L’ellipse du nom en français : le rôle des données de l’acquisition pour la théorie linguistique

Abstract

Abstract We pursue two goals in this article. The first is to examine morphosyntactic factors that promote noun ellipsis in French. The second is to show that acquisition data can help us evaluate different proposals for a given syntactic phenomenon. Using a transversal corpus of 15 French-speaking children aged 1;8 to 2; 12 years, we conclude that a cause-effect relationship between the acquisition of nominal agreement and noun-drop is difficult to establish. We propose rather that it is the presence of a determiner and its properties that license noun-drop. Our analysis rests on the concepts of partitivity and atomisation and thus supports Bouchard’s (2002) semantic analysis of noun drop while rejecting the notion that noun-drop is linked to pro drop .