Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:00:53.875Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Agreement syncretization and the loss of null subjects: quantificational models for Medieval French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2019

Alexandra Simonenko ,
Benoit Crabbé  and
Sophie Prévost
Alexandra Simonenko
Affiliation:
FWO/UGhent
Benoit Crabbé
Affiliation:
LLF, CNRS/Paris Diderot, USPC
Sophie Prévost
Affiliation:
Lattice, CNRS/ENS/Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/Université PSL/USPC*
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen's Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , October 2019 , pp. 275 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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.)

Footnotes

*

Sophie Prévost's affiliation has been corrected and funding sources have been added to the acknowledgments. An addendum detailing this change has also been published (doi:10.1017/S0954394519000267).

This work has been supported by the Labex EFL and Research Foundation Flanders. The authors are very thankful to three anonymous reviewers of Language Variation and Change for extremely helpful comments. We would like to express our deep gratitude to Yves Charles Morin, Henri Kauhanen, George Walkden, Paul Hirschbühler, Philippe Schlenker, and Hedde Zeijlstra for discussions and suggestions. The project has benefited from the feedback from the audiences at WCCFL 34, DiGS 2016, XLanS: Triggers of language change in the Language Sciences, workshop Linguistic Knowledge & Patterns of Variation, Texts, Tools, and workshop Methods in Digital Classics and Medieval Studies, seminars at Institut Jean Nicod, Université Diderot Paris 7, and the University of Manchester. The first author acknowledges the support of the Research Foundation Flanders. The work of the third author has been supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d'Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université de Paris - ANR-18-IDEX-0001.

References

REFERENCES

Adams, Marianne. (1987). From Old French to the theory of pro-drop. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 5:1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Elizabeth. (1976). Language and context: The acquisition of pragmatics, volume 13. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bettens, Olivier. (2015). Chantez-vous français ? Remarques curieuses sur le français chanté du Moyen Âge à la période baroque. URL http://virga.org/cvf/.Google Scholar
Bizzarri, Camilla. (2015). Russian as a partial pro-drop language: Data and analysis from a new study. Annali di Ca' Foscari. Serie occidentale 49.Google Scholar
Buridant, Claude. (2000). Nouvelle grammaire de l'ancien français. Paris: Sedes.Google Scholar
Carvalho, Ana M., & Child, Michael. (2011). Subject pronoun expression in a variety of Spanish in contact with Portuguese. In Selected Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 14–25.Google Scholar
Chocholoušová, Bohumila. (2009). Dummy subjects in English, Norwegian and German. A parallel corpus study. Doctoral Dissertation, Masarykova univerzita.Google Scholar
Cooper, Robin. (1983). Quantification and syntactic theory. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danckaert, Lieven. (2017). The loss of Latin OV: Steps towards an analysis. In Elements of comparative syntax: Theory and description 127:401–44. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.Google Scholar
De Cat, Cécile. (2005). French subject clitics are not agreement markers. Lingua 115:1195–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Jong, Thera. (2006). La prononciation des consonnes dans le français de Paris aux 13 èmeet 14 èmesiècles. Utrecht: LOT/Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.Google Scholar
Dees, Anthonij, Meilink, Steintje, van Reenen-Stein, Karin, & van Reenen, Pieter. (1980). Un cas d'analogie: l'introduction de -e à la première personne du singulier de l'indicatif présent des verbes en -er en ancien français. Rapport/Het Franse Boek 50:105–10.Google Scholar
Ewert, Alfred. (1943). The French Language. London: Faber & Faber.Google Scholar
Fontaine, Carmen. (1985). Application de méthodes quantitatives en diachronie: L'inversion du sujet en français. Master's thesis. Université du Québec à Montréal.Google Scholar
Fouché, Pierre. (1931). Le Verbe français: étude morphologique. Paris: Société d'édition “Les Belles Lettres.”Google Scholar
Foulet, Lucien. (1928). Petite syntaxe de l'ancien français. Paris: Champion, troisième édition revue. Réédition 1982.Google Scholar
Foulet, Lucien. (1935). L'extension de la forme oblique du pronom personnel en ancien français. Romania 61–62, 257–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franzén, Torsten. (1939). Étude sur la syntaxe des pronoms personnels sujets en ancien français. Doctoral Dissertation. Uppsala.Google Scholar
Fruehwald, Josef, Gress-Wright, Jonathan, & Wallenberg, Joel. (2009). Phonological rule change: The constant rate effect. In Kan, S., Moore-Cantwell, C., & Staubs, R. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, volume 1, 219–30. GLSA Publications.Google Scholar
Goyette, Stéphane. (1993). Le système verbal de Jacques Peletier du Mans, XVIe siècle. Master's thesis. Université de Montréal.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi, & Ritter, Elizabeth. (2002). Person and number in pronouns: A feature-geometric analysis. Language 78:482–526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. (1999). Optimality and diachronic adaptation. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 18:180–205.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene. (2008). Features on bound pronouns. In Harbour, D., Adger, D., & Bejar, S. (Eds.), Phi Theory: Phi-features across Modules and Interfaces, 35–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene, & Kratzer, Angelika. (1998). Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Heycock, Caroline, & Wallenberg, Joel. (2013). How variational acquisition drives syntactic change. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 16:127–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschbühler, Paul. (1992). L'omission du sujet dans les subordonnées V1: les CNN de Vigneulles et les CNN anonymes. Travaux de linguistique 24:25–46.Google Scholar
Hirschbühler, Paul, & Junker, Marie-Odile. (1988). Remarques sur les sujets nuls en subordonnées en ancien et en moyen français. Revue québécoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée 7:63–84.Google Scholar
Jaeggli, Osvaldo & Safir, Kenneth J. (1989). The null subject parameter and parametric theory. In Jaeggli, O. and Safir, K. J. (Eds.), The null subject parameter, 1–44. Dodrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaiser, Georg A. (2009). Losing the null subject. A contrastive study of (Brazilian) Portuguese and (Medieval) French. In Proceedings of the Workshop “Null-subjects, expletives, and locatives in Romance,” 131–56.Google Scholar
Kauhanen, Henri, & Walkden, George. (2017). Deriving the Constant Rate Effect. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 1–39.Google Scholar
Koeneman, Olaf. (2006). Deriving the difference between full and partial pro-drop. In Ackema, P., Brandt, P., Schoorlemmer, M., & Weerman, F. (Eds.), Arguments and agreement, 76–100. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. (2009). Making a pronoun: Fake indexicals as windows into the properties of pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 40:187–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kroch, Anthony. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1:199–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manzini, Maria Rita & Savoia, Leonardo Maria. (2005). I dialetti italiani e romanci: morfosintassi generativa, volume 1. Edizioni dell'Orso.Google Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, Christiane (1992). Histoire de la langue française aux XIVe et XVe siècles. Paris: Dunod.Google Scholar
Morin, Yves Charles. (2001). La troncation des radicaux verbaux en français depuis le Moyen Age. Études diachroniques. Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes 30:63–85.Google Scholar
Nagy, Naomi & Heap, David. (1998). Franco-provençal null subjects and constraint interaction. CLS 34:151–66.Google Scholar
Nagy, Naomi G., Aghdasi, Nina, Denis, Derek, & Motut, Alexandra. (2011). Null subjects in heritage languages: Contact effects in a cross-linguistic context. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2):134–44.Google Scholar
Narendra, Kumpati S. & Thathachar, Mandayam A.L. (1989). Learning Automata: An Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Otheguy, Ricardo, Zentella, Ana Celia, & Livert, David. (2007). Language and dialect contact in Spanish in New York: Toward the formation of a speech community. Language 83:770–802.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paolillo, John C. (2011). Independence claims in linguistics. Language Variation and Change 23:257–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penn Supplement to MCVF. (2010). Penn Supplement to the MCVF Corpus by Anthony Kroch & Beatrice Santorini.Google Scholar
Pintzuk, Susan. (1995). Variation and change in Old English clause structure. Language Variation and Change 7:229–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prévost, Sophie. (2018). Increase of Pronominal Subjects in Old French: Evidence for a Starting-point in Late Latin. In Carlier, A. & Guillot, C. (Eds.), Latin tardif-français ancien: continuités et ruptures, 169–98. Coll. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ranson, Diana L. (2009). Variable subject expression in Old and Middle French prose texts: The role of verbal ambiguity. Romance Quarterly 56:33–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. (1986). Null objects in Italian and the Theory of pro. Linguistic Inquiry 17:501–57.Google Scholar
Roberts, Ian. (1993). Verbs and Diachronic Syntax: A Comparative History of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Roberts, Ian. (2014). Taraldsen's Generalization and Language Change: Two Ways to Lose Null Subjects. In Svenonius, P. (Ed.), Functional Structure from Top to Toe: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, 9, 115–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santorini, Beatrice. (1993). The rate of phrase structure change in the history of Yiddish. Language Variation and Change 5:257–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauerland, Uli. (2008). On the semantic markedness of phi-features. In Harbour, D., Adger, D., & Bejar, S. (Eds.), Phi Theory: Phi-features across Modules and Interfaces, 527–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schøsler, Lene. (2002). La variation linguistique: le cas de l'expression du sujet. In Sampson, R. & Ayres-Bennett, W. (Eds.), Interpreting the History of French, A Festschrift for Peter Rickard on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, 187–208. New York: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Shlonsky, Ur. (2009). Hebrew as a partial null-subject language. Studia linguistica 63:133–157.Google Scholar
Simonenko, Alexandra, Crabbé, Benoit, & Prévost, Sophie. (2015). Morphological triggers of syntactic changes: Treebank-based information theoretic approach. In Dickinson, M., Hinrichs, E., Patejuk, A., & Przepiórkowski, A. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT14), 194–205. Warsaw: Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Speas, Margaret. (1995). Economy, agreement and the representation of null arguments. Ms. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Sprouse, Rex, & Vance, Barbara. (1999). An explanation for the decline of null pronouns in certain Germanic and Romance dialects. In deGraff, M. (Ed.), Language creation and language change: creolization, diachrony and development, 257–84. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Taraldsen, Tarald. (1980). On the NIC, vacuous application and the that-trace filter. Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Tvica, Seid. (2017). On minimal person and number features. Unpublished manuscript. https://www.academia.edu/23278325/On_the_universality_of_person_and_number.Google Scholar
van Reenen, Pieter & Schøsler, Lene. (1987). Le problème de la prolifération des explications. Vrije Universiteit working papers in linguistics 27.Google Scholar
Vance, Barbara. (1997). Syntactic change in medieval French. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vennemann, Theo. (1975). An explanation of drift. In Li, Ch. N. (Ed.), Word Order and Word Order Change, 269–305. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Yang, Charles. (2000). Internal and external forces in language change. Language Variation and Change 12:231–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, Charles. (2002). Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yang, Charles. (2010). Three factors in language variation. Lingua 120:1160–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zimmermann, Michael. (2009). On the evolution of expletive subject pronouns in Old French. In Remberger, E.-M. & Kaiser, G.A. (Eds.), Proceedings of the workshop “null-subjects, expletives, and locatives in romance.” Arbeitspapier 123, 63–92. Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz.Google Scholar
Zimmermann, Michael. (2014). Expletive and referential subject pronouns in Medieval French, volume 556. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Simonenko et al. supplementary material

Simonenko et al. supplementary material 1

Download Simonenko et al. supplementary material(File)
File 37.4 KB
Supplementary material: File

Simonenko et al. supplementary material

Simonenko et al. supplementary material 2

Download Simonenko et al. supplementary material(File)
File 76.5 KB
Supplementary material: File

Simonenko et al. supplementary material

Simonenko et al. supplementary material 3

Download Simonenko et al. supplementary material(File)
File 292.2 KB
Supplementary material: File

Simonenko et al. supplementary material

Simonenko et al. supplementary material 4

Download Simonenko et al. supplementary material(File)
File 12.5 KB