French Relative Clauses as Secondary Predicates

Knud Lambrecht
The University of Texas at Austin
lambrec@uts.cc.utexas.edu


The relative clause (RC) in (1) has (at least) three readings: arestrictive, an appositive, and a predicative one.

(1)

Jai vu le professeur qui fumait. 'I saw the professor (who was) smoking.'

The predicative reading differs from the first two in the following ways: (i) its matrix verb is lexically specified; (ii) the relativized argument must be the subject; (iii) the antecedent can be a clitic pronoun; (iv) the antecedent, but not the RC, can appear in subject position; (v) the RC predicate cannot be stative; (vi) in a sequence of RCs, the predicative one must be the last. From (iii) and (iv) it follows that the RC does not form a single NP constituent with its antecedent. Previous generative analyses have analyzed the predicative RC as a pseudo-relative, which is a complement clause in deep structure, and whose complementizer has been changed from que to qui by transformational rule. Thus sentence (1) is taken to be derived from (2):

(2)

Jai vu que le professeur fumait. 'I saw that the professor was smoking.'

Against this reductionist transformational approach, I argue that predicative RCs are bona-fide RCs, which function as depictive secondary predicates. The RC as a whole acts as a predicator, whose external subject requirement is satisfied by the matrix antecedent. Predicative RCs are distributionally similar to depictive APs or PPs, as well as to various other kinds of French RC constructions. The formal and semantic properties of the predicative RC construction are pragmatically motivated: it is used to inform an addressee of a physically perceived property of a discourse referent, which is simultaneously an object of perception and a subject of predication.

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Last updated July 20, 1997 by rblight@mail.utexas.edu Return to main program