On the Rule of Right-Node-Raising in French

"Right Node Raising", or rightward factorization, has to our knowledge never been investigated in any detail in French. In fact, its mere existence might be regarded with suspicion given the high variability of speakers judgements on prototypical examples, especially when compared to their pronominalized competitors.Building on both written and spoken attested data, we show that more natural (and unambiguous) patterns can be provided that give a safer ground to assess the facts and evaluate competing analyses. Our conclusions concur with those of Chaves & Sag (2007)'s for English, who also make rich use of attested data: 1- RNR may, under certain conditions, occur in any syntactic context, and not only in coordinate constructions 2- RNR involves ellipsis rather than extraction, extraposition, multidominance or delayed combination 3- Ellipsis, in the particular case of RNR, requires syntactic (and not only semantic) reconstructio