Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated bye

Abstract

AbstractThis paper offers a variationist analysis of object and adverbial clitic position in coordinated affirmative verb-first main declaratives introduced bye(t)“and” in Old Occitan. In this context, clitics occur in either preverbal (e·l vestit“and clothed him”) or postverbal position (e perdonet li“and pardoned him”). Following recent work on Medieval Romance coordination, I posit that proclitic and enclitic examples reflect different coordination structures at the underlying syntactic level. Data from complete analyses of five major 13th- and 14th-century texts, analyzed in a variationist approach using logistic regression, reveal that the choice between coordination structures – and hence, between proclisis and enclisis – is principled rather than random and depends on the degree of continuity or rupture/discontinuity between the conjuncts.