Code: 04548468

Masked Inversion in French

Name: Masked Inversion in French
Brand: University of Chicago Press
SKU: 04548468
Price: 84.86 EUR
Availability: BackOrder

by Paul M. Postal

Language: English
Binding: Hardback
Number of pages: 168
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1989
More about this

84.86 €

Availability:

50/50

We think title might be available. Upon your order we will do our best to get it within 6 weeks.
We search the world

Availability alert

Add to wishlist

Wisdom of Compassion
11.67 € -18 %
Buy
Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law
5412.35 €
Buy
Audition Speeches for Women
31.70 €
Buy

Give this book as a present today

Order book and choose Gift Order.
We will send you book gift voucher at once. You can give it out to anyone.
Book will be send to donee, nothing more to care about.

Book gift voucher sample Read more

Availability alert

We will watch availability for you

Enter your e-mail address and once book will be available,
we will send you a message. It's that simple.

You get 213 loyalty points

Book synopsis

In this important work of linguistic analysis, Paul M. Postal addresses a paradigm anomaly in French that has hitherto resisted explanation. A general restriction limiting the form of direct objects in complex infinitival constructions with main verbs like "faire" fails to hold with certain subordinate verbs, especially "connaitre." Marshaling extensive evidence, Postal argues that this apparent irregularity is a symptom of a deeper regularity. Rather than being an ordinary transitive complement, the subordinate clause in these cases is actually an Inversion structure, one in which the logical subject demotes to indirect object. However, since this demotion induces no word order change or other direct morphological consequences, the inversion is "masked," and revealed only by several types of apparent anomalies. This analysis has significant consequences for contemporary syntactic theories. First, the arguments support the view that a sentence's superficial structure cannot be identified with its syntactic structure, even though such an identification is a fundamental assumption of several currently influential grammatical frameworks. Second, even certain theories that do posit abstract aspects of grammatical form fail to allow for the needed Inversion structures. Postal's study supports theories based on the notion of arc and stratification into levels which provide a natural treatment consistent with the factual requirements. "Masked Inversion in French" is the first systematic account of this puzzling French syntactic anomaly, and its findings will stimulate research in many areas of natural language grammatical structure.