French Word Order and Lexical Weight

On the basis of the ordering of bare complements, modifying adjectives and certain adverbs in French, we show that certain constituents are more constrained than others, and we explain this situation in terms of weight, as one of the factors which determine word order. In addition to the distinction between heavy and non-heavy constituents, we propose that there exists a distinction among non-heavy constituents between 'light' and 'middle-weight' ones. We formalise this distinction in the feature based HPSG framework with a two-value (lite vs non-lite) feature WEIGHT, which is appropriate both for lexical items and phrases. Finally, we suggest that the lite vs non-lite distinction is universally available, although other word order properties make it more or less apparent in a given language.