Article published in:
Diachronic Treebanks
Edited by Hanne Martine Eckhoff, Silvia Luraghi and Marco Passarotti
[Diachronica 35:3] 2018
► pp. 393–428

Text form and grammatical changes in Medieval French

A treebank-based diachronic study

| FWO | Ghent University
| LLF/CNRS/Paris Diderot, USPC
| LATTICE, CNRS/ENS/Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle, USPC & PSL
This paper presents a treebank-based study of the effect the text form (prose vs. verse) has on the course of two grammatical changes in Medieval French: the loss of null subjects and the loss of OV word order. By means of statistical analysis, we demonstrate that naive estimates of the spread of overt subjects and VO orders give the impression that there is a significant difference between the rates of development in prose vs. verse. By contrast, estimates based on an abstract grammar competition model which distinguishes between grammar-ambiguous surface forms (overt personal subjects, null subjects in coordination contexts) and grammar-unambiguous surface forms (overt expletive subjects, null subjects in non-coordination contexts) show prose-verse parallelism, prose having an earlier change onset, in line with traditional intuitions. At a more general level, these results suggest that the product of the interaction of a particular grammar with universal pragmatic laws is constant, which can be observed if the factors responsible for variation in grammatical choices are controlled for.
Keywords: prose vs. verse in language change, Constant Rate Effect, null subjects, word order change, Medieval French, treebanks
Keywords: prose vs vers dans le changement linguistique, Effet du Taux Constant, sujets nuls, changement de l’ordre des mots, français médiéval
Keywords: Prosa und Vers im Sprachwandel, constant rate effect, Nullsubjekt, Wortstellungswandel, mittelalterliches Französisch
Published online: 05 November 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.00008.sim
References

References

Abeillé, Anne, Danièle Godard & Frédéric Sabio
2008 Deux constructions à SN antéposé en français. In Jacques Durand, Benoît Habert & Bernard Laks (eds.), Congrès mondial de linguistique française (CMLF08), 2361–2376. Paris: Institut de Linguistique Française.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Adams, Marianne
1987 From Old French to the theory of pro-drop. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 5(1). 1–32. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Agresti, Alan
2002 Categorical data analysis. John Wiley & Sons. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Alexiadou, Artemis & Elena Anagnostopoulou
1998 Parametrizing AGR: Word order, V-movement and EPP-checking. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 16(3). 491–539. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Barbosa, Pilar
1995 Null subjects. University of Massachusetts, Amherst dissertation.Google Scholar
Bettens, Olivier
2015 Chantez-vous français ? Remarques curieuses sur le français chanté de Moyen Âge à la période baroque (accessed 12 july, 2018). http://​virga​.org​/cvf/.
Buridant, Claude
2000 Nouvelle grammaire de l’ancien français. Paris: Sedes.Google Scholar
Dees, Anthonij, Steintje Meilink, Karin van Reenen-Stein & Pieter van Reenen
1980 Un cas d’analogie: l’introduction de -e à la première personne du singulier de l’indicatif présent des verbes en -er en ancien français. Rapport/Het Franse Boek 50. 105–110.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W.
2003 Argument structure: Grammar in use. In J. W. Du Bois (ed.), Preferred argument structure. Grammar as architecture for function, 11–60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dufter, Andreas
2010 Subordination et expression du sujet en ancien français. In Actes du XXVe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes (Innsbruck, 3–8 septembre 2007), vol. 2, 443–458.Google Scholar
Fleischman, Suzanne
1992 Discourse and diachrony: The rise and fall of Old French SI. In Marinel Gerritsen & Dieter Stein (eds.), Internal and external factors in syntactic change, 433–73. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fontaine, Carmen
1985 Application de méthodes quantitatives en diachronie: L’inversion du sujet en français. Université du Québec à Montréal MA thesis.Google Scholar
Foulet, Lucien
1928 Petite syntaxe de l’ancien français. Paris: Champion, troisième édition revue. Réédition 1982.Google Scholar
1935 L’extension de la forme oblique du pronom personnel en ancien français. Romania 61–62. 257–315. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Franzén, Torsten
1939 Étude sur la syntaxe des pronoms personnels sujets en ancien français. Uppsala University dissertation.Google Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara
2007 Subjects, topics and the interpretation of referential pro. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 25(4). 691–734. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
[ p. 422 ]
Glikman, Julie & Nicolas Mazziotta
2013 Répresentation de l’oral et syntaxe dans la prose du Queste del saint Graal (1225–1230) . In Dominique Lagorgette & Pierre Larrivée (eds.), Représentations du sens linguistique 5, 69–90. Université de Savoie.Google Scholar
Guillot-Barbance, Céline, Bénédicte Pincemin & Alexei Lavrentiev
2017 Représentation de l’oral en français médiéval et genres textuels. In Autour du clivage langue parlée/langue écrite du latin au français, Clermont-Ferrand, France.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Martin
1978 The evolution of French syntax: A comparative approach. Longman.Google Scholar
Hirschbühler, Paul
1992 L’omission du sujet dans les subordonnées V1: les CNN de Vigneulles et les CNN anonymes. Travaux de Linguistique 24. 25–46.Google Scholar
Jelinek, Eloise
1984 Empty categories, case, and configurationality. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 2(1). 39–76. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel
2016 When discourse met null subjects. Borealis-An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 5(2). 173–189. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jong, Thera de
2006 La prononciation des consonnes dans le français de Paris aux 13ème et 14ème siècles. Utrecht: LOT/Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Georg A.
2009 Losing the null subject. A contrastive study of (Brazilian) Portuguese and (Medieval) French. In G. A. Kaiser & E. -M. Remberger (eds.), Null-subjects, expletives, and locatives in Romance, 131–156. Konstanz: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz.Google Scholar
Kauhanen, Henri & George Walkden
2018 Deriving the Constant Rate Effect. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 36(2). 483–521. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony
1989 Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1(3). 199–244. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony & Beatrice Santorini
2014 On the word order of Early Old French. Handout for a talk at the 7th Conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 7) , Graz, Austria.
Labelle, Marie
2007 Clausal architecture in Early Old French. Lingua 117(1). 289–316. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labelle, Marie & Paul Hirschbühler
2005 Changes in clausal organization and the position of clitics in Old French. In Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz, Carme Picallo & Francesc Roca (eds.), Grammaticalization and parametric variation, 60–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lafond, Larry
2003 Historical changes in verb-second and null subjects from Old to Modern French. In D. Eric Holt (ed.), Optimality Theory and language change, 387–412. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lagorgette, Dominique & Pierre Larrivée
2013 Représentations du sens linguistique 5. Université de Savoie.Google Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, Christiane
1992 Histoire de la langue française aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Paris: Dunod.Google Scholar
1995 L’évolution du français. Ordre des mots, démonstratifs, accent tonique. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
2012 L’oral représenté: un accès construit à une face cadrée des langues ‘mortes’. In Bernard Combettes, Céline Guillot, Evelyne Oppermann-Marsaux, Sophie Prévost & Amalia Rodrígez Samolinos (eds.), Le changement en français. Etudes de linguistique diachronique, 247–264. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
[ p. 423 ]
2018 De S0 à SV: Vers le sujet obligatoire et antéposé en français, les dernières phases d’un changement. Journal of French Language Studies 28(1). 1–19. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, Christiane & Magali Rouquier
2012 De (S)OV à SVO en français: où et quand? L’ordre des constituants propositionnels dans la Passion de Clermont et la Vie de saint Alexis. In Monique Dufresne (ed.), Constructions en changement. Hommage à Paul Hirschbühler, 111–155. Presses de l’Université de Laval.Google Scholar
Mathieu, Éric
2006 Stylistic Fronting in Old French. Probus 18(2). 219–266. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 From local blocking to cyclic agree. In Jila Ghomeshi, Ileana Paul & Martina Wiltschko (eds.), Determiners: Universals and variations, vol. 147, 123–158. John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
MCVF
2010 Corpus MCVF annoté syntaxiquement, (2005–2010), dirigé par France Martineau, avec Paul Hirschbühler, Anthony Kroch et Yves Charles Morin.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Bruce
1985 Old English syntax. Oxford: Clarendon Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Morin, Yves Charles
2001 La troncation des radicaux verbaux en français depuis le Moyen Age. Études diachroniques. Recherches Linguistiques de Vincennes (30). 63–85.Google Scholar
Passarotti, Marco, Barbara McGillivray & David Bamman
2015 A treebank-based study on Latin Word Order. In Gerd Haverling (ed.), Latin Linguistics in the Early 21st Century. Acts of the 16th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, 338–350. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet.Google Scholar
Penn Supplement to MCVF
2010 Penn Supplement to the MCVF Corpus by Anthony Kroch and Beatrice Santorini.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan
2004 Variationist approaches to syntactic change. In Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics, 509–528. Wiley Online Library.Google Scholar
Prévost, Sophie
2018 Increase of pronominal subjects in Old French: Evidence for a starting-point in Late Latin. In Anne Carlier & Céline Guillot (eds.), Latin tardif -français ancien: Continuités et ruptures Coll. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 169–198. Berlin: De Gruyter.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rainsford, Thomas Michael
2011 The emergence of group stress in medieval French. University of Cambridge dissertation.Google Scholar
Roberts, Ian
1993 Verbs and diachronic syntax: A comparative history of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
2014 Taraldsen’s Generalization and language change: Two ways to lose null subjects. In Peter Svenonius (ed.), Functional Structure from Top to Toe, vol. 9 The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, 115–148. Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rouveret, Alain
2004 Les clitiques pronominaux et la périphérie gauche en ancien français. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 99(1). 181–237. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schøsler, Lene
2002 La variation linguistique: Le cas de l’expression du sujet. In Rodney Sampson & Wendy Ayres-Bennett (eds.), Interpreting the history of French, A festschrift for Peter Rickard on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, 187–208. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
[ p. 424 ]
Simonenko, Alexandra
2017 Determiners as a probe into diachronic information structure & the Definiteness cycle. Handout for a talk at Formal diachronic semantics 2, Saarland University, Saabrücken, November 20–21 (accessed 12 July, 2018). https://​www​.academia​.edu​/35249405​/Determiners​_as​_a​_probe​_into​_diachronic​_information​_structure​_and​_the​_Definiteness​_cycle.
Simonenko, Alexandra & Anne Carlier
2016 The evolution of the French definite article: from strong to weak. Handout for a talk at Going Romance. Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt 08–10/12/2016 (accessed July 12, 2018). https://​www​.academia​.edu​/28473104​/The​_evolution​_of​_the​_French​_definite​_article​_from​_strong​_to​_weak.
Simonenko, Alexandra, Benoît Crabbé & Sophie Prévost
2018 Agreement syncretisation and the loss of null subjects: Quantificational models for Medieval French. accepted for Language Variation and Change (accessed July 12, 2018). http://​ling​.auf​.net​/lingbuzz​/003491.
Simonenko, Alexandra & Paul Hirschbühler
2012 Placement de clitiques dans les propositions V1 et évolution de la structure de la proposition en ancien français. In Monique Dufresne (ed.), Constructions en changement Les voies du français, 11–53. Sainte-Foye: Presses de l’Université Laval.Google Scholar
Vance, Barbara
1997 Syntactic change in Medieval French Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vennemann, Theo
1974 Topics, subjects and word order. In J. M. Anderson & Charles Jones (eds.), Historical linguistics: Proceedings of the first international conference on historical linguistics, vol. 1, 339–376. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Walkden, George & Kristian Rusten
2017 Null subjects in Middle English. English Language and Linguistics 21(3). 439–473. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zaring, Laurie
2011 On the nature of OV and VO order in early Old French. Lingua 121. 1831–1852. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zimmermann, Michael
2014 Expletive and referential subject pronouns in Medieval French. Walter de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Larrivée, Pierre
2019. To be or not to be informational: Preverbal complements in Medieval French V2 configurations. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4:1 Crossref logo
Octavio de Toledo y Huerta, Álvaro S.
2019. Large Corpora and Historical Syntax: Consequences for the Study of Morphosyntactic Diffusion in the History of Spanish. Frontiers in Psychology 10 Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 january 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.