Local dislocation in the distribution of french adjectives

Abstract

In the recent literature on the cross-linguistic placement of adjectives it has been observed (Cinque 2005, among others) that the Germanic languages and the Romance adjectives display a mirror pattern with respect to the placement of adjectives. In this paper I show that while the corresponding generalizations put forward in Cinque (2005) may hold for the majority of the Romance languages, French seems to be much freer in the distribution of adjectives than would be predicted on the basis of these generalizations. To account for the observed differences, I pursue the claim made by Lamarche (1991) and others that the placement of adjectives in prenominal or postnominal position in French is sensitive to information-structural and morphosyntactic restrictions that are not found in the other Romance languages. I show that in the cases where French exhibits unexpected adjectivenoun combinations these restrictions are relevant, and can be captured with the Local Dislocation Hypothesis (cf. Embick & Noyer 2001) in the framework of Distributed Morphology.