Sophie Prévost | 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.
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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
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
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