Verb Second in Medieval Romance (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics)

✍ Scribed by Sam Wolfe

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 209
• Edition: Illustrated
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume provides the first book-length study of the controversial topic of Verb Second and related properties in a range of Medieval Romance varieties. It presents an examination and analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data from Old French, Occitan, Sicilian, Venetian, Spanish, and Sardinian, in order to assess whether these were indeed Verb Second languages. Sam Wolfe argues that V-to-C movement is a point of continuity across all the medieval varieties - unlike in the modern Romance languages - but that there are rich patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation in the medieval period that have not previously been observed and investigated. These include differences in the syntax-pragmatics mapping, the locus of verb movement, the behaviour of clitic pronouns, the syntax of subject positions, matrix/embedded asymmetries, and the null argument properties of the languages in question. The book outlines a detailed formal cartographic analysis of both the attested synchronic patterns and the diachronic evolution of Romance clausal structure. The findings have widespread implications for the understanding of both the key typological property of Verb Second and the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Verb Second in Medieval Romance
Copyright
Contents
Series preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Source Texts
1: Introduction
1.1 Medieval Romance word order and the V2 hypothesis
1.2 Germanic Verb Second: Theoretical and empirical developments
1.3 The Medieval Romance problem´ 1.3.1 V2 languages? 1.3.2 Continuity or microvariation? 1.3.3 V2 and its correlates 1.3.4 V2 and diachrony 1.4 Materials and methods 2: The V2 syntax of Medieval Romance 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Arguments for and against a V2 analysis 2.2.1 The V2 hypothesis: Arguments and evidence 2.2.2 Evidence against V2? 2.3 Evaluating the claims 2.3.1 The preverbal field and inversion phenomena 2.3.2 Matrix/embedded asymmetries 2.3.3 V1 and V3violations´
2.3.4 Diachronic implausibility?
3: Old Italo-Romance
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Matrix clause syntax
3.2.1 Verb placement
3.2.2 The preverbal field and clitic placement
3.2.3 Subject positions
3.2.4 Verb First and Verb Third
3.3 Embedded clause syntax
3.3.1 Verb placement and SVO
3.3.2 Embedded main clause phenomena
3.4 Chaptersummary
4: Old Gallo-Romance
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Matrix clause syntax
4.2.1 Verb placement
4.2.2 The preverbal field and clitic placement
4.2.3 Subject positions
4.2.4 Verb First and Verb Third
4.3 Embedded clause syntax
4.3.1 Verb placement and SVO
4.3.2 Embedded main clause phenomena
4.4 Chaptersummary
5: Old Spanish
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Matrix clause syntax
5.2.1 Verb placement
5.2.2 The preverbal field and clitic placement
5.2.3 Subject positions
5.2.4 Verb First and Verb Third
5.3 Embedded clause syntax
5.3.1 Verb placement and SVO
5.3.2 Embedded main clause phenomena
5.3.3 A symmetrical V2 language?
5.4 Chaptersummary
6: Old Sardinian
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Matrix clause syntax
6.2.1 Verb placement
6.2.2 The preverbal field and clitic placement
6.2.3 One half of the V2 constraint?
6.2.4 Subject positions
6.2.5 Verb Third
6.3 Embedded clause syntax
6.3.1 Embedded word order in Wolfe (2015c)
6.3.2 New data on Old Sardinian embedded clauses
6.4 Chaptersummary
7: Rethinking Medieval Romance V2
7.1 The syntax of Medieval Romance
7.1.1 Summary
7.1.2 Commonalities and the V2 bottleneck
7.1.3 Fin- and Force-V2 and microvariation
7.1.3.1 Verb Third.
7.1.3.2 Verb First
7.1.3.3 The syntax of si
7.1.3.4 Matrix/embedded asymmetries
7.1.3.5 A note on the V2 correlates
7.1.4 The cartography of the clause
7.2 Changes in clausal structure
7.2.1 Common syntactic properties: Early Medieval Romance
7.2.2 The Later Medieval Romance split
7.2.3 From Fin- to Force-V2
7.2.4 Old Sardinian and the great leap from Latin to Romance
7.3 Summary
8: Conclusion
8.1 Summary of major findings
8.2 New perspectives on the Medieval Romance `problem´
8.3 Future research
References
Primary texts and sources
Bibliography
Index