The specifier–head relationship: negation and French subject proforms

This article1 and the three others in this thematic collection are about heads and specifiers, the relationship between them, and how this relationship can change over time. A theme which emerges is the notion that the spec(ifier)–head relationship is cyclic, in other words, the synchronic relationship between the head and its specifier within a given phrase in a given language can be characterised as a location at a particular point on a cycle, while the diachronic development of the relationship can be seen as a directional stepwise shift around that cycle. The article is organised as follows. Section 2 introduces the theoretical framework. Section 3.1 sketches a well-known diachronic phenomenon – the history of sentential negation – which readily lends itself to an analysis in terms of a cyclic spec–head relationship, and shows how the stages in the cycle have been characterised theoretically. Section 3.2 considers another set of data − pre- and postverbal subject proforms in French − which is similarly suitable for such an approach. Section 4, finally, introduces the three other contributions to the collection

Strategies to face the socio-economic crisis in a rural territory: the case of the Baronnies Provençales

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