Information structure and epistemic modality in adverbial clauses in French

Abstract

In this paper it is argued that, contrary to what is often assumed, embedded adverbial clauses have an information structure articulation independent from that of the main clause. More particularly, it is shown that the specific way in which information structure is expressed in adverbial clauses depends on the possibility vs. impossibility of epistemic qualification in the adverbial clause. The claim is based on new empirical evidence concerning the distribution of a clearly information structure-driven syntactic configuration: verb-subject word order in French.