Providing the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax, this title covers syntactic variation and change across all periods of French, and in standard and non-standard varieties, and explores phenomena such as subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, and negation.
This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It makes use of the latest formal syntactic tools and combines careful textual analysis with a detailed synthesis of the research literature to provide a novel analysis of the major syntactic developments in the history of French. The empirical scope of the volume is exceptionally broad, and includes discussion of syntactic variation and change in Latin, Old, Middle, Renaissance, and Classical French, and standard and non-standard varieties of Modern French. Following an introduction to the general trends in grammatical change from Latin to French, Sam Wolfe explores a wide range of phenomena including the left periphery, subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, negation, and the makeup of the nominal expression. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of how French has come to develop the unique typological profile it has within Romance today. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and comparative Romance linguistics, as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory and historical linguistics more broadly.
1. 0. V2 AND NULL SUBJECTS IN THE HIS TORY OF FRENCH The prototypical Romance null subject language has certain well known characteristics: verbal inflection is rich, distinguishing six per sonlnumber forms; subject pronouns are generally emphatic; and, when there is no need to emphasize the subject, the pronoun is not expressed at all. Spanish and Italian, for example, fit this description rather weIl. Modem French, however, provides a striking contrast to these lan guages; it does not allow subjects to be missing and, not unexpectedly, it has a verbal agreement system with few overt endings and subject pronouns which are not emphatic. One of the goals of the present work is to examine null subjects in two dialects of Romance that fit neither the Italian nor the French model: later Old French (12th-13th centriries) and MiddIe French (14th- 15th centuries). Old French has null subjects only in contexts where the subject would be postverbal if expressed (cf. Foulet (1928)), and Mid dIe French has null subjects in a wider range of syntactic contexts but does not freely allow a11 persons of the verb to be null. The work of Vanelli, Renzi and Beninca (1985) (along with many other works by these authors individually) shows that a number of other geographically proximate medieval dialects had similar systems, though it appears that there are significant differences in detail among them.
This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It makes use of the latest formal syntactic tools and combines careful textual analysis with a detailed synthesis of the research literature to provide a novel analysis of the major syntactic developments in the history of French. The empirical scope of the volume is exceptionally broad, and includes discussion of syntactic variation and change in Latin, Old, Middle, Renaissance, and Classical French, and standard and non-standard varieties of Modern French. Following an introduction to the general trends in grammatical change from Latin to French, Sam Wolfe explores a wide range of phenomena including the left periphery, subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, negation, and the makeup of the nominal expression. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of how French has come to develop the unique typological profile it has within Romance today. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and comparative Romance linguistics, as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory and historical linguistics more broadly.
French is a syntactically interesting language, with aspects of its word order and clause structure triggering a variety of important developments in syntactic theory. This is a concise and accessible guide to the syntax of Modern French, providing a clear overview of those aspects of the language that are of particular interest to linguists. A broad variety of topics are covered, including the development and spread of French; the evolution of its syntax; syntactic variation; lexical categories; noun, verb and adjective phrases; clause structure; movement; and agreement. Drawing on the work of a wide range of scholars, it highlights the important role of French in the development of syntactic theory and shows how French challenges some fundamental assumptions about syntactic structure. An engaging and in-depth guide to all that is interesting about French, The Syntax of French will be invaluable to students and scholars of syntactic theory and comparative linguistics.
It is widely held that the large-scale translation of international news from English will lead to changes in French syntax. For the first time this assumption is put to the test using extensive fieldwork carried out in an international news agency and a corpus of translated news agency dispatches. The linguistic analysis of three syntactic structures in the translations is complemented by an investigation of the effects of a range of factors including, most notably, the speed at which the translation is carried out. The analysis sheds new light on the ways in which news translation could lead to syntactic borrowing in French, and by extension, in other languages.
Divided into three main sections on Phonology, Syntax and Semantics, this new volume on variation in French aims to provide a snapshot of the state of sociolinguistic research inside and outside metropolitan France. From a diatopic perspective, varieties in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Africa and Canada are considered, mainly with respect to phonological features but also focusing on syntactic and lexical evolutions (the relative clause in Ivorian French and discourse markers in Canadian French). The acquisition of stylistic features of French figures in chapters on both first and second language learners and variation across different genres is addressed with respect to non-standard non-finite forms. Finally, a section on semantic change traces the way that interactional and other socio-historical factors affect word meaning. The volume will appeal to (socio-)linguists with an interest in contemporary French as well as to advanced undergraduates and post-graduate students of French and specialists in the field.
