Sebastian Buchczyk, Ingo Feldhausen
On the subjunctive in French: experimentally revisiting the effect of obviation weakening. Even though the weakening of the subjunctive disjoint reference effect, also known as obviation, plays an important role in the research of subjunctives in (non-)Romance languages, to the best of our knowledge it has never been verified experimentally. The goal of our paper is twofold: (i) to test how native speakers of French evaluate sentences displaying factors that should weaken obviation using a grammatical judgement task, and (ii) to propose an initial novel framework for a possible syntactic approach to address the attested patterns. Our results show that only one out of six factors described in Ruwet (1984/1991) weakens obviation in French, namely Coordination. Since this factor is syntactic rather than semantic, the theoretical framework can be simplified, and we thus propose a syntactic analysis based on Farkas’ (1992) competition approach and Zhang’s (2010) analysis of coordination structures.
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