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Structures, Strategies and Beyond: Studies in honour of Adriana Belletti
Edited by Elisa Di Domenico, Cornelia Hamann and Simona Matteini
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 223] 2015
► pp. 209–236

A case of focal adverb preposing in French

This article is about a specific case of focal adverb preposing in French, i.e. preposing of the adverb ainsi ‘in this way’, which is necessarily followed by subject inversion, resulting in the word order [focal ainsi – V – S]. This construction appears in a very specific discourse context and, just as other cross-linguistic types of focus preposing, is the result of the movement of this adverb to a focus projection in the left periphery. I show that this correctly predicts the construction to be a main clause phenomenon and provide a syntactic analysis in terms of Relativized Minimality.

Keywords: Focus preposing, Focus projection, left periphery, main clause phenomenon, Relativized Minimality, subject inversion
Published online: 27 August 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.223.10lah
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Lahousse, Karen
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Wolfe, Sam
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