Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-kwt9d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T05:18:38.234Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Syntactic Structure of French Auxiliaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Anne Abeillé and
Danièle Godard
Anne Abeillé*
Affiliation:
Université Paris 7 and CNRS
Danièle Godard*
Affiliation:
Université Paris 7 and CNRS
*
Abeillé, Université Paris 7, UFRL, Case courrier 7031, 2 Place Jussieu, 75251 Paris-Cedex 05, France [abeille@linguist.jussieu.fr]
Godard, Université Paris 7, UFRL, Case courrier 7031, 2 Place Jussieu, 75251 Paris-Cedex 05, France [daniele.godard@linguist.jussieu.fr]
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While a consensus has been reached about the monoclausality of the Romance construction with an auxiliary verb and its verbal complement, questions remain about its syntactic structure. We focus here on French auxiliaries—the past tense auxiliaries (avoir and être), and the passive auxiliary (être)—which are unique in French in contributing only tense and aspect and triggering obligatory clitic climbing. Three syntactic structures have been proposed for such auxiliaries: a VP complement analysis, a verbal complex analysis, and a 'flat' VP analysis. We show here, working within a head-driven phrase structure grammar framework and basing our arguments on classical constituency tests, bounded dependencies, and lesser-known properties of a subset of manner adverbs, that the flat-structure analysis is to be preferred for tense auxiliaries, which take as their complements the bare participle as well as the complements subcategorized by this participle and 'inherited' from it. In contrast, the passive auxiliary, which we identify with the copula, has a predicative complement with different realizations: either an ordinary phrase, 'saturated' for its complements, or a 'partial' complement, where the predicative head lets some or all of its complements be inherited by the auxiliary. Our analysis allows for a solution to the well-known problem of auxiliary selection, which, we argue, should not be taken as an indicator of syntactic structure but is best handled via lexical constraints.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , September 2002, pp. 404 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abeillé, Anne. 1991. Une grammaire lexicalisée d'arbres adjoints pour le français. Paris: University of Paris dissertation. [Published. Une grammaire électronique du français. Paris: CNRS Editions. 2002.]Google Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, and Godard, Danièle. 1994. The complementation of tense auxiliaries in French. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 13.157–72.Google Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, and Godard, Danièle. 1997. The syntax of French negative adverbs. Negation and polarity: Syntax and semantics, ed. by Forget, D., Hirschbühler, P., Martineau, F., Rivero, M.-L., 1–27. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, and Godard, Danièle. 1999. A lexical approach to quantifier floating in French. Lexical and constructional aspects of linguistic explanations, ed. by Webelhuth, G., Koenig, J-P., and Kathol, Andreas, 81–96. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, and Godard, Danièle. 2000a. French word order and lexical weight. Syntax and semantics, vol. 32: The nature and function of syntactic categories, ed by Borsley, R., 325–60. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, and Godard, Danièle. 2000b. Varieties of esse in Romance languages. Proceedings of the HPSG 2000 conference, ed. by Flickinger, D. and Kathol, A. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Online: http://csli-publications.stanford.edu//HPSG/1/hpsg00-toc.html.Google Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, and Godard, Danièle. 2001. A class of lite adverbs in French. Romance syntax, semantics and their L2 acquisition, ed. by Camps, J. and Wiltshire, C., 9–25. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, and Godard, Danièle. 2002. Les prédicats complexes. Les langues Romanes, Problèmes de la phrase simple, ed. by Godard, D. Paris: CNRS Editions, to appear.Google Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, Godard, Danièle; and Sag, Ivan. 1998a. Two kinds of composition in French complex predicates. Syntax and semantics, vol. 30: Complex predicates in nonderivational syntax, ed. by Hinrichs, E., Kathol, A., and Nakazawa, T., 1–41. San Diego: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Abeillé, Anne, Godard, Danièle, Miller, Philip; and Sag, Ivan. 1998b. Bounded dependencies in French. HPSG in Romance, ed. by Balari, S. and Dini, L., 1–54. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Aissen, Judith, and Perlmutter, David. 1976. Clause reduction in Spanish. Berkeley Linguistics Society 2.1–30. [Reprinted in Studies in relational grammar 1, ed. by D. Perlmutter, 360–403. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.]Google Scholar
Alsina, Alex. 1996. The role of argument structure in grammar: Evidence from Romance. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Andrews, Avery, and Chris, Manning. 1999. Complex predicates and information spreading in LFG. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Auger, Julie. 1994. Pronominal clitics in Québec French, a morphological approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania dissertation. (IRCS report 94–29).Google Scholar
Bonami, Olivier. 1999. Construction des verbes: Le cas des groupes prépositionnels argumentaux. Paris: University of Paris thesis.Google Scholar
Bouma, Gosse, and Noord, Gertjan van. 1994. Adjuncts and lexical rules. Proceedings of COLING, Kyoto.Google Scholar
Bouma, Gosse, and Noord, Gertjan van. 1998. Word order constraints on verb clusters in German and Dutch. Syntax and semantics, vol. 30: Complex predicates in nonderivational syntax, ed. by Hinrichs, E., Kathol, A., and Nakazawa, T., 43–72. San Diego: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bouma, Gosse, Malouf, Robert; and Sag, Ivan A. 2001. Satisfying constraints on extraction and adjunction. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 19.1–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bratt, Liz. 1990. The French causative construction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, MS.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan, and Zaenen, Annie. 1990. Deep unaccusativity. Grammatical relations: A cross-theoretical perspective, ed. by Dziwirek, K., Farrell, P., and Mejías-Bikandi, E., 45–57. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Burzio, Luigi. 1986. Italian syntax: A government binding approach. Dordrecht: Reidel.10.1007/978-94-009-4522-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chung, Chan. 1998. Argument composition and long-distance scrambling in Korean: An extension of the complex predicate hypothesis. Syntax and semantics vol. 30: Complex predicates in nonderivational syntax, ed. by Hinrichs, E., Kathol, A., and Nakazawa, T., 159–220. San Diego: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copestake, Anne, Flickinger, Dan, Pollard, Carl; and Sag, Ivan. 1999. Minimal recursion semantics: An introduction. Stanford, CA and Columbus, OH: Stanford University and Ohio State University, ms.Google Scholar
Couquaux, Daniel. 1979. Sur la syntaxe des phrases prédicatives en français. Lingvisticae Investigationes 3.245–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, Williams, and Rosen, Carol. 1988. Union as multi-predicate clauses. Language 64.52–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dini, Luca. 1995. Unaccusative behaviors. Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica, 9.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joe. 1978. The verbal complex V'V in French. Linguistic Inquiry 9.151–75.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1983. Generalized union. Communication and Cognition 16.3–37.Google Scholar
Fradin, Bernard. 1993. Organisation de l'information lexicale: L'interface morphologiesyntaxe dans le domaine verbal. Paris: University of Paris, Saint-Denis, dissertation.Google Scholar
Frank, Anette. 1996. A note on complex predicate formation: Evidence from auxiliary selection, reflexivization, and past participle agreement in French and Italian. Proceedings of the Conference on Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG-96), ed. by Butt, M. and King, T. H., 174–89. Grenoble: Rank Xerox. Online: http://www-csli-stanford.edu/publications/LFG/lfg1.html.Google Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald, Pullum, Geoffrey; and Sag, Ivan. 1982. Auxiliaries and related phenomena in a restrictive theory of grammar. Language 58.591–638.10.2307/413850CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald, Klein, Ewan, Pullum, Geoffrey; and Sag, Ivan A. 1985. Generalized phrase structure grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Geuder, Wilhem. 2000. Oriented adverbs: Issues in the lexical semantics of event adverbs. Konstanz, Germany: Konstanz University, dissertation.Google Scholar
Grevisse, Marcel. 1969. Le Bon usage. Gembloux: Duculot.Google Scholar
Guasti, Maria-Teresa. 1993. Causative and perception verbs. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier.Google Scholar
Gueron, Jacqueline, and Hoekstra, Toen. 1988. T-chains and the constituent structure of auxiliaries. Constituent structure, ed. by Cardinaletti, A., Cinque, G., and Giusti, G., 35–100. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Hinrichs, Ehrard, and Nakazawa, Tzuneko. 1994. Linearizing aux's in German verbal complexes. German in HPSG, ed. by Nerbonne, J., Netter, K., and Pollard, C., 11–37. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. 1994. Introduction to government and binding theory. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Huot, Helene. 1981. Constructions infinitives du français: Le subordonnant de. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
Huot, Helene. 1990. Morpho-syntaxe du verbe français et inversion du clitique sujet. Travaux de Linguistique 14–15.159–75.Google Scholar
Kathol, Andreas. 1998. Constituency and linearization of verbal complexes. Syntax and semantics, vol. 30: Complex predicates in nonderivational syntax, ed. by Hinrichs, E., Kathol, A., and Nakazawa, T., 221–70. San Diego: Academic Press.10.1163/9780585492223_007CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kayne, Richard. 1974-75. French relative que. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes 2.40–61, and 3.27–92.Google Scholar
Kayne, Richard. 1975. French syntax: the transformational cycle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Kayne, Richard. 1984. Connectedness and binary branching. Dordrecht: Foris.10.1515/9783111682228CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Jong-Bok, and Sag, Ivan A. 1995. The parametric variation of French and English negation. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 14.303–17.Google Scholar
Kim, Jong-Bok, and Sag, Ivan A. 2001. French and English negation: A lexicalist alternative to head movement. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 20.339–412.10.1023/A:1015045225019CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kiss, Tibor. 1992. Infinite Komplementation, neue Studien zum deutschen Verbum infinitum. Bergische Universit Wuppertal, Germany: Bergische University dissertation.Google Scholar
Kiss, Tibor. 1994. Obligatory coherence: The structure of German modal verb constructions. German in HPSG, ed. by Nerbonne, J., Netter, K., and Pollard, C., 71–107. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
La Fauci, Nunzio. 1994. Objects and subjects in the formation of Romance morpho-syntax, Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistic Club. (Oggetti e soggetti nella formazione della morfosintassi romanza, Pisa: Giardini, 1988, trans. by Carol Rosen).Google Scholar
Lascarides, Alex, and Copestake, Ann. 1999. Default representation in constraint-based frameworks. Computational Linguistics 25.55–105.Google Scholar
Leeman, Danielle. 1994. Si j'aurais su, j'aurais pas venu, remarques sur les auxiliaries, la transitivité, et l' intransitivité. Le Gré des langues 7.48–62.Google Scholar
Legare, Luc, and Rollin, Jacques. 1976. Syntaxe de l'auxiliaire en français. North Eastern Linguistic Society 6.187–95.Google Scholar
Legendre, Geraldine. 1987. Topics in French syntax. San Diego: University of California, San Diego dissertation. [Published, New York: Garland, 1994.]Google Scholar
Levin, Beth, and Rappaport, Malka. 1995. Unaccusativity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Manning, Christopher. 1992. Romance is so complex. Technical Report CSLI-92–168. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Miller, Philip. 1991. Clitics and constituents in phrase structure grammar. Utrecht: Utrecht University dissertation. [Published, New York: Garland 1992.]Google Scholar
Miller, Philip, and Sag, Ivan A. 1997. French clitic movement without clitics or movement. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15.573–639.10.1023/A:1005815413834CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milner, Jean-Claude. 1986. Introduction à un traitement du passif. Paris: Publications de FERA 642, UFRL, University of Paris.Google Scholar
Monachesi, Paola. 1993. Restructuring verbs in Italian HPSG grammar. Chicago Linguistic Society 29.281–95.Google Scholar
Monachesi, Paola. 1999. A lexical approach to Italian cliticization. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Moore, John. 1991. Reduced constructions in Spanish. Santa Cruz: University of California, Santa Cruz dissertation.Google Scholar
Morin, Yves-Charles. 1979. More remarks on French clitic order. Linguistic Analysis 5. 5–312.Google Scholar
Morin, Yves-Charles. 1984. De quelques lacunes dans la distribution des clitiques réfléchis-réciproques [en français]. Le français moderne 52.61–65.Google Scholar
Perlmutter, David. 1989. Multiattachment and the unaccusative hypothesis: The perfect auxiliary in Italian. Probus 1.63–119.10.1515/prbs.1989.1.1.63CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollard, Carl. 1996. On head non-movement. Discontinuous constituency, ed. by Bunt, H. and Horck, A. van, 279–306. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110873467.279CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollard, Carl. and Sag, Ivan. 1987. Information-based syntax and semantics, vol. 1, Fundamentals. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Pollard, Carl, and Sag, Ivan. 1994. Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago and Stanford: University of Chicago Press and CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Pollard, Carl, and Calcagno, Mike. 1997. Argument structure, structural case and French causatives. Paper presented at the HPSG Conference 1997, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20.365–424.Google Scholar
Pullum, Geoffrey, and Zwicky, Arnold. 1986. Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflicts. Language 62.751–73.10.2307/415171CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reape, Mike 1994. Domain union and word order variation. German in HPSG, ed. by Nerbonne, J., Netter, K., and Pollard, C., 151–197. Stanford CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1982. Issues in Italian syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel.10.1515/9783110883718CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Ian. 1997. Restructuring, head movement and locality. Linguistic Inquiry 27.423–60.Google Scholar
Rochette, Anne. 1990. Restructuring classes of verbs in Romance. Binding in Romance, ed. by di Sciullio, A-M. and Rochette, A., 96–128. Special publication of the Canadian Linguistic Association, Ottawa.Google Scholar
Ross, John. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. [Published, Infinite syntax! Norwood: Ablex, 1986.]Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan A. 1997. English relative clause constructions. Journal of Linguistics 33.431–83.10.1017/S002222679700652XCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sag, Ivan, and Wasow, Thomas. 1999. Syntactic theory: A formal introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian, and Thibault, Pierrette. 1977. L'alternance entre les auxiliaires avoir et être en français parlé à Montréal. Langue Française 34.81–108.10.3406/lfr.1977.4818CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwarze, Christopher. 1996. The syntax of Romance auxiliaries. Proceedings of the Conference on Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG-96), ed. by Butt, M. and King, T. H., 418–33. Grenoble: Rank Xerox.Google Scholar
Sells, Peter. 1994. Sub-phrasal syntax in Korean, Language Research, Seoul 30.351–86.Google Scholar
Skytte, G., and Salvi, G. 1991. Frasi subordinate all'infinito. Grande grammatica di consultazione, ed by L. Renzi and G. Salvi, 2.493–536. Bologne: Il mulino.Google Scholar
Sorace, Antonella. 2000. Gradients in auxiliary selection with intransitive verbs. Language 76.859–90.10.2307/417202CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stefanini, Jean. 1954. La tradition grammaticale française et les temps surcomposés. Annales de la Faculté des Lettres d'Aix, tome 28. Gap: Ophrys. [Also in J. Stefanini (ed.) Linguistique et langue français. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1992.]Google Scholar
van Eynde, Frank. 1994. Auxiliaries and verbal affixes: A monostratal cross-linguistic perspective. Louvain: K U Leuven dissertation.Google Scholar
van Eynde, Frank. 2000. A constraint-based semantics for tenses and temporal auxiliaries. Grammatical interfaces in HPSG, ed. by Cann, Ronnie, Grover, Claire, and Miller, Philip, 231–49. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Zaenen, Annie, and Dalrymple, Marie. 1996. Les verbes causatifs polymorphiques: Les prédicats complexes en français. Langages 122.79–95.10.3406/lgge.1996.1750CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zagona, Karen. 1982. Government and proper government of verbal projection. Seattle: University of Washington dissertation.Google Scholar
Zagona, Karen. 1988. Verb phrase syntax: A parametric study of English and Spanish. Dordrecht: Reidel.10.1007/978-94-009-2717-9CrossRefGoogle Scholar