Syntaxe de l’ancien occitan

Jensen, Frede

doi:10.1515/9783110936148

Cited by 59 publications

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“…a. comi b. não eat.2sg the sandwich that you brought.1sg "yes" "no" "Did you eat the sandwich I brought you?" European Portuguese obviously shows a conservative feature which is part of Latin, and which is also attested in Old and Modern Provençal (Jensen 1994). I assume that in the medieval period this feature was shared by more Romance languages.…”

Section: The Phonological Sidementioning

confidence: 88%

Rethinking the Tobler-Mussafia Law

Fischer

2003

DIA

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It has been argued repeatedly that the Old Romance clitics are phrasal in character and obey a Romance version of the Wackernagel law, i.e. the Tobler-Mussafia law (cf. Tobler 1875; Mussafia 1888). This law has been interpreted as a constraint that forbids clitics to appear in initial position, due to their status as phonologically enclitic elements, and it was often taken as the explanation of why Old Romance clitics could follow the verb in matrix sentences but never in embedded sentences. Under this view the change in clitic placement from Old to Modern Romance was explained with a change in the categorial status of the clitic itself, i.e. as long as clitics were moving as phrases the ban on clitic-first orders was active and thus clitics were sometimes forced to follow the verb in matrix sentences. Old Catalan clitics contradict this view. They precede and follow the verb in matrix as well as in embedded sentences even though they need to be analyzed as heads from the beginning onwards. In this paper I argue that the change in clitic placement is neither connected to the clitics’ phrasal character nor to their obedience to the Tobler-Mussafia law, but that it is the parameter determining the relative order between verb and clitic that has changed its value in the development from Old to Modern Catalan. The data I present is taken from a corpus of more than 7000 sentences covering the last eight centuries.

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Section: The Phonological Sidementioning

confidence: 88%

Rethinking the Tobler-Mussafia Law

Fischer

2003

DIA

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“…Sentences (4)-(5) from Old Spanish, (6)-(7) from Old French, (8)-(9) from Old Catalan, and (10)-(11) from Old Occitan are relevant examples. Further illustration of VP-ellipsis in Old Romance can be found in Keniston (1937), Foulet (1928), Moignet (1937), Blasco Ferrer (1984), and Jensen (1994). Spanish: Jensen 1994: 282) While in Old Spanish different verbs can be found in sentences displaying VP-ellipsis, in Old French, Old Catalan and Old Occitan the attested manifestations of VP-ellipsis include mostly the verbs être/ésser 'to be', avoir/haver 'to have' and faire/fer 'to do'.…”

Section: The Strong Nature Of Sigma In Old Romancementioning

confidence: 98%

Clitic Placement, VP-Ellipsis, and Scrambling in Romance

Martins¹

2005

Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation

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This chapter accounts for variation and change with respect to clitic placement, VP-ellipsis, and scrambling in non-V1 finite clauses in Romance. The chapter is organized in five sections. Section 11.2 shows that in Romance there is a correlation which holds both synchronically and diachronically between the availability of VP-ellipsis and enclisis in finite clauses. Section 11.3 elucidates the connection between clitic placement and Old Romance IP-scrambling. Section 11.4 presents a concise description of the different patterns of clitic placement in Old and Modern Romance and proposes a unified account of synchronic and diachronic variation. Section 11.5 summarizes and concludes the chapter.

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“…A salient property of a V2 grammar is that, in main declaratives, the subject occurs postverbally when another XP precedes the verb. For Vance (1997: 43), this is ‘the distinctive mark of all V2 languages’, and this exact feature is a ‘fundamental trait of OOc syntax’ according to Jensen (Jensen 1994: 362; also Jensen 1986: 388–390; Romieu & Bianchi 2002a: 164; Kunert 2003: 199). Example (2) is typical:…”

Section: Main Declarative Word-order Phenomena In Old Occitan and Medmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preverbal subjects, information structure, and object clitic position in Old Occitan

Donaldson

2015

J. Ling.

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The position of object and adverbial clitics remains problematic in Old Occitan syntax (Wanner 2010). This paper analyzes clitic position specifically in affirmative main declaratives with overt preverbal subjects, in which clitics are either preverbal or postverbal with no apparent semantic distinction. Thus, the phrasesEn Constantiss’enanetandEn Constantis anet s’enare semantically equivalent, each meaning ‘Sir Constantine left’, whether the cliticss’en‘himself.from-there’ appear before or after the verbanet‘went’. Previous analyses have concluded that this variation is random (Mériz 1978) or due to regional or dialectal variation (Hinzelin 2007). Neither approach satisfactorily addresses the underlying grammar or the principles underlying the distribution of the variants. The present analysis draws on claims about the left periphery in medieval Romance (Benincà 2006) and reports empirical data from the troubadour biographies (vidasandrazos) and thevidaof Saint Douceline. Results from 470 subject–verb declaratives establish that the subject in subject–verb–clitic sequences is left-dislocated, albeit covertly so. This sequence is one of several instantiations of subject left dislocation in Old Occitan and usually signals topic shift.

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Syntaxe de l’ancien occitan

Cited by 59 publications

References 0 publications

Rethinking the Tobler-Mussafia Law

Rethinking the Tobler-Mussafia Law

Clitic Placement, VP-Ellipsis, and Scrambling in Romance

Preverbal subjects, information structure, and object clitic position in Old Occitan

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