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Thematic indirect objects in French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2007

YVES ROBERGE  and
MICHELLE TROBERG
YVES ROBERGE
Affiliation:
Department of French, University of Toronto, 81 St. Mary Street, Toronto, ON Canada M5S 1J4, e-mail: yves.roberge@utoronto.ca; michelle.troberg@utoronto.ca
MICHELLE TROBERG
Affiliation:
Department of French, University of Toronto, 81 St. Mary Street, Toronto, ON Canada M5S 1J4, e-mail: yves.roberge@utoronto.ca; michelle.troberg@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

We present a descriptive generalisation according to which a verbal or an event argument is merged as an indirect object (IO) when the direct object (DO) position is occupied. Our goal is to formalise this generalisation and to show how current syntactic theory provides the necessary tools to support it. Specifically, the converging consensus that all so-called intransitive verbs have an internal nominal argument resolves previous exceptions to the generalisation and shows that the transitivity restriction on thematic IOs is structural.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , November 2007 , pp. 297 - 322
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We would to thank the anonymous JFLS reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. This research is funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (412-2003-1003, Di Sciullo).