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

Abstract

It is widely assumed that Medieval French V2 constructions relate to an informational value (Labelle & Hirschbühler 2018 i.a.). This assumption is however rarely tested by quantitative studies, which tend to rely on heterogeneous textual material. The purpose of this paper is to document the informational value of preverbal complements that associate with (unambiguous) V2 configurations. I use a novel, homogeneous corpus of prose legal texts from the Normandy region over the period 1150-1475. Defining a decision tree, I determine the informational value of V2 complements, specifically whether they represent old information (explicit mentioned, anaphoric, accommodated or inferable) or new information. A categorical discourse-old value is evidenced for preverbal V2 complements for the period between 1150 and 1236. The loss of the categorical informational value precedes the decline of V2 as a productive configuration with the emergence of formulaic uses. The detailed documentation of the informational value of historical configurations, based on an explicit, replicable method applied to a homogeneous corpus, contributes to the understanding of the driving role of informational structure for syntactic change.

Is Medieval French diglossic? New evidence on remnant V2 and register

“…These issues are important because the former tells us whether V2 is a central word order of 13 th century French or merely a particular construction, as is the case in contemporary normative French (Guimier 1997); and the latter because it indicates whether the configuration is driven by formal syntactic requirements or informational dynamics. The hypothesis is that such variance relates to the register of the investigated texts, as suggested by Ingham (2012: 114, 117) and Ledgeway (2008) and documented by Larrivée (2019).…”

“…One reason to do such a comparison is that it might explain the variance in informational values associated to the argument and adjunct XPs of V2 across studies. Whereas Radwan finds that 49% of XP in unambiguous V2 configuration are discourse-new in a 13 th century literary text, Larrivée (2019) shows that 2,7% are in legal Norman texts from 1150 to 1250. It may be that literary texts contain more dialogue, and that this provides more opportunities to introduce discoursenew information, including of the Focus type.…”

“…There is however considerable variance between the studies. Work on 13 th century literary prose cite figures of between 17% and 30% of V2 among all clauses (Radwan 2011, Salvesen and Bech 2014, Marchello-Nizia 2018, Kaiser and Zimmermann 2011, 13 th century prose legal sources yield 3.7% of unambiguous V2 (Larrivée 2019). Such quantitative variance between literary and non-literary sources is also found across the history of Portuguese, Galves 2019.…”

“…In the latter, there is actually a smaller proportion of Focus in dialogue than in the narration. The narration of the literary text has a massive overrepresentation of Focus XP in strict main-clause V2 configurations; if this carries to other texts, given that strict main clauses are thought to be central to V2 and that literary narration is traditionally very much the primary material of studies, that may have been instrumental in supporting the view that even in 1230, there was no dominant informational value for the XP (but see Larrivée 2019).…”

“…Such quantitative variance between literary and non-literary sources is also found across the history of Portuguese, Galves 2019. As for the informational value of the XP that is thought to play an important role for the construction, whereas Larrivée (2019) and Ingham (2018) converge in finding virtually categorical discourse-old argument and adjunct XPs with unambiguous V2 in 13 th century prose, Labelle and Hirschbühler (2018) discover a near-categorical discourse-new Focus value for preverbal objects in verse texts between 1090 and 1200, and Radwan no specific value for V2 in 13th century literary prose. These issues are important because the former tells us whether V2 is a central word order of 13 th century French or merely a particular construction, as is the case in contemporary normative French (Guimier 1997); and the latter because it indicates whether the configuration is driven by formal syntactic requirements or informational dynamics.…”