A comparative perspective on the evolution of Romance clausal structure

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of the diachronic evolution of Romance clausal structure from Classical Latin through to the late medieval period, with particular reference to the Verb Second (V2) property. In the medieval period three distinct diachronic stages can be identified as regards V2: a C-VSO stage attested in Old Sardinian, a ‘relaxed’ V2 stage across Early Medieval Romance and maintained into 13th and 14th century Occitan and Sicilian, and a ‘strict’ V2 stage attested in 13th and 14th century French, Spanish and Venetian. The C-VSO grammar found in Old Sardinian is a retention of the syntactic system attested in late Latin textual records, itself an innovation on an ‘incipient V2’ stage found in Classical Latin, where V-to-C movement and XP-fronting receive a pragmatically or syntactically marked interpretation.

Reconsidering variation and change in the Medieval French subject system

“…In tandem, the attestation of unambiguously old active or pronominal subject increases overall. Although corroboration is needed at a larger scale, these data provide little support for Wolfe's (2016a) proposal that New Information Focus is encoded postverbally after 1200. Rather, they suggest that Poletto's (2006a;2006b; approach to Old Italian may fruitfully be applied to French: the CP and vP phase show parallel developments regarding the syntax-pragmatics mapping.…”

“…As already noted there is a long tradition in the syntactic literature of differentiating between Early Old French (pre-~1200) and Later Old French (Hirschbühler 1990;Roberts 1993;Vance 1997). Partly this distinction concerns an increase in the asymmetry between main and embedded clauses, but there is also an additional difference, namely the decline of V1 clauses from c.1200 onwards (Simonenko & Hirschbühler 2012;Wolfe 2016a). Likely due to a change in the locus of V2 (Wolfe 2016a; Wolfe 2018b), the licensing conditions for null subjects change in Later Old French, such that they are typically only licensed postverbally, whereas previously they could also be licensed preverbally, yielding a V1 order.…”

Probing the Syntax of a Problematic Particle: Old French ‘si’ Revisited

“…1; Rouveret ; Labelle & Hirschbühler , 2017; Mathieu : §2, : 344, : 340; Labelle : 290; Vance et al. : 302–7; Salvesen : §1, : 135–8; Hansch : 81–118; Steiner : 10–23; Wolfe : §2, : §1.2). This V2 syntax is not understood in the vast majority of recent research as a form of linear ordering constraint, but a systematic requirement that the finite verb targets the vacant C(omplementiser) position, with an additional operation which fronts an XP into the left periphery of the clause.…”

To be or not to be informational: Preverbal complements in Medieval French V2 configurations

“…V2 is a rare typological feature, that is mostly found in some families of Indo-European languages, Germanic, Celtic and Indo-Aryan (see the overview in Holmberg 2015, inter alia). It is also attested in a number of Medieval Romance languages (Wolfe 2018a(Wolfe , 2016 and the extensive set of references therein), including French. In most languages, the configuration is asymmetric: it is a feature of main clauses, and is constrained or excluded in subordinates.…”

“…Another recurrent variation is one between (states of) languages with strict V2, allowing only one item before the verb, as seems to be the case in contemporary standard German, and non-strict V2, typically (some periods of) Medieval French. According to Wolfe (2016), the variation is dependent on whether the verb moves to a relatively low FinP position in a non-strict V2, or to a relatively high ForceP projection in a strict V2, a high position that prevents other XPs from moving up. Evolution from strict to nonstrict has been claimed for the same language at different periods (for early French, see the discussion between Rouveret 2004 andHirschbühler 2005).…”