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Article published In:
Romance Parsed Corpora
Edited by Christina Tortora, Beatrice Santorini and Frances Blanchette
[Linguistic Variation 18:1] 2018
► pp. 23–48
Special issue articles

The variable use of determiners in Old French and the argument DP hypothesis

| Queen’s University
| Université de Montréal
| University of British Columbia

The argument DP hypothesis, adopted by many syntactic analyses, claims that nominal arguments are introduced by a determiner (D), which may be covert or overt. While overt D is obligatory in Modern French (consistent with the argument DP hypothesis), it was not obligatory in earlier stages of French. We explore the factors that contributed to this change – including semantic class, syntactic function, number, and definiteness – focusing on a shift that occurred in the D-paradigm in two Anglo-Norman texts of the 12th century. Quantitative analysis (Goldvarb) yields two major findings. First, the effect of syntactic function remains constant: subject position favours overt D, but object position inhibits it. Second, there is a change in the effect of semantic class: count nouns increasingly favour overt D, but non-count (mass and abstract) nouns increasingly inhibit it. More generally, the gradual disappearance of bare Ns in French reflects the emergence of paradigmatically conditioned D.

Keywords: argument DP hypothesis, bare nouns, definiteness, Old French, Anglo-Norman, syntax, morphology, language change, language variation, corpus analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What D does
  • 3.Previous studies of OF bare nouns
  • 4.Investigating OF determiners with variationist methods
    • 4.1Determiners as linguistic variables
    • 4.2Data extraction
    • 4.3Methods for data analysis
  • 5.Results and interpretation
    • 5.1Predicates versus arguments
    • 5.2Arguments
    • 5.3Argument count nouns
      • 5.3.1D is the locus of (in)definiteness
      • 5.3.2A reorganization of the indefinite D paradigm
    • 5.4Argument definite count nouns
    • 5.5Argument non-count nouns
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.00003.duf
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