Influence of noun dependents on French adjective placement in sentence production

Résumé En

In French, attributive adjectives (A) can appear either before or after the noun (N): une agréable soirée (preposed) / soirée agréable (postposed)‚ 'nice evening'.According to quantitative observations of corpus data, the choice of position is influenced by an interaction of factors (Thuilier, 2012), including the presence of other N dependant(s) in the NP, which favours preposed adjectives. This observation has been explained as a tendency to produce, in planned and written discourse, "balanced NPs"‚ with material before and after the head noun in order to avoid accumulation of post-nominal dependants (Grevisse & Goose, 2007). In order to test whether the presence of NP dependents affects sentence production in real time, we studied the effect of post-nominal PPs on the position of A using a sentence recall experiment (1). (1) A N order alternatives shown in [], recall prompt in < > d'un [redoutable gang / gang redoutable] d'un [redoutable gang / gang redoutable] de braqueurs. 'This adolescent is a member of a terrible gang (of armed robbers)'Preliminary results show that speakers (N=32) tend to produce more inversions from postposed to preposed adjectives (40%) than from preposed to postposed (5,8%), which corresponds to corpus observations: Alternating adjectives, such as those used in the experiment, are predominantly preposed (about 70% in Thuilier, 2013). There is also a significant interaction (p