In Colloquial French, first and second person preverbal subject pronouns function as agreement markers on the finite verb because they are obligatory and adjacent to the finite verb (e.g. von Wartburg 1943). In other spoken varieties of French, third person pronouns are also agreement markers, having lost gender and number (Fonseca-Greber 2000 for Swiss French). This paper adds new data on third person subjects for Colloquial French, namely third person emphatic pronouns being used on their own, and shows how these data fit the subject cycle. Because, like subject markers, object pronouns are preverbal, they ‘interfere’ with the preverbal subject agreement markers. Our hypothesis was therefore that preverbal object clitics would be replaced by postverbal pronouns (cf. van Gelderen 2011: 52) or would be deleted, as Lambrecht et al. (1996) had already observed. We investigated postverbal placement of object pronouns and found some evidence of this but, more interestingly, we found that object markers were reinterpreted as agreement markers. The important insights for cyclical change this paper provides are that different person markings can be at different stages, that some stages can be skipped, and that one cycle can influence another.
2019. From negative cleft to external negator. In Cycles in Language Change, ► pp. 228 ff.
Batllori, Montserrat, Elisabeth Gibert-Sotelo & Isabel Pujol
2019. Changes in the argument and event structure of psych verbs in the history of Spanish. In Cycles in Language Change, ► pp. 249 ff.
Bernstein, Judy, Francisco Ordóñez & Francesc Roca
2019. On the emergence of personal articles in the history of Catalan. In Cycles in Language Change, ► pp. 88 ff.
Blümel, Andreas & Marco Coniglio
2019. What kind of constructions yield what kind of constructions?. In Cycles in Language Change, ► pp. 131 ff.
Bosworth, Yulia
2021. ‘Those people who chose us’: Discursive construction of identity and belonging in the context of Quebec’s 2018 provincial elections. Discourse & Society 32:2 ► pp. 135 ff.
Miriam Bouzouita, Anne Breitbarth, Lieven Danckaert & Elisabeth Witzenhausen
2019. Cycles in Language Change,
Breitbarth, Anne, Lieven Danckaert, Elisabeth Witzenhausen & Miriam Bouzouita
2019. Cycling through diachrony. In Cycles in Language Change, ► pp. 1 ff.
De Clercq, Karen
2019. French negation, the Superset Principle, and Feature Conservation. In Cycles in Language Change, ► pp. 199 ff.
Fischer, Susann, Mario Navarro & Jorge Vega Vilanova
2019. The clitic doubling parameter. In Cycles in Language Change, ► pp. 52 ff.
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