The emergence of the grammatical paradigm of nominal determiners in French and in Romance: Comparative and diachronic perspectives

Abstract

This article is devoted to the emergence of a new paradigm in French and Romance: that of nominal determiners. Latin had no articles, and although possessives, demonstratives and indefinites could determine the noun, they could also be used as pronouns or adjectives, so that the morpho-syntactic category of nominal determiners did not exist as such. We first examine the diachronic evolution of French, where a far-reaching grammaticalization process took place. Syntagmatically, all determiners end up in the NP-initial position as the only available syntactic slot, contributing to the highly configurational NP pattern characteristic of Modern French. From a paradigmatic viewpoint, determiners no longer correspond to a syntactic function, but to a separate morpho-syntactic category. We also evaluate to what extent this evolution took place in two other Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. Through the analysis of this particular evolution, based on parallel corpora consisting of a Latin text and its translations in Old, Middle, and Modern French on the one hand, and in Spanish and Italian on the other, our study also provides evidence for more general mechanisms, analogy in particular, at work in the creation of new paradigms.Keywords: Analogy, French, Romance, Grammaticalization, Nominal Determiner Part of this research has been carried out in the framework of the ANR-DFG project PaLaFra (ANR-14-FRAL-0006). We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and useful comments on the submitted version. All remaining errors are of course ours. RésuméCet article est consacré à l'émergence d'un nouveau paradigme grammatical en français et dans les langues romanes, celui de la détermination nominale. Le latin n'avait pas d'articles, alors que les possessifs, les démonstratifs et les indéfinis, tout en pouvant servir de déterminant nominal, étaient par ailleurs utilisés comme pronom ou adjectif. La détermination nominale en tant que catégorie morpho-syntaxique autonome était donc inexistante. Nous examinons d'abord comment a eu lieu, au cours de l'évolution diachronique du français, un processus important de grammaticalisation. Syntagmatiquement, tous les déterminants se retrouvent dans la position initiale du NP comme seule position syntaxique disponible, ce qui contribue au caractère hautement configurationnel du constituant nominal du français moderne. D'un point de vue paradigmatique, les déterminants ne correspondent plus à une fonction syntaxique, mais à une catégorie morphosyntaxique distincte. Nous évaluons ensuite dans quelle mesure cette évolution a eu lieu dans deux autres langues romanes, l'italien et l'espagnol. Notre analyse est basée sur des corpus parallèles comprenant un texte latin et ses traductions en français médiéval et moderne, d'une part, et ses traductions en espagnol et en italien, d'autre part. Elle met en évidence des mécanismes et des motivations plus généraux, notamment l'analogie, qui sont à l'oeuvre dans la création de nouveaux paradigmes.

The evolution of bare nouns in the history of French. The view from calibrated corpora

“…There are no argumental 2 contexts of use (as is the case with English bare plurals, or Italian bare mass nouns) in which a French NP can commonly be found without a determiner (Lauwers 2012). This contrasts with other Romance languages: Carlier and Lamiroy (2018a), who study the emergence of the determiner category (see also Combettes 2001), cite figures of 20 % of bare nouns in Spanish and 15% in Italian, as compared to 6% in contemporary French, where bare nouns are restricted to specific cases such as proper nouns (1) and nouns with metalinguistic reference (2).…”

“…Rates of bare nouns over the history of French are provided by various studies (see Sakari 1988, Haussalo 2014. Carlier and Lamiroy (2018a) propose 32% in Old French and, as mentioned, 6% in Modern French. Reporting on two translations of Cicero's De Inventione in 1282 by Jean d'Antioche and in 1932 by de Bornecque, and where the Latin original contains 86,66 % of bare nouns, Goyens (1994) identifies figures of 40,76 % in Old French and 15,98 % in contemporary French.…”

The evolution of possessive phrases and the rise of DP in French, Spanish, and Portuguese

“…ninth c.) show that at that point the language did not make use of determiners in the same way Modern French does. This situation is entirely expected since Latin did not have any consistent (in)definiteness marking, the absence of nominal determination being largely dominant (see Carlier & Lamiroy (2018) for quantitative data, based on a small corpus). In older stages of Romance languages we find bare nouns in contexts which strictly require a determiner in today's varieties.…”

“…The rise-and-fall evolution hypothesis is all the more plausible in view of the fact that the possessive only rarely co-occurs with a (demonstrative) determiner in Latin (including in Late Latin). In general, the rate of bare nouns in Classical Latin has been estimated to be 77% (Carlier & Lamiroy 2018), while at the beginning of the Old French period it is down to approximately 40% (Simonenko & Carlier 2020a). The empirical question at stake here is whether the rise-and-fall pattern can be detected in the observable time period, that is, after 800, or whether the rise of determiners with short possessives precedes the earliest preserved records in the vernacular.…”

A Protocol for Indefinite Determiners in Italian and Italo-Romance

“…The subject/object asymmetry found in Spanish is widespread across Romance (Stark 2008a(Stark , 2008b(Stark , 2016Carlier and Lamiroy 2018).…”