Word order phenomena are the results of the interaction of several linguistic and extralinguistic factors. I focus here on some syntactic constraints French word order, and propose a treatment which relies on underspecification and not on movement. As SVO languages in general, lexical heads come before any other constituent in French. Contrary to English, the order between phrasal constituents is free (modulo discursive effects):

(i)  Marie dit à Jean de partir/ dit de partir à Jean
       ('M told J to leave.')
(ii) Marie donne (gentiment) des fleurs (gentiment) à Paul (gentiment)
       ('M kindly gives flowers to J.')

Differences between phrasal and lexical elements have been noted in English (Pollard and Sag 1987, Arnold and Sadler 1992) and Korean (Sells 1994); I show here that in French, lexical constituents are the only constituents which exhibit a fixed order:

1) they precede all phrasal constituents, as shown with bare nominal complements or degree adverbs:

(iii) La course donne soif à Marie/ * donne à Marie soif
	('Running gives thirst to M.= makes M. thirsty.')
(iv)  Marie mange bien sa soupe / * mange sa soupe bien 
        ('M eats her soup well.')

2) lexical complements are ordered among themselves, according to the obliqueness hierarchy :

(v) La course donne bien soif à Marie / * donne soif bien à Marie
      ('Running gives well thirst to Mary.')

3) lexical modifiers must adjoin to the lexical head, and precede all complements.

Lexical constituents are lexical items that fail to project phrases on their own, such as negative or degree adverbs, bare quantifiers, bare common nouns in light verbs constructions, prenominal adjectives and certain verbal forms in complex predicate constructions. I assume a feature [LEX {+,-}] (Pollard and Sag 1987, Arnold and Sadler 1992), which is not reducible to the word/phrase distinction. There are words that behave as [LEX -] items (proper names, manner adverbs...). Moreover, I analyze some left adjunctions (très bien = very well) and some coordinations (bien ou mal = well or badly) as phrases (built in the syntax) which are underspecified for [LEX ].

If time permits, I will show how this account of word order interacts nicely with an HPSG grammar for French (Abeillé, Godard, Miller and Sag in progress) and especially with the flat structures we propose for auxiliary and causative constructions.

There is a paper available on this subject by Danièle Godard and myself called "Lexicality and French word order", to appear in B. Borsley (ed) Syntactic categories, Syntax and semantics, Academic Press.