The Syntax of French de-N' Phrases

Colloque avec actes et comité de lecture. internationale.International audienceOf all French functional elements, the form _de_ has without question the widest variety of uses, and presents the greatest challenge for linguistic description and analysis. Historically a preposition, it still has a number of prepositional uses in modern French, but in many contexts it calls for an altogether different treatment. We begin by outlining a general distinction between "oblique" and "non-oblique" uses of _de_. We then develop a detailed account of constructions where _de_ combines with an N'. We provide a unitary analysis of _de_ in three constructions (quantifier extraction, "quantification at a distance", and negative contexts) which have been not been considered to be related in previous accounts