On the nature of OV and VO order in Old French

Zaring, Laurie

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.07.008

Cited by 14 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 35 publications

(29 reference statements)

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“…(c. 1120, Brn, 32.42) This analysis makes an interesting prediction: the order XP auxiliary S V pastparticiple should not be possible in nonconjunctional clauses. 17 Assuming the periphrastic structure argued for in Zaring (2011a), which postulates Aux and PastPart heads below TP and above vP, a subject must follow the past participle if it is not fronted to SubjP. There is no other spot between the auxiliary and the participle for it to occupy.…”

Section: Sn-inversion Is Ip-v2mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, the nature of V1 and V3 clauses changes over this period, as documented by Rouveret (2004), Labelle (2007), and Labelle and Hirschbühler (to appear), which these authors attribute to changes in left-peripheral clause structure. Movement possibilities to the middle periphery (above vP) also undergo changes, as Zaring (2010Zaring ( , 2011a attests. Finally, conjunctional clauses undergo change as well during this period: as Zaring and Hirschbühler (1997) note, they can appear early on preceded by ce 'this, it' in any grammatical function, but this becomes restricted to complements of prepositions in the 13 th century.…”

Section: Embedded Xvsp Is True V2mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The nature of V2 in Old French: Evidence from subject inversion in embedded clauses

Zaring

2017

Can. J. Linguist.

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Old French (OF) is often characterized as a Germanic-style asymmetric V2 language, although this characterization is often questioned. The present study evaluates the nature of OF V2 from a quantitative perspective. An extensive set of data provided by syntactically annotated corpora shows that both IP and CP structure change over the OF period. Focusing on Germanic inversion – XVS word order – I argue that most of the attested inversion in OF occurs within an elaborated IP structure and that this type of subject inversion dwindles over time due to the decreasing use of null expletives. True Germanic-style embedded V2 does not appear until the late 12th century, and is only rarely used throughout the 13th century. Thus, OF is an asymmetric V2 language, but with a difference, namely in having an IP field that allows for apparent V2 orders and a CP field that is only marginally employed.

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Section: Sn-inversion Is Ip-v2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Embedded Xvsp Is True V2mentioning

confidence: 99%

The nature of V2 in Old French: Evidence from subject inversion in embedded clauses

Zaring

2017

Can. J. Linguist.

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“…We furthermore hypothesize that the rise of the NP-givenness grammar is correlated with the decline of information structure-driven word order. It is commonly acknowledged that Old French underwent a major restructuring of its word order which can be roughly summarised as the replacement of a syntactically "flexible" word order by dominant SVO (Marchello-Nizia 1995, Vance 1997, Labelle and Hirschbühler 2005, Labelle 2007, Zaring 2011, Marchello-Nizia and Rouquier 2012, Kroch and Santorini 2014, Simonenko et al 2018, to name just a few).…”

Section: Theoretical Framework: Competing Grammarsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between demonstrative and definite: A grammar competition model of the evolution of French l-determiners

Simonenko

Carlier

2020

Can. J. Linguist.

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This article investigates the spread of the le/la/les-forms in the diachrony of French on the basis of large-scale corpora. It focuses on the issue of their “mixed” distribution viz. the observation that during a long period of time the le/la/les-forms in French do not pattern as either (anaphoric) demonstratives from which they originate (Late Latin ille), nor as (uniqueness-based) definites, which they end up becoming in Modern French. We model the phenomenon as a competition between two grammars which ascribe different Logical Forms to the l-forms and test model predictions in contexts which differ with respect to whether they satisfy the relevant conditions for either demonstrative or definite semantics. We also suggest that this change was part of a larger change involving the spread of presupposition triggers within noun phrases. We show that our model correctly predicts the relative rates of determiner spread in various contexts.

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“…Several studies have observed that older Romance languages had more frequent preverbal objects than their modern counterparts (Antonelli 2011;Sitaridou 2011;Zaring 2011;Poletto 2014, among others). In generative works applied to Romance varieties, this word order has been explained as the result of movement to left-peripheral projections, such as those related to topic or focus (Benincà 2004;Benincà & Poletto 2004;Wolfe 2015), whereas for Old Portuguese IP-scrambling was suggested as a possible solution as well (Martins 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrast and word order: A case study on the history of Portuguese

Andrade

Galves

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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Several studies have observed that older Romance languages had more frequent object-verb order than their modern counterparts. This article explores the idea that contrast is crucial to understand the shift to verb-object order, as part of a more encompassing notion of boundedness, which has been frequently associated with the V2 parameter. To do so, we first show that some fronting constructions involving demonstratives were available in Old and Classical Portuguese, but not in Modern Portuguese, as a consequence of the existence of a KP projection hosting contrastive items of different sorts acting as delimitators. Second, we present some changes between Old and Classical Portuguese: (i) a decrease in fronted objects with demonstratives; (ii) an increase in the frequency of null subjects; and (iii) a small decrease in the frequency of frame setters. We propose that these shifts are to be attributed to an information-structural change correlated with a syntactic change concerning the position of complementizers and verb movement in subordinate clauses. To wit, while Old Portuguese was a symmetrical relaxed C-V2 language, Classical Portuguese was an asymmetrical one, which is reflected in terms of a reduced left periphery of subordinate clauses in the latter, in which KP cannot be projected. The article presents some implications of this account for the derivation of basic word order patterns and of clitic interpolation in Old Portuguese and for the loss of V2 in the history of Portuguese. These results suggest that the connection between boundedness, contrast and V2 grammars can be profitably explored in Old Romance languages.

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On the nature of OV and VO order in Old French

Cited by 14 publications

References 35 publications

The nature of V2 in Old French: Evidence from subject inversion in embedded clauses

The nature of V2 in Old French: Evidence from subject inversion in embedded clauses

Between demonstrative and definite: A grammar competition model of the evolution of French l-determiners

Contrast and word order: A case study on the history of Portuguese

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