Preverbal Subjects with a Partitive Article: A Comparison Between Aosta Valley Francoprovençal and French*

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on two constructions that allow preverbal subjects headed by a so‐called partitive article in French, that is, sentences with a stage‐level predicate and generic emphatic constructions. The aim is to explain why their counterparts were generally not accepted by speakers of Francoprovençal, an endangered and understudied Gallo‐Romance language, in a translation task carried out in fieldwork in the Aosta Valley in Italy (Ihsane 2018, Stark & Gerards 2020). To account for our results, we propose that preverbal subjects in the two languages have different statuses and develop the typology of languages postulated by Dobrovie‐Sorin & Laca (2003): we argue that there are more than two types of languages when it comes to the status of preverbal subjects and that Francoprovençal differs not only from French (Ihsane 2018), but also from languages like Spanish: it generally has topical subjects like Spanish but also allows some subjects that represent new information to occur preverbally. In contrast to French, however, this option is restricted to nominals that reach a certain degree of referential givenness (Gundel 2003).

Indefinite DPs in the Gallo-Romance of Piedmont, in some Marginal Northern Italian Varieties and in Romansh

“…Moreover, in all these varieties, in the contexts with postverbal subjects, an SCl of 3 rd singular person is inserted. This picture matches that of Franco-Provençal provided in Ihsane (2022), where the preverbal indefinite subject introduced by DE is generally excluded, except for particular contexts associated with a certain degree of givenness, where bare partitives are specific. Substantially the same distribution is shown by all of our varieties.…”

Francoprovençal: a spatial analysis of ‘partitive articles’ and potential correlates in Swiss and Italian varieties

“…We will show the fine-grained spatial distribution of this property in Swiss Francoprovençal varieties and the Aosta Valley, based on fieldwork data assembled in the ALAVAL, an audiovisual atlas of Swiss varieties, plus additional data from fieldwork in the Aosta Valley in 2017 (cf. Ihsane 2018) and in Evolène, in Valais, in 2019; see section 2.1. We will present several maps in order to complement Kristol's basic subdivision with a more nuanced geographical picture and also to determine the spatial distribution of some morphosyntactic features of PAs like their number (singular vs. plural; also explicit number marking on nouns) and their appearance in certain syntactic contexts, in comparison also with invariable DE.…”

“…However, important differences between singular and plural PAs in their semantics (mass vs. count; impossibility vs. possibility to have a specific interpretation, respectively: cf. Ihsane 2008), but also in their syntactic distribution (as subjects, for instance, see e.g., Anscombre 1996, Ihsane 2018 suggest that duSG -desPL do not form a paradigm. If this is the case, it predicts that some varieties/languages may have only the singular or only the plural form of the PA (even though the morphosyntactic regularities of such varieties would not be directly transferable to varieties with both singular and plural PAs): the existence of such systems would show the possibility in Romance to grammaticalize only one function (singular PAs as markers of the mass reading vs. plural PAs as markers of the plural indefinite count interpretation), which weakens the conception of the partitive article as one functional element with two different inflected forms.…”