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Grammatical Markers and Grammatical Relations in the Simple Clause in Old French

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Grammatical Markers and Grammatical Relations in the Simple Clause in Old French Grammatical markers and grammatical relations in the simple clause in Old French Nicolas Mazziotta Universität Stuttgart Institut für Linguistik/Romanistik Germany [email protected] Abstract described in a dependency framework (henceforth “DF”). As an introduction, I will first give a quick The focus of this paper is the descrip- overview of OF (1.1), and define the focus of this tion of the surface syntax relations in the study (1.2). simple clause in Old French and the way they can be described in a dependency 1.1 Old French: an overview grammar. The declension system of Old The term Old French roughly corresponds to a French is not reliable enough to cope with continuum of romance varieties that were spoken the identification of the dependents of the in the northern half of France, in Wallonia and main verb, but it remains true that related in England during the Middle Ages (9th-13th C.). grammatical markers are still observable To carry on a description of OF, one has to sys- and obey rules that forbid them to appear tematize the common ground that all these idioms in specific syntactic positions. share as well as the major differences that distin- This study relies on three previous ac- guish the varieties. The paper will focus on that counts; Igor Mel’cuk’sˇ “criteria B”, the common ground, which can be seen as the direct criteria that are used to determine which ancestor of modern French. is the syntactic governor in a syntactic de- From a grammatical point of view, OF is much pendency relation, Thomas Groß’s intra- more analytic than Latin is: many relations are in- word analysis, which grants morphs node troduced by prepositions. The traditional descrip- status in the tree, and the concept of speci- tion of the nominal inflection tells us that Latin fication as used by Alain Lemaréchal, who declension had shrunk in OF to a simple two-fold understands grammatical markers as a set opposition between the nominative (Fr. cas su- of formal constraints that stack over a re- jet) and a universal oblique case (Fr. cas régime). lation. Periphrastic verbal tenses had developed and the I demonstrate that the structure of the whole aspectual system had changed; the system nominal dependents of the verb is highly had become clearly dominated by the opposition unstable, ranging from explicit marking of between bare forms and compound verbs (express- the relation to constructions that do not ing aspectual/temporal anteriority). make use of any segmental marker: some The distribution of the major constituents of structures use bound morphemes, some the clause tends to express information-structural others use free morphemes and some use properties rather than grammatical ones. There- only semantic features to express the rela- fore, word order was a lot freer than it is in modern tions. Moreover, markers are mainly op- French. tional and can stack up in a hierarchical way, which results in variable structural 1.2 Question organization of the nominal phrase. Others have demonstrated that the declension sys- tem of OF is not reliable enough to cope with the 1 Introduction identification of dependents1 of the verb. Several This paper investigates the grammatical markers 1In the remainder of this paper, when no additional pre- at work in the structure of the simple clause in Old cision is given, the terms dependency, governor, dependent, French (henceforth “OF”) and the way they can be actant, tree, etc. as well as the symbol between a governor → 207 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (DepLing 2013), pages 207–216, Prague, August 27–30, 2013. c 2013 Charles University in Prague, Matfyzpress, Prague, Czech Republic studies have shown: 1/ that the valence of the verb dency relation, are used to distinguish be- as well as the semantic properties of the actants tween the governor and the dependent (2.1); are more important than the declension patterns Thomas Groß’s intra-word analysis, which • (Schøsler, 1984); 2/ that the declension pattern is treats morphs (surface expression of mor- so heterogeneous that it cannot be described as a phemes) in the syntactic tree (2.2); systematic tool (Chambon, 2003; Chambon and the concept of specification as employed by • Davidsdottir, 2007); 3/ that case markers are an ad- Alain Lemaréchal, who understands gram- ditional mean to express dependencies that would matical markers as a set of formal constraints exist without them.2 over a relation (2.3). General grammatical descriptions acknowledge these conclusions, but still deliver long lists of ta- 2.1 Mel’cuk’sˇ criteria for finding bles describing the different “paradigms” (Buri- dependencies dant, 2000). Given two forms f 1 and f 2, united by a depen- As unreliable as declension is, it is neverthe- dency, which form is the governor? This crucial is- less a fact that related grammatical markers are sue has been debated by so many scholars in many still observable and appear to obey at least some different frameworks that it would not be possi- rules. These rules ensure that declension is well ble to name them all. From the DF perspective, it integrated with the rest of the grammar, which is seems fair to assume that Arnold Zwicky (1985) invoked as a whole during the communication pro- has played a major role in clarifying things. Many cess (Schøsler, 2013, 173-175). Apparently, the criteria have been investigated since his work, but rules block the markers from appearing in cer- it seems that Igor Mel’cukˇ (2009) has given the tain specific syntactic positions. The purpose of most rigorous hierarchized list so far. There are this paper is to describe the syntactic structure of three criteria: namely, in order of importance, B1, the constructions where they appear. I will make B2 and B3.4 It is important to note that these cri- use of DF to model grammatical relations between teria are initially meant to be used when f 1 and f 2 words (and morphemes, see 2.2), focusing mainly are words (see sec. 2.2 about morphs). on verbal dependents of the intransitive and tran- B1. Igor Mel’cukˇ claims that the orientation of sitive minimal clause. As it will appear in the fol- a dependency between f 1 and f 2 mainly depends lowing sections, identifying the dependencies is on the syntactic criterion based of what he calls not a trivial matter, because one has to cope with passive valence: an unreliable declension system. Even the sim- plest examples involve complex phenomena inside Passive syntactic valence of a lexeme/of the noun phrase, that have not yet been described a phrase: a set of syntactic roles which under the scope of DF.3 the lexeme/the phrase can take in larger To achieve a proper description, three major constructions (maybe with some inflec- theoretical choices (2) will be used to carry out the tional modifications). In other words, analyses (3). the passive syntactic valence of a lex- eme/a phrase is its syntactic distribution. 2 Theoretical grounds (Mel’cuk,ˇ 2009, 4) My study relies on three primary sources: The main idea is that the governor controls the Igor Mel’cuk’sˇ “criteria B”, which, given a passive valence; i.e., f S-governs f if the dis- • 1 2 pair of forms united by a syntactic depen- tribution of the phrase f 1 + f 2 is more the one of and a dependent, will fall under the scope of surface syntax f 1 than the one of f 2. In ex. 1, the word horse (Mel’cuk,ˇ 2009, 6-7) governs the word white, because the distribution of 2Given the high level of instability of the system, some white horse is more the distribution of horse than authors even claim their main purpose is sociolinguistic and indicates that “the speaker is well-integrated in the speech of white (which can be deleted). Note that Igor community” (Detges, 2009, esp. 117). Mel’cukˇ speaks about syntactic distribution only, 3As explained by Peter Stein and Claudia Benneckenstein without any reference to word order. (2006) (who mainly focus on the verb), as far as OF is con- cerned, hardly any question has been described under the 4C criteria (used to discriminate different dependencies) scope of DF so far. Nevertheless, the works of Lene Schøsler, will not be discussed here (Mel’cuk,ˇ 2009, 34-40). A criteria starting with her thesis (1984), makes use of Lucien Tes- (used to find dependencies between words) are discussed in nière’s approach (1966). sec. 2.2. 208 (1) the white horse kind of jam (Mel’cuk,ˇ 2009, 31), quoting (Hud- son, 1990). Hence, sandwich jam. One should not confuse this criterion with the → omissibility property. Most of the time, gover- 2.2 Thomas Groß’s intra-word analysis nors are not omissible, but it is not always the Expanding the Meaning-Text Theory (henceforth case; e.g.: in English, the subordination marker “MTT”) model (Mel’cuk,ˇ 2009) to handle intra- that constrains the distribution of the clause when word syntactic dependencies can help produce a it is present, but can be omitted in some cases more explicit analysis of the relations between (Mel’cuk,ˇ 2009, 42). segmental units. Thomas Groß’s (2011) sugges- This criterion is a genuinely syntactic one. As tion will lead to reconsider some of the basic defi- such, it must be used first: B2 and B3 must be nitions provided by Igor Mel’cuk.ˇ invoked only if B1 fails. B1 will be extensively used in sec. 3. Grammatical markers in MTT. According to Igor Mel’cukˇ (2009, 23-24), there are only four B2.
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