Phi-features and the Modular Architecture of - UMR 7023 - CNRS

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With this background on French clitics, the next section proceeds to set out in
detail the PCC, prior to establishing its syntactic character.
4.3 The PCC repair and the Cliticization Requirement
This section sets out the relationship between the Cliticization Requirement and
the strong pronouns of the PCC repair, giving the following generalizations:
– Cliticization Requirement (section 4.2): Outside the PCC context, unfocussed
dative and accusative pronouns must be clitic, and (àDAT +) strong
pronouns require semantic focus. In contrast, locatives (and genitives) may
be clitic or àLOC + strong pronoun without focus.
– PCC repair: When a dative clitic is impossible through the PCC, à +
strong pronoun is perfect instead without semantic focus, for indirect objects
(other datives are addressed in section 4.5).
– Accusatives: An accusative strong pronoun is impossible in the PCC context
or out of it, whether the PCC repair for the dative is available or not,
save to an unclear extent when the dative clitic is an inherent reflexive.
The Cliticization Requirement requires semantically unfocussed accusative
and dative pronouns to be clitic, while strong pronouns must have semantic focus.
The semantic focus that may license strong pronouns comes about through: (i) ostension;
(ii) contrast, where the contrasted alternatives may be silent or explicit, as
in Il parle à LUI (et non à MOI) 'He talks to HIM (and not to ME)', Il parle à LUI
(plutôt qu'à MOI) 'He talks to HIM (rather than to ME)'; (iii) focus associated with
elements such as aussi 'also'. A nondislocated dative or accusative strong pronoun
must have such a focussed reading, a clitic cannot. From semantic focus must be
carefully distinguished prosodic accent. Zribi-Hertz (2008) argues that strong pronouns
in French do not undergo deaccenting even when semantically unfocussed,
unlike in English. The meaning of the French and English sentences in (134) is the
same: jealoux has narrow focus and of her has none. Thanks to the absence of focus,
of her can be realized as the genitive clitic en in French. However, it can also
be realized as the genitive strong pronoun d'elle. In that case, it retains prosodic
accent, despite lack of focus, in contrast to English. 63
63 Inversely, prosodic accent may be hard to detect under certain conditions such as second occurrence
focus (but see Beaver et al. 2007). Distinct from focus is the construction ne…que 'only',
as in Il ne parle qu'à moi lit. 'He NEG speaks than to me', meaning 'He is speaking only to
me' (Cardinaletti and Starke 1999, Kayne 2000: 159 note 68, 170). Que behaves as if it were a
preposition: it licenses undoubled accusative strong pronouns even for those that cannot license
them otherwise, blocks clitic doubling, and allows coreference with the local subject. Perhaps related
should be Postal's (1990: 161f.) ability of comparative plus…que 'more…than' to license