Stylistic Fronting in Old French

Abstract

The aim of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, its purpose is to show that Stylistic Fronting was very productive in Old French; on the other, its rationale is the introduction of a novel hypothesis according to which Stylistically Fronted elements in Old French target a special Topic phrase. This phrase is labelled TopicP+ to distinguish it from TopicP, the position where topicalized elements in V2 structures raise to in Old French. The special topic position accessed by Stylistic Fronting is motivated by the main pattern emerging from a series of carefully studied Old French texts: two elements can undergo SF at the same time, but the two elements cannot both be XPs or both be heads. It is further demonstrated that the subject gap constraint that accompanies Stylistic Fronting in Modern Insular Scandinavian languages is also relevant for Old French and that the most natural way to account for it is to suppose that Stylistically Fronted XPs move through (rather than into, cf. Holmberg 2000) the specifier of Spec-TP. This is made to follow from the fact that TP in Old French is a (strong) phase. The account relies on the splitting of the EPP between two features, [P] and [D], and on the idea that these features may not necessarily come packaged as a bundle. [P] can appear on one head while [D] surfaces on another, with [P] depending on [D]. In the second part of the paper, an explanation is given as to why Stylistic Fronting disappeared from French grammar: the hypothesis put forward is that once verbal agreement lost its pronominal properties, the EPP could no longer undergo feature fission and spread its features on distinct heads, since the mechanism by which the [D] feature on T0 is checked by the verb's agreement is a necessary condition for the occurrence of Stylistic Fronting.