Influence of noun dependents on French adjective placement in sentence production

Juliette Thuilier (1) , Margaret Grant (2)

1 CLLE-ERSS - Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie
2 Department of Linguistics [Montréal]

In French, attributive adjectives (A) can appear either before or after the noun (N): une agréable soirée (preposed) / soirée agréable (postposed)‚ 'nice evening'. According to quantitative observations of corpus data, the choice of position is influenced by an interaction of factors (Thuilier, 2012), including the presence of other N dependant(s) in the NP, which favours preposed adjectives. This observation has been explained as a tendency to produce, in planned and written discourse, "balanced NPs"‚ with material before and after the head noun in order to avoid accumulation of post-nominal dependants (Grevisse & Goose, 2007). In order to test whether the presence of NP dependents affects sentence production in real time, we studied the effect of post-nominal PPs on the position of A using a sentence recall experiment (1). (1) A N order alternatives shown in [], recall prompt in < > d'un [redoutable gang / gang redoutable] d'un [redoutable gang / gang redoutable] de braqueurs. 'This adolescent is a member of a terrible gang (of armed robbers)' Preliminary results show that speakers (N=32) tend to produce more inversions from postposed to preposed adjectives (40%) than from preposed to postposed (5,8%), which corresponds to corpus observations: Alternating adjectives, such as those used in the experiment, are predominantly preposed (about 70% in Thuilier, 2013). There is also a significant interaction (p<.01 in a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis) such that the most inversions are produced from postposed to preposed in NPs with PP dependents (62% vs. 22.4% of postposed to preposed inversions without PPs), showing a clear effect of post-nominal PPs on the position of adjectives in sentence production. Two leads will be followed up to explain this result: (a) from the syntactic point of view, using preposed adjectives could be a way for the speaker to avoid choosing the relative ordering between the adjective and the PP after the noun; (b) from a prosodic point of view, it is generally assumed that preposed adjectives form one phonological phrase with the noun, whereas postposed adjectives tend to be phrased independently of the noun (Delais-Roussarie, 1996). The presence of an other prosodic phrase, namely the post-nominal PP, could lead speakers to put the adjective before the noun to limit the number of prosodic phrases in the NP.

Mots clés: sentence recall; adjective; French; word order; sentence production; prosodic structure; syntactic integration

Domaines: Linguistique; Linguistique

Juliette Thuilier, Margaret Grant. Influence of noun dependents on French adjective placement in sentence production. International workshop on Language Production 2014 , Jul 2014, Genève, Switzerland. . ⟨hal-01451737⟩