From the perspective of language change, grammaticalization is generally viewed as the process whereby ‘a lexical item or construction in certain uses takes on grammatical characteristics’. Roberts and Roussou (1999) account for this type of change as resulting from the reanalysis of lexical heads into functional heads. This chapter discusses the diachronic changes that do not fall under this definition, viewed as exemplifying a type of grammaticalization whereby illocutionary features come to be associated with distinct functional heads. It analyses the changes in the clausal organization of Old French as following from the fact that the Topic/Focus functional head common to all clause types of the first stage gives way to a system with a number of separate illocutionary heads. The chapter argues that the weakening of the Tobler–Mussafia (TM) constraint excluding object clitic pronouns from initial position in main clauses in Old French (OF) results from a gradual replacement of a common representation for V1 initial clauses by a new system where (1) satisfaction of a discourse-related [Top]/[Foc] feature by V is minimized, and (2) there is a reanalysis of the CP layer, with grammaticalization of illocutionary type features.

The hypothesis that Old French was not a verb-second (V2) language, but rather a Topic-initial language, is evaluated in a corpus of verb initial (V1) and V2 matrix clauses extracted from a corpus of 12th- and 13th-century texts. It is shown that the initial constituent of V2 clauses is not always a Topic; it may be part of the informational Focus, or it could be an element that is neither Topic nor Focus. In addition, in V1 and V2 sentences with subject inversion, the postverbal subject may be an informational Topic, contrary to the hypothesis that subjects must move to the preverbal position to avoid being interpreted as part of the informational Focus. Therefore, from an Information-Structure point of view, Old French is similar to a standard V2 language like German. However, certain differences between 12th- and 13th-century texts could suggest that the use of the left periphery evolved during the period considered.

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La légitimation de la construction V1 à sujet nul en subordonnée dans la prose et le vers en ancien français

La position des clitiques par rapport au verbe à l'impératif dans l'évolution...

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