11. Apparent insubordination as discourse patterns in French

Abstract

In current syntactic literature, two empirical situations are typically earmarked as cases of "insubordination". Their common trait is that, despite formal features that should technically define them as subordinate clauses (they are preceded by subordinatorsa subordinating conjunction or some other appropriate morpheme), they behave in discourse like "independent sentences". This description takes into account both formally subordinate clauses functioning as independent discourse units (Evans 2007) and peripheral subordinate clauses which display "main clause features" (Debaisieux 2013, Chap 2). Our stance is that, in both cases, the concept of "insubordination" is an artefact of sentence type theory (Struckmeier & Kaiser, 2015). Committed to the pioneering model of Claire Blanche-Benveniste (1990), which posits a fundamental distinction between grammatical syntax on the one hand and discourse syntax on the other, Desbaisieux (2016) has conclusively shown that, in actual fact, neither of the structures identified in the macrosyntactic paradigm as candidates for "insubordination"peripheral clauses with main clauses featuresare in any way governed by the so-called "main clauses" with which they are combined. In this paper we deal with two types of apparent exclamative insubordinates in French introduced respectively by the subordinating conjunctions si and quand. We argue by extending syntactic dependency to discourse that both are regular syntactic patterns.

Insubordinate hypothetical manner constructions in French and Spanish: A pilot study

“…(3) Spanish (About (2012b:174), "[i]n addition to the basic adverbial use […], these subordinators can occasionally be found in complementation structures introducing finite declarative clauses". While in the literature adverbial insubordination (Schwenter 2016, Bossaglia et al 2017, Horie 2018, Debaisieux et al 2019, Lastres-López 2020 and complement insubordination (Verstraete et al 2012, Gras & Sansiñena 2017) have been discussed separately, we observe that, for HM constructions, the borderline between these categories is blurred because of the ambivalent status of the conjunction by which they are introduced (cf. López-Couso & Méndez-Naya 2015).…”