Left-detachment and topic-marking in French: The case of quant à and en fait de
Résumé
The aim of this paper is to compare the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of two left-detachment constructions in French, introduced respectively by quant à and en fait de. Although both have been described as topic-marking constructions, they appear to differ substantially in each of the following parameters: the characteristics of the detached constituent, its relation to the matrix clause, and its embedding possibilities. Most of these differences can be accounted for by the fact that the detached constituent in the en fait de construction is non-referential and therefore cannot fully acquire topic status, unlike the detached nominal in the quant à construction, which is a prototypical topic-marking construction. More specifically, the quant à and en fait de constructions are shown to differ crucially in terms of two semantic attributes of topichood: addressation and frame-setting