Initial subordinate clauses in Old French: Syntactic variation and the clausal left periphery

Donaldson, Bryan

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.04.003

Cited by 23 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…A final property in which Old French patterns separately from Standard Modern French concerns the preverbal field. As acknowledged in traditional descriptive works (Foulet 1928: 306-32;Wartburg 1958: 103;Moignet 1973: 357;Sk arup 1975: 9-69) and theoretical analyses (Vanelli et al 1986: §4.1;Adams 1987bAdams : 4-5, 1988Roberts 1993: 85-7;Hulk & Van Kemenade 1995: 235-6;Vance 1997: 43-7;Donaldson 2012Donaldson : 1025Mathieu 2012: 327;Salvesen 2013: 135-6;Steiner 2014: xviii), the preverbal field in Old French is not a privileged subject position. Rather, consistent with other V2 languages (Vikner 1995: 41;Frey 2004 A range of particles also occur in the preverbal field that have proven problematic to analyse.…”

Section: Left-peripheral Constituents and Particlesmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…If 'V-to-T movement' is a cover term for a range of verb movement operations targeting different positions within the inflectional domain, the correct characterisation of Old French 'V-to-C' movement becomes non-trivial. 3 In a cartographic approach to the left periphery (Rizzi 1997(Rizzi , 2004(Rizzi , 2006(Rizzi , 2010(Rizzi , 2013Beninc a & Poletto 2004), there are a priori a number of potential landing sites for the moved finite verb: 4 (3) [ Frame HT, Adv Scene-Setting Capitalising on the intuition that V2 effects may have different loci cross-linguistically, accounts of Old French V2 which assume Fin (Salvesen 2011(Salvesen , 2013, Focus (Beninc a 2004(Beninc a : 285-92, 2006Labelle 2007: 301-5;Donaldson 2012Donaldson : 1029 and Force (Wolfe 2016a) to be the locus of V2 have all been proposed. Therefore, an O-V-S V2 (4), could minimally be derived in three ways (5): 5 (4) messe e matines ad li reis escultet mass and matins have.3SG the king hear.PTCP 'The King has attended mass and matins' (Roland 11,139) In the analysis below, I consider these options to be non-exclusive.…”

Section: Structure Of the Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wolfe

2018

Trans of the Philol Soc

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This article presents the findings of a corpus analysis of seven Old French texts to better understand the syntax of the particle SI. It is argued that the texts display clear evidence of synchronic and diachronic variation, much of which has not been noted in the literature. A diachronic grammaticalisation pathway is proposed for SI from a temporal deictic adverb to a Topic continuity marker and then to a FinP expletive which undergoes upwards reanalysis as a ForceP expletive.

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Section: Left-peripheral Constituents and Particlesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Structure Of the Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wolfe

2018

Trans of the Philol Soc

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“…See recent discussion in Donaldson (2012Donaldson ( :1033 who finds the poetry/prose distinction insignificant as 7 regards the makeup of the left periphery in 10th-14th century French.…”

Section: Textual Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparative perspective on the evolution of Romance clausal structure

Wolfe¹

2016

DIA

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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.

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“…One such context, central to the present paper, involves a main declarative preceded immediately by a subordinate, as in (3). In Donaldson (2012), I argue that OF initial subordinates usually occupy a left-peripheral Frame (i.e., topic) position. The consensus that emerges is that left-peripheral material does not count for V2 purposes.…”

Section: Vin Old Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1100), only about 3.5% of main declaratives are preceded by a subordinate (Donaldson, 2012(Donaldson, : 1044, the figure climbs to 12% in Villehardouin (ca. Whereas in the Chanson de Roland (ca.…”

Section: Initial Subordinate + Main Declarativementioning

confidence: 99%

Socio-stylistic reflexes of syntactic change in Old French

Donaldson

2013

French Language Studies

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ab st rac tThis paper analyses aspects of the loss of verb-second (V2) in Old French in a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Data come from sequences in which a main declarative is preceded immediately by a tensed subordinate clause (Vance, Donaldson, and Steiner, 2010). Following Romaine (1982), represented speech and narrative are considered to represent distinct registers within a single text. An analysis of intra-textual variation between narrative and represented speech reveals stylistic variation, in that represented speech evinces higher rates of surface subjectverb-(object) orders in main clauses than narrative passages within the same text. The data also reveal gender variation, as the represented speech of women tends to be more linguistically conservative than that of men.Variation (University of Texas at San Antonio). All remaining shortcomings are of course my own.

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Initial subordinate clauses in Old French: Syntactic variation and the clausal left periphery

Cited by 23 publications

References 23 publications

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

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

A comparative perspective on the evolution of Romance clausal structure

Socio-stylistic reflexes of syntactic change in Old French

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