On the feature composition of participial light verbs in French

Radford, A. and Vincent, M. (2012) On the feature composition of participial light verbs in French. In: Brugè, L., Cardinaletti, A., Giusti, G., Munaro, N. and Poletto, C. (eds.) Functional Heads. Series: Cartography of syntactic structures (7). Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 208-219. ISBN 9780199746729 (doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746736.001.0001)

Abstract

This chapter sets out to provide a contribution to our understanding of the feature composition of participles from the perspective of the Minimalist Program developed by Chomsky. It focuses on accounting for participle agreement in French in transitive clauses containing the auxiliary avoir have. It follows Chomsky in taking transitive participles to be the spell-out of a functional head (an abstract light verb) that serves as the head of a phase, and looks at the featural make-up of the relevant type of functional head. It notes that participle agreement is optional and linked with movement, and proposes that this optionality is a consequence of two different mechanisms provided by UG for driving movement to the edge of a phase, via a selective or unselective Edge Feature. The chapter begins by providing a brief description of the conditions under which past participle agreement takes place with avoir have in French.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Radford, Dr Andrew and Vincent, Dr Michele
• Authors: Radford, A., and Vincent, M.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature; College of Social Sciences > School of Social & Environmental Sustainability
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• ISBN: 9780199746729