What is it about?
The paper argues that the feature specification of a Swiss French deficient ‘ça’ , as in ‘Je ça veux’ (I that want = I want that) or ‘j’ai déjà ça vu’ (I have already that seen = I have already seen that), accounts for its syntactic distribution. Contrary to the ordinary accusative clitics ‘le', ‘la', ‘les', this pronominal form lacks gender and Case feature, but has a temporal-aspectual locative feature.
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Why is it important?
As a result of its feature composition, it is demonstrated that this ‘ça’ requires generic event quantification. In other words, it is shown that the aspectual non-ambiguity of the Swiss-French deficient ‘ça’, i.e. the fact that it can only appear in contexts of generic event quantification, is responsible for ungrammatical sequences such as ‘*Je ça aime’ (I that like) in this grammar.
Perspectives
There are very few speakers of this dialect remaining and the co-author of this paper is a native speaker of this Swiss-French dialect.
Marie-Therese VINET
Universite de Sherbrooke
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Propriétés configurationnelles et contraintes aspectuelles: Un ça objet déficient, Lingua, December 2000, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/s0024-3841(00)00024-3.
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