Quant aux livres / De livre, il n’en a lu aucun

Abstract

Summary The purpose of this paper is to offer an insight into the syntactic properties of two left-detachment constructions in French which display a head-positioned constituent introduced by de on the one hand (De livre, il n’en a lu aucun) and by quant à on the other hand (Quant aux livres, il n’en a lu aucun). Both constructions appear to differ substantially on each one of the parameters taken into account, i.e. the detached constituent, its syntactic and semantic relation to the clause and the embedding possibilities. While the de construction proves to be more similar in many respects to left-dislocation (Les livres, il les a lus), the quant à construction is syntactically more peripheral.