Abstract
Both Old English and Old French are commonly described as V2 languages. We investigate the position of the postverbal subject based on a corpus of medieval texts with respect to syntax and information structure. Our main findings are that information structure plays a more important role in Old English than in Old French.
Highlights
Both Old English and Old French are commonly described as V2 languages
This paper investigates subjects in postverbal position in Old English (OE, 700 – ca. 1100) and Old French (OF, 842 – ca. 1350) against the backdrop of the verbsecond (V2) phenomenon (for OE see among others Pintzuk (1993, 1999); Haeberli (2000, 2002); Pintzuk & Haeberli (2008); Walkden (2012, To appear)); for OF, see among others Thurneysen (1892); Foulet (1930); Adams (1987, 1989); Roberts (1993); Vance (1997); Labelle (2006)
We show that postverbal pronominal subjects are adjacent to the finite verb in both languages
Summary
In OE, they constitute around 40% of our selection; in OF only around 18% The reason for this difference may be that OF allows null subjects, and these occur when an XP other than the subject precedes the finite verb (as initially observed by Foulet (1930)). The language user had the choice between omitting the subject altogether or expressing it in a postverbal position when something other than the subject preceded the finite verb. In (9) the subject has been omitted, and in (10) it is expressed Both clauses have the adverb mieuz ‘better’ in clause-initial position (the conjunction car ‘for’ is not part of the clause structure). When we consider the clauses with postverbal subject, we get the word order distribution shown in Table 2 on the facing page. ‘X’ stands for ‘any clause element other than the subject and the finite verb’
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