Revisiting subjunctive obviation in French: a formal acceptability judgment study

Abstract

Even though the weakening of the subjunctive disjoint reference effect, also known as obviation, plays an important role in the research of subjunctives in (non-)Romance languages, to the best of our knowledge it has never been verified experimentally. The goal of our paper is to test how native speakers of (European) French evaluate sentences displaying factors that (according to Ruwet 1991) should weaken obviation using a formal acceptability judgment task. Our results show that we were unable to replicate Ruwet’s observations (when averaging over multiple participants): only one out of six factors described by Ruwet seems to clearly weaken obviation, namely Coordination. We conclude that (a) French may be a language for which formal experimentation of complex data is useful, (b) idiolects should not be ignored, and (c) our results challenge theoretical accounts of obviation weakening. Finally, we relate our study to the ongoing discussion on whether informal methods of collecting acceptability judgments (such as introspection by the author) need to be verified by formal methods.