Just as the Modern Germanic languages (with the exception of English) have a verb second structure (V2), Old French was a V2 language. In this paper I compare Old French and Modern Germanic and show that they share the basic configuration. I suggest that these languages all have obligatory verb movement to Fin°, and that only material in SpecFocP and SpecFinP are visible for V2. All the V2-languages investigated exhibit instances of apparent V3-constructions that may be accounted for in a split-CP-framework. Crucially, there is a difference between Modern Germanic and Old French regarding topics. In Modern Germanic, a left dislocated topic must be immediately followed by its resumptive pronoun, a constraint which is not operative in Old French.
2018. Aboutness Topics in Old and Middle French: A corpus-based study on the fate of V2. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 63:2 ► pp. 194 ff.
Haegeman, Liliane & Ciro Greco
2018. West Flemish V3 and the interaction of syntax and discourse. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 21:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Zaring, Laurie
2018. The nature of V2 in Old French: Evidence from subject inversion in embedded clauses. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 63:2 ► pp. 288 ff.
Eric Mathieu & Robert Truswell
2017. Micro-change and Macro-change in Diachronic Syntax,
2019. The Variable Position of Initial Subordinate Clauses in Old French: Arguments Against a Semantic Account. In Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 95], ► pp. 175 ff.
Labelle, Marie & Paul Hirschbühler
2014. Déplacement stylistique à gauche de verbes non conjugués en ancien et en moyen français. Corpus :13 ► pp. 191 ff.
Meklenborg Salvesen, Christine
2014. Le complémenteur que et la périphérie gauche : analyse diachronique. Syntaxe & Sémantique N° 15:1 ► pp. 47 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. List of abbreviations. In Romance Object Clitics, ► pp. xiii ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Copyright Page. In Romance Object Clitics, ► pp. iv ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Series preface. In Romance Object Clitics, ► pp. ix ff.
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