Fernabhängigkeiten im Französischen: Vergleichende Analysen (HPSG und Minimalistisches Programm)
Funding Body
DFG (Grant MU 2822/9-1, ME 1252/14-1)Principal Investigator
Stefan MüllerFunding Period
01.10.2015 bis 30.09.2018Research Team
| Guido Mensching (Göttingen) |
| Stefan Müller (HU Berlin) |
| Franziska Werner (Göttingen) |
| Elodie Winckel (HU Berlin) |
Summary
The project explores long-distance dependencies, especially in interrogative and relative
constructions, using two grammatical frameworks (HPSG and the Minimalist Program). In a first step,
the data situation will be improved through corpus analyses and inquiries with native speakers. This
will yield, for the first time, a broad empirical and theoretical coverage and a maximally complete
description of long-distance dependencies in French, an area that has been only fragmentarily
described up to now. The overreaching objective of the project is to answer the question of how
complex, numerous and construction-specific the elements of syntactic description must be in order
to explain the phenomena contained in a broad sample of data that show long-distance-dependencies in
French. The selected frameworks present two extreme poles of possible interpretations. The
Minimalist Program requires modeling by means of atomic units (lexical entries with head status),
which interact with very general syntactic principles of a very local range. Similarly to what is
claimed by construction grammar, HPSG has expanded the term lexicon
and can formulate, if
necessary, complex description units in which larger constellations and the range of constraints are
already defined. In an interpretation within Construction Grammar, this can lead to the formulation
of a construction family, as required in Sag (2010).
At the end of the project funding period, a detailed comparison of the two analyses is planned to be available.