Abstract: Les articles se centrent sur trois grands thèmes qui marquent le changement historique du français : le développement des déterminants, la diffusion de la négation renforcée, et la structure de la phrase, plus particulièrement le rôle informationnel des éléments sur la syntaxe de la phrase et la structure V21 de la langue.La langue latine classique ne connaissait pas de déterminants articles, alors que cette catégorie existe en français. Comment s'est effectuée cette transition qui s'est déroulée en partie durant l'ancien français, état de langue qui permettait les noms nus (« bare NPs ») dans beaucoup plus de contextes que le français moderne ' Deux articles se penchent sur cette question. Carlier et Lamiroy ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This article is devoted to the emergence of a new paradigm in French and Romance: that of nominal determiners.1 In this section, we set forth our claims, the theoretical framework that accounts for the data, viz. grammaticalization in relation to construction grammar, and the method on which the analysis is based, namely a study of parallel corpora.As is well known, Latin has no articles. Moreover, although Latin has demonstratives, possessives and indefinites, these can be used both as pronouns and as adjectives (Menge 2000, inter alia). Hence, the concept of nominal determiner in Latin does not correspond to a separate morphosyntactic category (or form class), but rather to a syntactic function. From Latin to ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In Old French (OF), several factors determine whether a noun occurs with a determiner or as a bare noun, i.e., without a determiner; we call this "determiner drop" (D-drop).1 The factors that condition D-drop include predicativity, grammatical function, semantic class, definiteness, number, and gender (Foulet 1928/1974; Moignet 1976; Carlier and Goyens 1998; Buridant 2000; Boucher 2005; Carlier 2007, 2013; Stark 2007, 2008; Mathieu 2009; Dufresne et al. to appear), and they condition D-drop as listed in (1).(1)afor predicativity, n predicates favour D-dropbfor word order, post-verbal position favours D-dropcfor grammatical function, object position favours D-dropdfor semantic class, non-count ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A long-standing tradition of research in Old French has sought to unveil the relation between information structure and syntax and the verb-second (V2) hypothesis (Thurneysen 1892, Priestley 1955, Rickard 1962, Skårup 1975, Marchello-Nizia 1995, Labelle & Hirschbühler 2005, among others).1 This article builds on this practice by offering a corpus-based investigation of the nature of left-peripheral elements from the 11th to the 16th century. The data, properly referenced further below, were collected from the following corpora: MCVF (Modéliser le Changement: les Voies du Français), the Penn Supplement, and the BFM (Base de Français Médiéval). The use of automatic queries helped to build a bigger database than was ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: L'objectif du présent article est de montrer quelques-uns des apports d'une perspective sociohistorique (Romaine 1982) sur une question pérenne dans l'histoire du français, et plus précisément en ancien français, à savoir l'évolution de la négation phrastique. Les buts d'une telle approche sont multiples : tenter d'entrevoir la situation sociolinguistique que révèlent les données historiques, retrouver, dans la mesure du possible, des traces de l'oral en ancien français, et discerner les sources et les voies de diffusion du changement.L'évolution de la négation phrastique en français ne cesse de susciter l'intérêt des linguistes, dont la plupart y voient un exemple du cycle de Jespersen (par ex. Larrivée 2010 ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A long-standing problem in Old French syntax is to account for the variability in subject pronoun realisation (see, e.g., Foulet 1935/6, Price 1973, Roberts 1993, Vance 1997, Rinke 2003, Ingham 2005, Prévost 2011, Zimmermann 2014).1 As can be seen from the representative set of example data in (1 a–d) below, taken from early 13th century narrative prose, an overt Subject pronoun (henceforth Spro) could appear either before the tensed verb, or after it if a nonsubject constituent stood in first position, whereas a null subject occurred only in the latter eventuality.(1)For Foulet (1935/6), optional expression of Spro was possible only when Spro, if expressed, would have followed the verb, an analysis ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A growing body of work explores the role of information structure on word order variation and change.1 Information structure refers to the way languages structure discourse information like topic and focus. The cartographic approach to syntactic structures (e.g., Rizzi 1997, 2004; Cinque 2002, 2006; Cinque and Rizzi 2008), despite its shortcomings (van Craenenbroeck 2009), has shown that specific positions in the clause appear to be dedicated to topic and focus elements (Benincà 1999, 2006; Belletti 2004; Benincà and Poletto 2004; Benincà and Munaro 2010), and a number of authors argue that changes in word order reflect changes in the way a language expresses these notions (e.g., Benincà 2006; Laenzlinger 2006; ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Old French (OF) is often characterized as a Germanic-style asymmetric V2 language.1 In other words, like Modern German, V2 is held to be obligatory in OF matrix clauses, but impossible in embedded clauses, with the exception of complements of bridge verbs (following Vance 1997, I refer to these as conjunctional clauses). First formalized in generative work by Adams (1987), Roberts (1993), and Vance (1997), this characterization has been more recently developed by Mathieu (2006, 2009, 2013), Sitaridou (2012), Salvesen (2013), Salvesen and Walkden (2013), and Salvesen and Bech (2014). Consider the example in (1), where both the matrix clause and the embedded conjunctional clause display inverted V2 (XVS) ... Read More Keywords: French language; Linguistic change; Romance languages; Sociolinguistics PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00