Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-8zxtt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T21:38:56.378Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Socio-stylistic reflexes of syntactic change in Old French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2013

BRYAN DONALDSON
BRYAN DONALDSON*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
*
Address for correspondence: Department of French and Italian, University of Texas at Austin, 201 W 21st Street, B7600, HRH 2.114A, Austin, TX 78712, USA e-mail: bdonaldson@austin.utexas.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper analyses aspects of the loss of verb-second (V2) in Old French in a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Data come from sequences in which a main declarative is preceded immediately by a tensed subordinate clause (Vance, Donaldson, and Steiner, 2010). Following Romaine (1982), represented speech and narrative are considered to represent distinct registers within a single text. An analysis of intra-textual variation between narrative and represented speech reveals stylistic variation, in that represented speech evinces higher rates of surface subject-verb-(object) orders in main clauses than narrative passages within the same text. The data also reveal gender variation, as the represented speech of women tends to be more linguistically conservative than that of men.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 319 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Adams, J. N. (2007). The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC–AD 600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adams, M. (1987). From Old French to the theory of pro-drop. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 5: 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amt, E., (Ed.). (2010). Women's Lives in Medieval Europe: A sourcebook (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ayres-Bennett, W. (2001). Socio-historical linguistics and the history of French. Journal of French Language Studies, 11: 159–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ayres-Bennett, W. (2004). Sociolinguistic Variation in Seventeenth-century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13: 145–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, A. (2002). Back in style: Reworking audience design. In: Eckert, P. and Rickford, J. R. (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benincà, P. (2006). A detailed map of the left periphery of Medieval Romance. In Zanuttini, R., Campos, H., Herburger, E., and Portner, P. H. (eds.), Cross-linguistic research in syntax and semantics (pp. 53–86). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Bertini, F. (1991). Introduction. In Bertini, F., Cardini, F., Leonardi, C. and Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri, M. T. (eds.), La vie quotidienne des femmes au moyen âge. Paris: Hachette.Google Scholar
Besten, H. den. (1983). On the interaction of root transformations and lexical deletive rules. In Abraham, W. (ed), On the Formal Syntax of the Westgermania (pp. 47–131). Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, M. (2002). From ‘sex differences’ to gender variation in sociolinguistics. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 8, 33–45.Google Scholar
Buridant, C. (2000). Grammaire nouvelle de l'ancien français. Paris: Sedes.Google Scholar
Clark, R. and Roberts, I. (1993). A computational model of language learnability and language change. Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 299–345.Google Scholar
Combettes, B. (2010). Aspects diachroniques de la parataxe: Les propositions temporelles en position initiale en ancien français. In Béguelin, M.-J., Avanzi, M. and Corminbœuf, G. (eds.), La parataxe: Entre dépendance et intégration (volume I, pp. 115–137). Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Dees, A. (1980). Atlas des formes et des constructions des chartes françaises du 13e siècle. Tübingen: Niemeyer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dees, A. (1987). Atlas des formes linguistiques des textes littéraires de l'ancien français. Berlin: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, B. (2012). Initial subordinate clauses in Old French: Syntactic variation and the clausal left periphery. Lingua, 122: 1021–1046.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ennen, E. (1989). The Medieval Woman. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Finegan, E. and Biber, D. (1994). Register and social dialect variation: An integrated approach. In: Biber, D. and Finegan, E. (eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 315–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finegan, E. and Biber, D. (2002). Register variation and social dialect variation: The Register Axiom. In: Eckert, P. and Rickford, J. R. (eds.), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 235–267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleischman, S. (1990). Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Fleischman, S. (1991). Discourse pragmatics and the grammar of Old French: A functional reinterpretation of si and the personal pronouns. Romance Philology, 44: 251–283.Google Scholar
Fleischman, S. (1996). Methodologies and ideologies in historical grammar: A case study from Old French. In: Bloch, R. H. and Nichols, S. G. (eds.), Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 402–438.Google Scholar
Foulet, L. (1928). Petite syntaxe de l'ancien français. Paris: Honoré Champion.Google Scholar
Grad, A. (1956). L'inversion du sujet dans la principale précédée d'une subordonnée en ancien français. Razprave SAZU, 2: 65–90.Google Scholar
Grad, A. (1961). Remarques sur l'emploi de l'adverbe de reprise si en ancien français. Linguistica, 4: 5–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grevisse, M., [and Goosse, A.]. (2008). Le bon usage (14th edn.). Paris: De Boeck.Google Scholar
Hall, R. A., Jr. (1972). Is ‘Middle French’ necessary? In: Valdman, A. (ed.), Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics to the memory of Pierre Delattre. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 215–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Harris, M. and Vincent, N. (eds.). (1988). The Romance Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Herman, J. (1954). Recherches sur l'ordre des mots dans les plus anciens textes français en prose. Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 4: 69–93, 351–379.Google Scholar
Herman, J. (2000). Vulgar Latin. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Holmberg, A. (in press). Verb second. In: Kiss, T. and Alexiadou, A. (eds.), Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Research. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Kaiser, G. (2002). Verbstellung und Verbstellungswandel in den romansichen Sprachen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Key, M. R. (1996). Male/female Language. London: Scarecrow Press.Google Scholar
Koch, P. and Oesterreicher, W. (1985). Sprache der Nähe – Sprache der Distanz: Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit im Spannungsfeld von Sprachtheorie und Sprachgeschichte. Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 36: 15–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koch, P. (1993). Pour une typologie conceptionnelle et médiale des plus anciens documents/monuments des langues romanes. In: Selig, M., Frank, B. and Hartmann, J. (eds.), Le Passage à l'écrit des langues romanes. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, pp. 39–81.Google Scholar
Kroch, A. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change, 1: 199–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, A. (2001). Syntactic change. In: Baltin, M. and Collins, C. (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 629–739.Google Scholar
Kytö, M. (1993). Third-person present singular verb inflection in early British and American English. Language Variation and Change, 5: 113–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labelle, M. (2007). Clausal architecture in Early Old French. Lingua, 117: 289–316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (2010). Principles of Linguistic Change: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, K. (1987). On the status of SVO sentences in French discourse. In: Tomlin, R. (ed.), Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 217–261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lemieux, M. and Dupuis, F. (1995). The locus of verb movement in non-asymmetric verb-second languages: The case of middle French. In: Battye, A. and Roberts, I. (eds.), Clause Structure and Language Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 80–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lightfoot, D. (2003). Grammatical approaches to syntactic change. In: Joseph, B. D. and Janda, R. D. (eds.), Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 495–508.Google Scholar
Lodge, R. A. (1993). French: From Dialect to Standard. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lodge, R. A. (2004). A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, C. (1985). Dire le vrai: L'adverbe si en français médiéval. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, C. (1995). L'évolution du français: Ordre des mots, démonstratifs, accent tonique. Paris: Armand Colin.Google Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, C. (2012). L'oral représenté en français médiéval: un accès construit à une face cachée des langues mortes. In: Guillot, C., Combettes, B., Lavrentiev, A., Oppermann-Marsaux, E. and Prévost, S. (eds.), Le changement en français: Etudes de linguistique diachronique. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 247–264.Google Scholar
Martineau, F., and Mougeon, R. (2003). A sociolinguistic study of the origins of ne deletion in European and Quebec French. Language, 79: 118–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathieu, E. (2013). The left-periphery in Old French. In: Arteaga, D. (ed.), Research on Old French: The State of the Art. Berlin: Springer, pp. 327–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matarasso, P. J. (1969). The Quest of the Holy Grail. Baltimore, MD: Penguin.Google Scholar
Meklenborg Salvesen, C. (2013). Topics and the left periphery: A comparison of Old French and modern Germanic. In: Lohndal, T. (ed.), In Search of Universal Grammar: From Old Norse to Zoque. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 131–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milroy, J., and Milroy, L. (1985). Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation. Journal of Linguistics, 21: 339–384.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milroy, J. (1992). Linguistic Variation and Change: On the historical sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Milroy, L. (1992). New perspectives in the analysis of sex differentiation in language. In Bolton, K. and Kwok, H. (eds.), Sociolinguistics Today: International Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 163–179.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, T., and Raumolin-Brunberg, H. (2003). Historical Sociolinguistics. London: Pearson.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, T., Raumolin-Brunberg, H. and Mannila, H. (2011). The diffusion of language change in real time: Progressive and conservative individuals and the time depth of change. Language Variation and Change, 23: 1–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nissen, H. (1943). L'ordre des mots dans la Chronique de Jean d'Outremeuse. Upssala: Almqvist & Wiksells.Google Scholar
Niyogi, P., and Berwick, R. C. (1997). A Dynamical Systems model for language change. Complex Systems, 11: 161–204.Google Scholar
Palermo, M. (1998). Esprimere il soggetto, dalle origini a oggi. Italiano e oltre, 13: 174–187.Google Scholar
Posner, R. (1994). Historical linguistics, language change, and the history of French. Journal of French Language Studies, 4: 75–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posner, R. (1997). Linguistic Change in French. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Power, E. (1975). Medieval Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Price, G. (1971). The French Language: Past and Present. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Priestley, L. (1955). Reprise constructions in French. Archivum Linguisticum, 7: 1–28.Google Scholar
Rees Jones, S. (2003). Women's influence on the design of urban homes. In: Erler, M. C. and Kowaleski, M. (eds.), Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 190–211.Google Scholar
Riddy, F. (2003). Looking closely: Authority and intimacy in the late medieval urban home. In: Erler, M. C. and Kowaleski, M. (eds.), Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 212–228.Google Scholar
Rinke, E., and Meisel, J. (2009). Subject inversion in Old French: Syntax and information structure. In: Kaiser, G. A. and Remberger, E.-M. (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop ‘Null-subjects, Expletives, and Locatives in Romance’. Konstanz: Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz, pp. 93–130.Google Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1996). Residual verb second and the wh-criterion. In: Belletti, A. and Rizzi, L. (eds.), Parameters and Functional Heads: Essays in Comparative Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 63–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, L. (1997). The fine structure of the left periphery. In: Haegeman, L. (ed.), Elements of Grammar. Kluwer: Dordrecht, pp. 281–337.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, I. (1993). Verbs and Diachronic Syntax: A Comparative History of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Roberts, I. (2007). Diachronic Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, I. (2010). Agreement and Head Movement: Clitics, Incorporation, and Defective Goals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, I. (2012). Phases, head movement, and second-position effects. In: Gallego, Á. J. (ed.), Phases: Developing the Framework. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 385–440.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romaine, S. (1980). Stylistic variation and evaluative reactions to speech: Problems in the investigation of linguistic attitudes in Scotland. Language and Speech, 23: 213–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romaine, S. (1982). Socio-historical linguistics: Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romaine, S. (1988). Historical sociolinguistics: Problems and methodology. In: Ammon, U., Dittmar, N. and Mattheier, K. J. (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Sciences of Language and Society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, vol. 2, pp. 1452–1469.Google Scholar
Schilling-Estes, N. (2002). Investigating stylistic variation. In: Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, P. and Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 375–401.Google Scholar
Skårup, P. (1975). Les premières zones de la proposition en ancien français. Revue Romane, numéro spécial 6.Google Scholar
Thurneysen, R. (1892). Die Stellung des Verbums in Altfranzösischen. Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 16: 289–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, P. (2000). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society (4th edn.). London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Vance, B. (1981). A syntactic and semantic study of subject personal pronoun usage in Old French. M.A. thesis, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.Google Scholar
Vance, B. (1995). On the decline of verb movement to Comp in Old and Middle French. In: Battye, A. and Roberts, I. G. (eds.), Clause Structure and Language Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 173–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vance, B. (1997). Syntactic Change in Medieval French: Verb-second and Null-subjects. Dordrecht: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vance, B., Donaldson, B., and Steiner, B. D. (2010). V2 loss in Old French and Old Occitan: The role of fronted clauses. In: Colina, S., Olarrea, A. and Carvalho, A. M. (eds.), Romance Linguistics 2009: Selected Papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 301–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanelli, L., Renzi, L. and Benincà, P. (1985). Typologie des pronoms sujets dans les langues romanes. Actes du XVIIe Congrès international de linguistique et philologie romanes, 3: 163–176.Google Scholar
Weinreich, U., Labov, W. and Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Lehman, W. and Malkiel, Y. (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 95–188.Google Scholar
Yaguello, M. (1978). Les Mots et les femmes. Paris: Payot.Google Scholar
Zwanenburg, W. (1978). L'ordre des mots en français médiéval. In: Martin, R. (ed.), Etudes de syntaxe du moyen français. Paris: Klincksieck, pp. 153–171.Google Scholar