Extraction from DP in French: A minimalist approach

This article is about the extraction of French PP complements of nouns headed
by de, mostly in wh and relative clause contexts. After a review of the literature
on extraction in French, it addresses the issue of the constraints on extraction in
cases with multiple arguments, eventually following Kolliakou (1999) in assuming
that there can only be one argument of a noun, whereas other expressions are
adjuncts. I then explain the relevant extractions within the Minimalist Program:
on the assumption that DPs are phases, an extracted item must first move to the
phase edge, as assumed in previous accounts. The exact extraction mechanism is
then modeled by assuming a phi-probe plus an unvalued operator feature on the
D head. The fact that only complements introduced by the preposition de can be
extracted from the DP is explained by considering de as a post-syntactic marking
for genitive case, which is assigned by the phi-probe.