kind
permission of Elsevier Science, Amsterdam.
Chapter 4 first appeared in L.Zaring and J.Rooryck, Phrase Structure and the Lexicon (1995), and is
reproduced here with the kind permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.
Chapter 6 first appeared in A.Cardinaletti and M.T.Guasti (eds), Small Clauses (1995), and is reproduced
here with the kind permission of Academic Press Inc., Florida.
Chapter 7 first appeared in H.Campos and P.Kempchinsky, Evolution and Revolution in Linguistic Theory:
Essays in Honor of Carlos Otero (1995), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Georgetown
University Press, Washington.
Chapter 8 is taken from the GLOW abstract of a paper given at the 1985 GLOW colloquium in Brussels.
Chapters 3 and 5 are previously unpublished.
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INTRODUCTION
In this introduction, I will provide a survey of what I think the central ideas presented in each of these
articles are and how they relate to each other, together with comments on how these ideas developed in
my own research. I will also put some of these ideas in the perspective of more recent research.
These articles are written within a general framework largely inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky (cf.
Chomsky 1995) that has been called successively the Extended Standard Theory (EST), the Government
and Binding Theory (GB) and the Economy/Minimalist Program (E/M), reflecting various hypotheses that
were at one time or other perceived as playing an important role in ongoing research. These theories
make certain very general assumptions about the study of Universal Grammar. They assume, recognizing
it as a substantial idealization, that it is fruitful and epistemologically sound to study linguistic structure in
isolation from other manifestations of human cognitive capacities such as smell, vision, intentions,
scientific reasoning, beliefs, feelings of pleasure or sadness, face recognition, or even mental language
processing (on-line understanding), and so on. They take the main problem to be that of accounting for
the existence of the rich mental system of linguistic structure manifested by adults, given the nature and
structure of the (linguistic) environment humans grow up in.
In practice, grammarians adopting this perspective work on constructing models of these mental linguistic
structures in children or adults, address the question of how these models are acquired, or used by
(idealized) mental processing systems. My work belongs to the first category, i.e. the construction of
explicit models of mental linguistic structures. This work takes its central problem to be that of explaining
how physical expressions such as articulated sounds or signs relate systematically to the meanings which
speakers attribute to them; this is the sound/meaning (or sign/meaning) problem. The way this extremely
complex problem is addressed is by segmenting it into a series of more manageable subproblems in ways
that seem warranted empirically and over which there seems to exist a very large consensus in our field.
This is achieved by postulating that a syntactic
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