Sam Wolfe
List of John Benjamins publications for which Sam Wolfe plays a role.
Articles
2020 Old French si, grammaticalisation, and the interconnectedness of change Historical Linguistics 2017: Selected papers from the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, San Antonio, Texas, 31 July – 4 August 2017, Drinka, Bridget (ed.), pp. 253–272 | Chapter
The particle SI is ubiquitous across the early French textual record, yet receives no uniform analysis, with numerous competing and often contradictory claims in the literature about its distribution and formal status. This study draws on a novel diachronic corpus analysis to put forward an… read more
2019 Redefining the typology of V2 languages: The view from Medieval Romance and beyond A micro-perspective on Verb Second in Romance and Germanic, Meklenborg Salvesen, Christine (ed.), pp. 16–46 | Article
This article proposes a new typology of the V2 property, integrating new data from a corpus of Medieval Romance texts with data from Rhaeto-Romance, Early Germanic and Modern Germanic. The proposed analysis is that all V2 systems have a V-movement and phrasal movement trigger on the lowest… read more
2018 Occitan, verb second and the Medieval Romance word order debate Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13: Selected papers from ‘Going Romance’ 29, Nijmegen, Berns, Janine, Haike Jacobs and Dominique Nouveau (eds.), pp. 315–336 | Chapter
This study presents a discussion of the word order properties of Old Occitan, a Medieval Romance language which remains under-studied in comparison to many of its sister languages. I argue that it was a V2 system and in particular that the locus of the V2 property was a low left-peripheral head,… read more
2016 A comparative perspective on the evolution of Romance clausal structure Diachronica 33:4, pp. 461–502 | Article
This article presents a comparative analysis of the diachronic evolution of Romance clausal structure from Classical Latin through to the late medieval period, with particular reference to the Verb Second (V2) property. In the medieval period three distinct diachronic stages can be identified as… read more
2015 Microparametric variation in Old ItaloRomance syntax: The view from Old Sicilian and Old Sardinian Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Amsterdam 2013, Aboh, Enoch O., Jeannette Schaeffer and Petra Sleeman (eds.), pp. 51–66 | Article
New evidence is presented from two under-studied Old Romance varieties, Old Sicilian and Old Sardinian, to assess whether they instantiate V2 systems, as predicted under Benincà’s (1983–4) account of Old Romance word order. We suggest that Old Sicilian is a V2 system, evidenced by strong… read more
2015 Medieval Sardinian: New evidence for syntactic change from Latin to Romance Historical Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oslo, 5-9 August 2013, Haug, Dag T.T. (ed.), pp. 303–324 | Article
We present evidence that Old Sardinian, in contrast to other old Romance systems commonly reported to be verb-second, had a form of verb-initial syntax with optional pragmatically-driven focalisation and topicalisation into the left periphery. We argue that this verb-initial order is derived… read more