Toward an Analysis of French Hyper-Complex Inversion

This chapter examines French cases of hyper-inversion in interrogative clauses. It assumes that the doubling of two clitics is possible and that an object and a subject clitic can start out as a single constituent in the clause. This assumption has potentially far-reaching consequences for the analysis of clitic elements and more generally for the notion of constituent itself. The chapter shows how very detailed data can find a syntactic characterization inside an approach that pays attention to finer distinctions and how they can be relevant for the general theoretical framework.