The purpose of this submitted thesis is to offer new insights into the composition of the left edge in subordinate clauses in Medieval French, and into the nature of fronting types found in subordinate clauses as illustrated in (1).
(1) pour faire ce que fait n’avoient à l’aultre fois to do what done NEG.had.3PL the other time
‘to do what they haven’t done the last time’ (Le Bel 175)
For Medieval French, the optional fronting of infinitives and participles to the left of the finite verb in embedded clauses is already noted by Foulet (1921). A prominent explanation is to assume interferences with the Latin word order and thus to analyse structures like (1) as a case of residual OV word order (Buridant 2000, Geisler 1982). If this assumption is correct, we should not expect to find constituents after the finite verb. However, as illustrated in (1), there are constituents that do occur to the right of the finite verb.
Within the generative framework, Cardinaletti and Roberts (1990/2002) were the first to analyse word orders as in (1) as instances of Stylistic Fronting. This term was first used by Maling (1980/1990) to describe occurrences of fronting in embedded clauses in Icelandic, where a constituent of the VP – i.e. not only infinitives and participles, but also objects, predicative expressions, adjectives and (negation) adverbs – appears to be moved to unfilled subject positions. Cardinaletti and Roberts (1990/2002) compared the Icelandic data to constructions as (1) in Old Romance varieties and established the application of the notion Stylistic Fronting for Romance as well. Ever since, numerous studies have investigated Stylistic Fronting in Scandinavian and Old Romance languages, regarding the common premises of Stylistic Fronting in these languages, the differences between it and other types of A’-movement (focus A’-movement, topicalization), and the relevance of information-structural properties of Stylistic Fronting with respect to its syntactic analysis.
Meanwhile, several controversies challenge these analyses. First, a central issue concerns the question whether Stylistic Fronting is restricted in both Icelandic and Old Romance to cases like (1) and therefore requires a “subject gap”, i.e. either a non-overt subject or a subject realized by a relative clause item. For Medieval French, Labelle and Hirschbühler (2014a,b) offer a
different analysis and take combinations of fronted elements and subjects as in (2) to be variants of (1).
(2) veant que nosdiz adverseres a grant puissance estoient par tout le pais seeing COMP our adversaries at major power were in the country
‘seeing that our adversaries had major power in the whole country’
(LDR 1431,203)
Hence, Labelle and Hirschbühler (2014a,b) adopt the term Leftward Stylistic Displacement or Déplacement stylistique in order to differentiate between Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic and the fronting occurrences in Medieval Romance. In the present study, the term “Stylistic Fronting”
is used to refer to studies that investigate Stylistic Fronting and Leftward Stylistic Displacement and, hence, structures as (1) and (2).
Second, from a syntactic point of view, further issues are contested. While Maling (1980/1990) takes “Stylistic Fronting” to be limited to embedded contexts, all studies on Old Romance (Benincà 2006; Cardinaletti 2003; Cardinaletti and Roberts 1990/2002; Fischer 2010, 2014;
Fischer and Alexiadou 2001; Franco 2009, 2012; Egerland 2011, 2013; Fontana 1993; Mathieu 2006, 2013; Salvesen 2011, among others) assume that the phenomenon is possible in both, main and embedded contexts. One might then wonder whether these structures are instances of V2, since V2 in main clauses is one of the most prominent properties discussed for Medieval French as suggested by Adams (1987), Benincà (2006), Roberts (1993) or Vance (1997), among others, and challenged by Kaiser (2002), Rinke and Meisel (2009) and Sitaridou (2012), among others. Furthermore, as there are embedded clause types that exhibit Main Clause Phenomena such as V2 (Heycock 2006, among many others), one could then cut the analysis of structures in (1) and (2) down on an analysis as a variant of V2. However, we do also find similar fronting contexts in comparative and relative clauses, for which Main Clause Phenomena and thus V2, are generally assumed to be excluded (Heycock 2006, Haegeman 2012). An occurrence of fronting in a relative clause is given in (3), taken from Cardinaletti and Roberts (1990/2002:
129).
(3) Por l’esperance qu’an lui ont for the hope which.in him have.3PL
‘For the hope which they have in him’
In order to avoid interferences with V2 contexts and to verify if there are two different phenomena, namely V2 and “Stylistic Fronting”, this study will focus on fronting contexts in relative and comparative clauses. For these embedded clauses, an extensive corpus analysis is provided on both clauses with and without constituents other than a subject or a clitic that precede the finite verb and thus are situated at the left edge. Other subordinate contexts that imply constituents other than a subject or a clitic to the left of the finite verb will be taken into account in order to allow for comparison between both groups.
Furthermore, a central question in the debate is the pragmatic motivation of the fronted elements. The different analyses and hypotheses made on “Stylistic Fronting” in Medieval French depend decisively on the idea of the information-structural property of the fronted elements. Approaches that favour a neutral pragmatic value of stylistically fronted elements encounter major difficulties with respect to the question what triggers the fronting (Labelle 2007, Salvesen 2011, Labelle and Hirschbühler in press). In contrast, the two analyses that take a pragmatic value into account come to opposite conclusions which are based, however, on very similar basic observations on the anaphoricity of stylistically fronted elements (Mathieu 2006, 2013; Fischer 2010, 2014). Hence, the completion of a consistent pragmatic analysis of the phenomenon appears to be central to further work on the matter.
The present study looks into two matters. First, it aims at providing an extensive description of the constituents other than a subject or a clitic that are found at the left edge of relative, comparative and other subordinate contexts in Medieval French. Second, it proposes an analysis of the information-structural and syntactic motivation of structures such as (1), (2) and (3).
In order to allow for a consistent analysis of the information structure of the constituents in question, this study is based on its own corpus composed of Lettres de rémission (remission letters) from the 14th and 15th century. The concentration on documents of the same genre allows us to avoid ambiguities due to the ascertained lack of standardization even for texts written in the same Medieval French dialect (Völker 2003).
The study itself is divided into three chapters. The first two chapters are written from a descriptive point of view. Chapter 2 introduces the corpus and the methodology used for its annotation. Chapter 3 provides the description of the data with respect to the distribution and frequency of fronting contexts. Finally, chapter 4 turns to the analysis of the information
structure and the syntax of fronting contexts by giving an extensive overview of the previous research matter on the matter before turning to the pragmatic and syntactic analyses.