%0 Journal Article %T The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: four apparent counter-examples in French %+ Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus (CLILLAC-ARP (EA_3967)) %A Miller, Philip, Harold %A Pullum, Geoffrey K. %A Zwicky, Arnold M. %< avec comité de lecture %@ 0022-2267 %J Journal of Linguistics %I Cambridge University Press (CUP) %V 33 %N 1 %P 67-90 %8 1997 %D 1997 %K Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax %K PPFS %K syntax %Z Humanities and Social Sciences/LinguisticsJournal articles %X The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the alleged relevance of syllable count to the description of attributive adjective placement; section 2 addresses the validity of a rule mentioningconsonantality in stating the agreement rule for adverbial tout; section 3 turns to the issue of preposition choice (e.g. en vs. au) with geographical proper names; and section 4 takes a look at a purported case of phonological reference in stating the rule for ellipsis of a clitic pronoun and an auxiliary in a coordinate structure. In each case we bring independent evidence to bear on the problem in order to show that the analyses employing phonology-sensitive syntactic statements are in error and the prediction of the PPFS is confirmed. %G English %L hal-01235284 %U https://u-paris.hal.science/hal-01235284 %~ SHS %~ UNIV-PARIS7 %~ AO-LINGUISTIQUE %~ CLILLAC-ARP %~ UNIV-PARIS %~ UP-SOCIETES-HUMANITES