Refereed publications

Book



In many languages, reflexives like English herself exhibit a puzzling dual behavior: they must either obey structural constraints or perspective-related discourse constraints. Based on detailed examination of crosslinguistic data, this book proposes a unified solution to this syntax-semantics issue, which has consequences for the theories of binding and logophoricity.

Journal articles



The grammatical paradigm used to be a model for entire areas of cognitive science. Its primary tenet was that theories are axiomatic-like systems. A secondary tenet was that their predictions should be tested quickly and in great detail with introspective judgments. While the grammatical paradigm often seems passé, it continues to be as efficient as ever. Formal models are essential because they are explicit, highly predictive, and typically modular. Their critical predictions must be tested efficiently; introspective judgments do just this. The grammatical paradigm also continues to be fruitful, both within linguistics and beyond. Implicature theory is an example within linguistics, with a combination of formal explicitness, modularity, and interaction with experimental work. Beyond traditional linguistics, the grammatical paradigm has proven fruitful in the study of gestures and emojis; literature; picture semantics and comics; music and dance cognition; and even reasoning and concepts. Still, the grammatical paradigm must be adapted to contemporary cognitive science. Computational methods are essential to derive quantitative predictions from formal models (example: Bayesian pragmatics). And data collection techniques offer an ever richer continuum of helpful options, from introspective judgments to large-scale experiments.

The specific goal of the article is to investigate the principles governing the perception of rhythmic structure in dance and music – taken separately and together – on the basis of a case study. I take as a starting point Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) conception of musical rhythm as the interaction between grouping and meter, and I examine to what extent it can apply to dance. Then, I explore how the rhythmical structures of music and dance interact in a single event. I conclude that dance and music perception largely share the same abstract system, and the differences in the properties of their structure derives from the different (visual vs. auditory) modalities in which they are perceived; their modality difference also affects the perceived structure resulting from their combination in dance-music events.The exploration is guided by a detailed examination of the opening of Stravinsky’s Augurs of Spring (1913) as choreographed by Nijinsky (1913), Béjart (1970) and Bausch (1975). By comparing these minimal pairs of dance-music events, I adapt the formal methodology of linguistics to other cognitive systems. The general goal of the article is to shed further light on the organizational principles of mental representations by comparing several cognitive systems in order to distinguish between general cognitive properties and modality-specific or domain-specific properties.

This article provides a solution to the long-standing puzzle of English anaphors within so-called picture noun phrases, which superficially exhibit an exceptional binding behavior. In particular, picture noun anaphors seem, under certain conditions, to escape the locality conditions imposed by Condition A of Binding Theory. Previous proposals attribute such apparently exceptional behavior to various sources: the classical Binding Theory appeals to the possible presence of covert agents within NPs; predicate-based theories introduce the possibility of exemption from Condition A; others capitalize on possible homophony with (logophoric) pronouns. While all of these proposals provide valuable insight into some aspect of the puzzle, we show that they all fail to capture the full empirical picture. Based on a detailed examination of their behavior in various syntactic and interpretive conditions, we instead propose that English picture noun anaphors, like any other anaphor, systematically obey Condition A. Their apparent exemption from it in some cases derives from the possible implicitness of some binders, in particular, logophoric pronouns or nominal subjects. Furthermore, the availability of such covert binders is crucially affected by a binding-independent competition principle between weaker and stronger forms. Thus, the apparently irregular behavior of English picture noun anaphors results from the interaction between several factors (syntactic representation of logophoricity, syntactic projection of subjects in nouns, pronominal competition), which is responsible for the illusion that Condition A does not apply systematically. By disentangling these factors, we propose a solution that integrates previous insights without compromising on empirical adequacy or analytical parsimony.

The notion of logophoricity is used to characterize linguistic elements sensitive to perspective. The goal of this review is to examine this notion by focusing on the behavior of so-called exempt reflexives. It has long been observed that reflexives can be exempt from Condition A of Binding Theory under perspectival conditions. The distribution of exempt reflexives can thus be examined to identify what perspectival properties are grammatically relevant and thereby specify the definition of logophoricity. In this article, I first review various proposals about this issue; in particular, the grammatical relevance of perspective for exempt reflexives has been explored in comparison with so-called logophoric pronouns as well as in the context of literary and philosophical studies. Second, after providing tools for exploring the perspectival properties of exempt reflexives crosslinguistically, I present my own hypothesis explaining why reflexives can superficially be exempt from Condition A under logophoric conditions.

The goal of this article is to explain why anaphors are typically either subject to Condition A of Binding Theory or exempt from it, but with specific interpretive properties. Based on French data and crosslinguistic comparisons, I first show that such ‘exempt’ anaphors must be anteceded by logophoric, i.e. perspective, centers. Elaborating on, but modifying Sells (1987), I argue that they can be of two kinds: intellectual (attitude holders) and emotional (empathy loci), thus reducing logophoricity to mental perspective. Specific tests are provided to justify this classification. Next, the logophoricity of exempt anaphors derives from the following hypothesis: seemingly exempt anaphors are in fact bound by silent logophoric pronouns introduced by syntactically represented logophoric operators within their local domain. This hypothesis explains why exempt anaphors have to be anteceded by perspective centers (their interpretation is derived from their binder); it also accounts for the apparent exemption from Condition A, reanalyzed here as local binding by a silent logophoric binder. Ultimately, this means that plain and exempt anaphors are one and the same type of element subject to the same locality constraint, the apparent difference between them coming from the availability of implicit perspective coding in language.

This article explores understudied dependent readings in (English) ellipsis and focus constructions and their theoretical consequences. The main focus is on “supersloppy” readings of person indexicals in VP-ellipsis, in which 'you' can be bound by 'I' and vice versa. The empirical properties of these cases, tested in a large-scale systematically controlled questionnaire, show that 'I' and 'you' can be construed as e-type pronouns dependent on each other. This challenges the Kaplanian fixity theory of indexicals in a new way: not only can first- and second-person pronouns be bound, they can also contribute descriptive meanings that affect the interpretation of (elided) sentences. Readings similar to supersloppy readings furthermore extend to time and location indexicals, demonstratives and proper names, which indicates the linguistic relevance of other relations between indexicals and between non-indexicals. All these types of dependent readings shed new light on the theories of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names as well as e-type pronouns.

The general goal of this paper is to investigate the structure of our unconscious mental representation of dance: we do not perceive dance as an unanalyzed flow of movement, but we unconsciously create a mental representation regulated by structural principles. Specifically, this article examines local grouping principles in dance perception inspired by Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1983) approach to musical grouping. I spell out the basic perceptual dimensions at work in basic human movement perception, and on that basis, I propose six principles of change that determine group boundaries in dance (change of body part, orientation, level, direction, speed, quality). I experimentally test the relevance and interaction of these principles, and find that they are organized on a scale of relative strength. This experiment thus supports the hypothesis that grouping is a general cognitive capacity applying across domains and modalities, and shows how specific grouping principles are stated in relation to modality-specific and domain-specific dimensions. More generally, it takes a step toward the development of a generative theory of dance that should help extend the research avenue of comparing complex temporal cognitive activities across modalities (visual, auditory) and purposes (referential, non-referential), which so far involves spoken language, signed language and music.

This paper aims to show that (one of) the main argument(s) against the presuppositional account of person is not compelling if one makes appropriate assumptions about how the context fixes the assignment. It has been argued that unlike gender features, person features of free pronouns cannot yield presupposition failure (but only falsity) when they are not verified by the referent. The argument is however flawed because the way the referent is assigned is not made clear. If it is assumed to be the individual that the audience can recognize as the referent intended by the speaker, the argument is reversed.

This article documents and explains the presence of logophoric elements in adjunct clauses by studying the particular case of causal clauses. This case study focuses on English 'because'-clauses (and 'since'-clauses) and reveals that expressions sensitive to mental perspective (like exempt anaphors, epistemic modals or evaluatives) occurring in causal clauses can be anchored to the speaker (or in embedded attitude contexts, to the lowest attitude holder) or to an event participant that can claim her own reason for the event. This shows that 'because'-clauses qualify as attitude contexts: the causal relation they express is relativized to a causal judge j that can include another individual than the speaker. Locality requirements (j must include the local attitude holder) motivate the syntactic representation of j as a silent anaphoric argument of because. Furthermore, the constrained range of perspectival possibilities for the causal relation on the one hand, and for the content of the causal clause on the other hand, motivates the presence of a logophoric operator in the left periphery of causal clauses, which is locally (partially) bound by j, and locally and exhaustively binds logophoric elements in the causal clause. In sum, adjunct clauses like causal clauses are understudied logophoric domains that shed new light on the linguistic effects of perspective.

In this note, we examine surprising patterns of hybrid agreement in sentences involving quantitative subjects with two DPs with different features.

For twenty years or so, two influential but superficially incompatible versions of condition A of the Binding Theory have coexisted: the classical binding theory (cf. Chomsky 1986) and predicate-based theories (Pollard and Sag 1992, Reinhart and Reuland 1993; modified since by Pollard 2005, Reuland 2011). In order to attempt to establish an accurate formulation of condition A, we study the behavior of (some) anaphors in French. We discuss why it is necessary, as is now well known, to separate plain anaphors subject to Condition A, from exempt anaphors subject to different restrictions, and how this can be done in principle by studying the difference (roughly) between inanimate anaphors, which we argue must be plain, and non-inanimate anaphors, which do not have to be. Focusing on plain anaphors (thus inanimates), we conclude that the classical approach is basically correct as far as French is concerned, and that the locality imposed on anaphor/antecedent relations by the core case of Condition A could be reduced to Phase theory.

The goal of this paper is to account for scalarity effects typically arising in the presence of French propre ‘own’. I argue for the presence of an implicit, focus-sensitive operator E akin to overt ‘even’, which has previously been proposed to combine with certain NPIs and minimizers. My argument is based on empirical and theoretical considerations: the E operator hypothesis correctly predicts that the domain for the scalarity effect does not depend on the position of propre and that the simultaneous presence of overt focus particles gives rise to intervention effects; this hypothesis is moreover economical since it makes it possible to provide a single lexical entry for propre under all its readings and to analyze all cases of scalarity effects by using a single mechanism, namely E. Furthermore, I argue that the association between E and the focused possessive DP containing propre is pragmatic. It is because propre is a maximizer of possessive relation—i.e. it characterizes the possessive relation it modifies as most specific—that it is relevant in the association with E of the focused DP containing it: the possessum is ranked higher than its alternatives on the scale of relational specificity introduced by propre, and this scale pragmatically correlates with the scale of unexpectedness required by the semantics of E. In sum, the case of propre supports the existence of E on new empirical ground and thus clarifies the pragmatic conditions giving rise to it. 
In some Romance languages, including French and Spanish, there is an interesting asymmetry concerning the behavior of isolated clitics and clitic clusters with respect to coreference. In the French example Anne croit qu’on va la lui recommander pour la promotion ‘Anna thinks that they will recommend her to him for the promotion’, the accusative clitic la ‘her’ in the embedded clause cannot corefer with ‘Anne’ when a dative clitic, lui ‘to him’, co-occurs in the cluster. The only previous account of this constraint (Bhatt and Šimík 2009) attributes this to a binding restriction. Based on new data disentangling binding and logophoricity, we show that the generalization capturing the distribution of clitics clusters in French and Spanish is the following: an accusative clitic cannot be clustered with a dative clitic if the accusative clitic refers to a logophoric center and is read de se.We derive this antilogophoricity effect from perspective conflicts, which we represent as intervention effects in the presence of a single logophoric operator in the relevant domain. This analysis furthermore provides a semantic motivation for intervention effects that have been postulated for the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), which we hypothesize also derives from perspective conflicts. 
The main goal of this article (based on French data) is to provide a unified analysis for all constructions involving terms expressing similarity and difference (sidi terms) such as same, different or other. I strive to provide a unified, non specific analysis of sidi term by relating them to both comparatives and relational terms. The analysis relies on the possible presence of underspecified silent elements (implicit nominal argument as with relational terms, ellipsis of comparative clause) that can be interpreted in different ways.   

The aim of the paper is to analyze the syntactic rules of the incidental clause - parenthetical sentence - in Latin. I propose that despite its syntactic autonomy, the incidental clause obeys precise syntactic constraints of insertion.

Book chapters



In dialogs such as “I love you – I do too”, the pronoun in the ellipsis site can be interpreted as dependent on the preceding overt pronoun (i.e. I do love you too). This dependency can neither be explained by Kaplan’s (1977/1989) theory implying the fixity of indexicals, nor by the various theories of bound indexicals: due to mismatch in person features, the identity in the ellipsis is not sloppy, but supersloppy in such cases. Based on experimentally collected English data, I proposed in Charnavel (2019) to reduce supersloppy readings to sloppy readings by hypothesizing that indexicals can be interpreted as context-dependent descriptions containing a bindable pronoun, i.e. as indexical e-type pronouns (e.g. you as my interlocutor). But due to some limitations in my English data, I left open two interrelated issues: (i) whether supersloppy readings, like sloppy readings, rely on focus blindness to presuppositions of bound pronouns; (ii) whether supersloppy readings can be analyzed in the same way in ellipsis and focus constructions. I here use novel French data to settle these two issues partly based on some morphosyntactic specificities of French. By clarifying the analysis of supersloppy readings, this provides new insight into the theories of indexicals and e-type pronouns. 

This paper examines the discourse status of French causal clauses introduced by puisque ‘since’. Puisque-clauses are associated with two implications: the relation expressed by puisque and the content of their clause. Several diagnostics show that neither implication is at-issue and that the two implications belong to two different types of projective content (cf. Tonhauser et al. 2013). This is due to syntactic and lexical reasons: the relation expressed by puisque is not at-issue because puisque-clauses modify high (evidential and speech act) phrases that are not at-issue; the content of the puisque-clause is not at-issue because puisque is lexically factive, i.e. selects true facts. Puisque thus exemplifies an unrecognized type of double presuppositional trigger.

This chapter is a condensed version of the 2019 NLLT article described above, which incorporates new empirical and experimental evidence.

This paper uses the case study of French clauses introduced by parce que ‘because’ and puisque ‘since’ to argue that causal clauses are intrinsically perspectival: the causal relation that they express is established by a causal judge. Perspectival effects in causal clauses indicate that the referential possibilities of this judge depend on the structural level of attachment of causal clauses, which can modify Verb Phrases, Evidential Phrases or Speech Act Phrases. This supports the hypothesis that the causal judge is syntactically represented as a silent argument of the causal subordinator that must be bound within its clause. The presence of this judge argument explains why logophoric elements can appear in causal clauses.

This paper aims at showing that long-distance binding can be reduced to logophoric exemption from Condition A based on the case study of French soi. Soi is usually treated as a long distance anaphor similar to Icelandic sig. But once the relevant factors are disentangled, it turns out that soi is a standard anaphor that must be locally bound unless the relevant logophoric conditions are met, which exempt soi from binding requirements. First, soi is a first-person oriented generic, expressing a generalization based on the discourse participants’ identification with the antecedent. Second, this determines its logophoric conditions of exemption (speaker-orientedness): soi is exempt from Condition A when its antecedent includes the speaker and is the perspective center of its clause.

In sections 5-6 of this chapter, I review the various (typological, semantic and syntactic) approaches to logophoricity and how they relate to so-called long distance binding.

The goal of this paper is to account for instances of anaphors that appear to be exempt from Condition A, based on the French anaphors son propre (‘his own’) and lui-même (‘himself’). Drawing on specific tests, I show that such anaphors must be anteceded by logophoric centers, specifically either by attitude holders or by empathy loci. This generalization is explained if we suppose the existence of silent logophoric operators that corefer with the antecedent and locally bind the anaphor: apparently exempt anaphors are in fact not exempt. This accounts for why they have the same form as anaphors standardly obeying Condition A: they are one and the same element. Their specific distribution and interpretation derives from their silent logophoric binder. 

This paper examines the behavior of the French scalar focus-sensitive particles même, quand même, ne serait-ce que and seulement as compared to English even and only. I first show that French même displays a more restricted distribution than even: this behavior and that of its antonym quand même argue for the scope theory against the ambiguity theory of even. Secondly, I demonstrate that the behavior of ne serait-ce que and seulement reveal the existence of an intrinsic link between even-like particles and only-like particles. To capture this observation and more generally the organic relation between scalar particles, I propose a new, parsimonious, theory that builds scalarity, additivity and exclusivity of scalar particles into a conjunctive or disjunctive meaning.

This paper focuses on the sentence-internal reading of même ('same') in French. I argue for an analysis in terms of events and I relate the analysis of même to the notion of pluractionality. 

Based on French possessive son propre ('his own'), I show that intensification and binding interact with each other: the behavior of son propre can only be understood if the intensifying properties of propre ('own') are correlated with the binding properties of son propre ('his own'). 

The goal of this paper is to shed light on the existence of an interaction between binding and intensification based on the behavior of French possessive son propre ('his own'). When propre ('own') intensifies the possessor, son propre ('his own') behaves like an anaphor or/and a logophor; but when propre intensifies the possessum, son propre does not exhibit any anaphoric property.