Extracting out of the subject in French: experimental evidence

Extracting the complement outside a subject has been claimed to be more difficult than out of the object (Chomsky, 1973, a.o). In a series of controlled experiments, we compare extraction out of subject and out of object in French, and we also compare relative clauses and wh-questions. As it turns out, relativizing out of the subject is easier than out of the object, while the opposite pattern holds for wh-questions. We claim that our results cast doubt on a universal syntactic constraint on this type of operation, and call for a discourse based explanation, since the discourse function of relative clauses is different from that of wh-questions.

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