Archive for the ‘French’ Category
Two Books on French Syntax
This quarter I’m working on French parsing with Marie-Catherine de Marneffe. Since I don’t speak French (yet), I bought two syntax books. While it seems non-intuitive to work with a language you don’t know, one benefit of formal linguistics training is that you can start to analyze a language as a system composed of a subset of linguistic components. So even though I don’t know what le garçon embrassé sa petite amie means, I do know that nouns bear gender and can indicate number, non-finite verbs don’t agree with their subjects, and so on. So begins my first foray outside of Arabic.
- Rowlett, Paul. The Syntax of French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- A consolidated primer in Chomskyan notation. Useful if you have taken an introductory, grad-level syntax course.
- Fagyal, Zsuzsanna, Douglass Kibbee, and Fred Jenkins. French: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- A descriptive grammar largely absent of linguistic theory. Similar to my favorite Arabic grammar, Karen Ryding’s A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic.
