Long Subject Questions in French: An Insight into the Left Periphery of Selected CPs

Abstract This article presents experimental data assessing the acceptability status of long subject questions (LSQs) in French. It shows that their suboptimal score does not reflect dialect variation and it fails to detect a change in progress. An analysis, developing further the rescuing strategy proposed in Rizzi and Shlonsky's freezing account, is presented. The crux of the proposal is that a Case mismatch obtains within the embedded complementizer, which is shown to be necessarily syncretic in LSQs. The full acceptability of embedded subject questions is then discussed and accounted for within this framework.