AMSA-175-1000
Author: Dalila Ayoun
Title: Verb Movement in French Revisited: Syntactic Theory and Experimental Data
Citation: ms. 2000 University of Arizona.

This paper revisits Pollock's (1989, 1997) account of verb movement phenomena in French in the light of experimental data elicited from two groups of native speakers. The results of four different tasks indicate that the minimalist principle, according to which only strong [+finite] verbs may raise to Infl to check and erase their features, does not apply in a systematic and consistent fashion. It appears that 1) weak [-finite] lexical verbs systematically raise past adverbs; 2) weak [-finite] auxiliaries do raise past negation and adverbs, and optionality appears to be excluded. It is argued that carefully elicited experimental data should inform syntactic theory to achieve greater descriptive accuracy.