Topic and focus in Old French V1 and V2 structures

Abstract

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.

Reconsidering variation and change in the Medieval French subject system

“…We noted at the outset that the most recent corpus work on pragmatic change in the Medieval French prefield is indicative of a more gradual change in this domain that has conventionally been conceived (Steiner 2014;Labelle & Hirschbühler 2018). Our data broadly confirm this intuition, with obvious intertextual variation for all the factors considered.…”

“…After approximately 1200, however, null subjects become increasingly restricted in nonroot clauses (Adams 1987b: 3;Roberts 1993: 139;Vance 1997: Chapter 5) and declarative verb-initial clauses either decline markedly or disappear entirely (Skårup 1975: 291;Rouveret 2004: 193-5;Labelle & Hirschbühler 2005: 66;Simonenko & Hirschbühler 2012;Labelle & Hirschbühler 2018). Thirdly, Old French features a range of sentenceinitial particles, of which one of the most frequently attested, si, has accrued a vast literature.…”

“…In general terms, this begs the question as to whether this analysis can be extended to Old French, a language which shows a number of striking parallelisms with Old Italo-Romance varieties in other domains (see Vanelli, Renzi & Benincà 1986;Benincà 2004;Ledgeway 2007). More specifically, given that the discourse-pragmatic status of the constituents satisfying the Old French V2 requirement changed diachronically (Labelle & Hirschbühler 2017;Labelle & Hirschbühler 2018; Wolfe 2018b; Larrivée 2019), a strong interpretation of Poletto's proposal would lead us to predict concomitant changes in the vP-domain which is the locus of many inversion structures, that is to say a change in the discourse status of preverbal subjects may correlate with a parallel change for postverbal subjects.…”

“…Consider for reference the clitic-pronominal system(Rouveret 2004;Labelle & Hirschbühler 2005), the encoding of new Information Focus(Wolfe 2016a: 480;Labelle & Hirschbühler 2018), Stylistic Fronting or other 'leftward displacement' operations(Mathieu 2006;Labelle 2007;Labelle & Hirschbühler 2017), and the particle si (Wolfe 2018a; Meklenborg 2020). 10 See http://bfm.ens-lyon.fr and the details given in the bibliography.…”

“…11 See for exampleLabelle (2007: secs. 4-5) andLabelle & Hirschbühler (2018) for syntactic studies making use of verse texts. SeeBalon & Larrivée (2016) and Larrivée (this volume) for one way of surmounting this issue in making use of legal texts.…”