SECONDARY PREDICATION AND FUNCTIONAL PROJECTIONS IN FRENCH

Abstract

This paper focuses on the structural properties of secondary predication. It is argued, based on an analysis of French depictive and resultative secondary predicates, that secondary predicates are functional projections of the category Gender, they form constituents of their own, and they contain a PRO subject coindexed with a main subject or object. Configurationally, they are of two types: subject-oriented secondary predicates, which are adjoined to VP, and object-oriented secondary predicates, which are adjoined to VP (if resultative) or are sisters of V! (if depictive). Compared with previous analyses of secondary predication, the present one corroborates early proposals about the constituency and internal make-up of secondary predicates (Stowell 1981, 1983; Chomsky 1981). The main difference lies in the nature of the constituent itself: it is argued here that it is a functional projection, namely GenderP, a proposal which owes much to late 1980s and early 1990s explorations in the nature of syntactic categories. In particular, the present analysis leads to the proposal that Agr$_s$ and Agr$_o$ (Chomsky 1991) should, at least in languages like French, be identified as Person and Gender, respectively. The lack of productive resultative constructions in French is also addressed.