Defectivity Matters: Cliticization in French Causatives Revisited

Abstract

On the basis of revised syntactic structures for the French faire-causatives, this article argues that the placement of various clitics in these causatives can be accounted for by making reference to the feature defectivity/completeness of clitics and that of their host. I show that the faire-à construction involves a biclausal structure, where the raised causativized v in the embedded clause is defective and activates the object to prepose. In addition, I identify four types of clitics with respect to their feature contents, which are licensed by different applications of three syntactic dependency operations: Agree-match, Agree-value, and Agree-check.