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V2 beyond borders: The histoire ancienne jusqu’a cÉsar

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Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Abstract

There is considerable consensus and increasing evidence within the descriptive and theoretica literature that the syntax of medieval Romance, as well as late Latin, was characterized by a verb-second (V2) constraint. Accordingly, in root clauses, and in certain types of embedded clause, the finite verb is argued to raise systematically to the vacant C(omplementizer) position, a movement operation which is variously accompanied by the fronting of one or more pragmatically-salient constituents to the left of the raised verb to target topic and focus positions situated in the left periphery. Now, while the V2 status of medieval Romance and old French in particular is widely supported by detailed empirical and statistical studies like those cited in footnote 3, there are still some dissenting voices, such that the introduction and detailed scrutiny of new data, especially involving a range of more diverse textual sources, is a welcome addition in that it can provide important confirmatory evidence in favour of the V2 hypothesis. The present article therefore undertakes a detailed examination of the word order of a non-canonical old French prose text, the Histoire Ancienne jusqu’à César (henceforth HA), a universal history of particular interest since its earliest manuscript witnesses were produced outside of France in Acre (in the Kingdom of Jersualem), providing us with a precious example of a supralocal use of French transmitted by scribes who were often multilingual, or in any case not necessarily from France, and intended for a broad linguistic readership across France, Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, many of whom would not have had French as a native language. Within this context, the study of word order and, in particular, the evidence for a V2 constraint in the HA offers us a discrete scientifically-controllable variable by which to measure the extent of structural unity across those mutually intelligible medieval koinés, of which the language of the HA is but one example, albeit from outside of France, conventionally considered to constitute old French. If an examination of the word order of the HA, in itself an original result, can be shown to follow a V2 syntax, then this underlines the salience of this structural constraint as a distinctive and stable feature of the grammars of medieval French texts produced both inside and outside of France, including by perhaps less than fully native scribes. At the same time, this strengthens, in turn, claims for the existence of a common medieval Romance syntax characterized by a shared structural norm in the form of the V2 constraint, arguably the common denominator and hallmark of all medieval Romance grammars.

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Journal Title

Journal of Historical Syntax

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Journal ISSN

2163-6001

Volume Title

5

Publisher

Linguistic Society of America