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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 10:3 (2020) ► pp.389–426

Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated by e

A variationist analysis

| University of California

This paper offers a variationist analysis of object and adverbial clitic position in coordinated affirmative verb-first main declaratives introduced by e(t) “and” in Old Occitan. In this context, clitics occur in either preverbal (e·l vestit “and clothed him”) or postverbal position (e perdonet li “and pardoned him”). Following recent work on Medieval Romance coordination, I posit that proclitic and enclitic examples reflect different coordination structures at the underlying syntactic level. Data from complete analyses of five major 13th- and 14th-century texts, analyzed in a variationist approach using logistic regression, reveal that the choice between coordination structures – and hence, between proclisis and enclisis – is principled rather than random and depends on the degree of continuity or rupture/discontinuity between the conjuncts.

Keywords: old Occitan, medieval Romance, word order, clitic position, sentential coordination, variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Clitic placement in OOc
  • 3.Verb-second and generative analyses of medieval Romance and clitic position
    • 3.1Verb-second
    • 3.2Tobler-Mussafia revisited
    • 3.3Generative studies of coordination in medieval Romance
    • 3.4Proposal
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Overview
    • 5.2Main declaratives
    • 5.3Subordinate clauses
    • 5.4Rupture between conjuncts
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • Secondary sources
Published online: 8 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.19002.don
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