The Syntax of the Old French Subjunctive

Jensen, Frede

doi:10.1515/9783110874655

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Historically, the French subjunctive morphology derives from the Latin subjunctive system whereby certain functions in Latin carried over into French. Some researchers (Hahn, 1953;Jensen, 1974) consider the dual-origin hypothesis for the Latin subjunctive. According to this hypothesis, two Indo-European forms, the optative and the subjunctive, gave rise to the Latin subjunctive based on two separate functions: to express volition (the optative) and to express doubt (the subjunctive).…”

Section: The Subjunctive Mood In Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

When a linguistic variable doesn’t vary (much): The subjunctive mood in a conservative variety of Acadian French and its relevance to the actuation problem

Comeau

2019

French Language Studies

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This study considers the subjunctive mood in one of the most conservative varieties of Acadian French, that spoken in the Baie Sainte-Marie region in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. A number of claims made in the literature are considered: whether the subjunctive mood is undergoing loss, whether it expresses semantic meaning, and whether it is lexically-conditioned. Unlike most spoken varieties of French where the subjunctive is argued to be a linguistic variable (i.e., it varies with other moods), the results for Baie Sainte-Marie show that it varies very little. The analysis reveals that the few cases of variation can be accounted for by formal theoretical approaches to the subjunctive where this mood is argued to express modality. With limited variation, the subjunctive is not showing signs of loss. These findings suggest that the subjunctive is not part of a linguistic variable and so is not subject to inherent variability. I further argue that the retention of the imperfect subjunctive in this variety, along with a tense concordance effect, can help us understand why the subjunctive became a linguistic variable in other varieties of French, which ultimately contributes to our understanding of the actuation problem.

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Section: The Subjunctive Mood In Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

When a linguistic variable doesn’t vary (much): The subjunctive mood in a conservative variety of Acadian French and its relevance to the actuation problem

Comeau

2019

French Language Studies

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“…Comeau explains this result by the fact that, in this negative context, the subjunctive expresses the semantic meaning of doubt (which is its main semantic function since its apparition in Latin, also confirmed for Old French, cf. Jensen 1974). This result is interpreted to show that the subjunctive isn't always subject to inherent variability.…”

Section: The Role Of the Distributive Patterns Of The Matrix Verbmentioning

confidence: 85%

Predicting verbal mood in complement clauses: the role of the semantic category, the tense and the grammatical aspect of the matrix verb

Grisot

Blochowiak

Puskás

2022

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This study deals with the issue of mood choice in complement clauses in French, in which speakers may choose between the indicative or the subjunctive. We report on the results of two experiments using an elicitation task, in which we investigated how the matrix verb, via its distributive patterns (i.e. verbs selecting only the subjunctive vs. only the indicative vs. verbs accepting either mood), tense and grammatical aspect influences mood choice in the complement clause. While the role of the semantics of the matrix verb has been extensively studied in semantic studies, considering its tense and its grammatical aspect is a novel approach to explaining mood choice. Our experiments confirm that mood choice depends on the distributive patterns of the matrix verb: there are verbs selecting only the indicative (e.g. constater ‘notice’), verbs selecting only the subjunctive (e.g. apprécier ‘appreciate’) and verbs which allow both the indicative and the subjunctive, called alternance verbs (e.g. rêver ‘dream’). Crucially, our results reveal important interactions between the matrix verbs’ distributive patterns and their tense, as well as with their grammatical aspect. Specifically, both alternance verbs and subjunctive verbs undergo the influence of tense but the direction of the effect is different for each of these categories. In contrast to alternance and subjunctive verbs, verbs selecting the indicative are not influenced by tense and aspect. At a general level, our experimental study opens a new path towards enriching our knowledge about what factors play a significant role for mood choice in complement clauses and reveals that the polysemy of certain verbs strongly affects their selection of the subjunctive or of the indicative.

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“…(5) Frangais ancien : a. e li FranceiSj n'ont talent que pro; s'en algent et les FrancaiSj n'ont talent qu'ils; s'en aillent 'et les Francais veulent partir' (Roland 3476;Jensen 1974:34) 2 'Pour des raisons de simplicity, j'utiliserai le terme frangais ancien pour designer la periode du francais couvrant l'ancien francais (842 (Serments de Strasbourg) jusqu'a la fin du Xin e siecle), le moyen francais (XIV 6 ;Jensen 1974:34) c. car ye vouldroie que je ne alasse james hors de nostre meson car je voudrais que je ne alasse jamais hors de notre maison 'car je voudrais ne jamais aller hors de notre maison' (QJM,11) d. qu'ilj eust bien voulus que jamais proj n'eust encommencez une telle chasse qu'ilj eut bien voulu que jamais ilj n'eut commence une telle chasse 'qu'il aurait bien voulu n'avoir jamais commence une telle chasse' (CNNV,229,64) De plus, le francais ancien permet aussi la coreference entre l'objet de la principale et le sujet de la subordonnee pour des verbes de volonte comme commander et ordonnet 2 :…”

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“…Raposo etablit done un lien entre dependance temporelle et obviation. On pourrait, en etendant cette analyse, supposer que si des langues qui presentent l'obviation ont des contraintes temporelles, les langues qui ne presentent pas d'obviation n' auront pas ce type de contraintes.A premiere vue, ce parallele semble fonctionner pour le francais ancien puisqu'on trouve a la fois l'absence d'obviation et des sequences passe dans la principale-present dans la subordonnee dans cet etat de langue (voir entre autres,Foulet 1982, Jensen 1974, Raynaud de Lage 1975. Ainsi, en (12a), le verbe de la principale manda est au passe et le verbe subordonne soient au present du subjonctif.…”

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Verbes de volonté et absence d’obviation en français ancien

Martineau¹

1995

Can. J. Linguist.

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This article examines the absence of obviation with volition verbs in Older French (e.g., je veux que je soye batu). It is shown that the analyses which propose that obviation depends on the anaphoric character of Tense or on the presence of a lexical complementizer cannot explain the absence of obviation in Older French. The analysis proposed in this article relies on the semantic selection of verbs. It is argued that in Older French, volition verbs (i.e., non-factive emotive verbs) select a [definite event], realized on the head of MP, which licenses an operator in Comp; as a result, the binding domain of the embedded subject is closed and the subjects can be coreferent. The presence of this operator, which can be reanalyzed as the head of CP, also accounts for the fact that both moods, indicative and subjunctive, can be found in the complements of volition verbs. It is also proposed that the changes which affect the complements of volition verbs in Classical French (presence of obviation and absence of indicative mood) are triggered by the fact that volition verbs ceased to select the category [definite event].

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The Syntax of the Old French Subjunctive

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

When a linguistic variable doesn’t vary (much): The subjunctive mood in a conservative variety of Acadian French and its relevance to the actuation problem

When a linguistic variable doesn’t vary (much): The subjunctive mood in a conservative variety of Acadian French and its relevance to the actuation problem

Predicting verbal mood in complement clauses: the role of the <em>semantic category</em>, the <em>tense</em> and the <em>grammatical aspect</em> of the matrix verb

Verbes de volonté et absence d’obviation en français ancien

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