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The Emergence of Group Stress in Medieval French

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The Emergence of Group Stress in Medieval French The Emergence of Group Stress in Medieval French Thomas Michael Rainsford St. John’s College 24 January, 2011 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ii Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text. Statement of length The word count of this dissertation does not exceed 80,000 words including footnotes, references and appendices, but excluding the bibliography. iii Summary The thesis investigates the development of the group-stress system in French from the earliest textual records to 1500. Empirical work is based on a corpus compiled especially for the study, which comprises 87 extracts from medieval French texts totalling over 250,000 words, composed mainly of verse texts to make use of the extra phonological information provided by the form. A unique metrical and syntactic annotation is used in the corpus to permit studies of phonological phrasing and stress placement in lines of verse. Much octosyllabic narrative verse, in particular texts associated with oral performance, is shown to have an iambic rhythmic tendency in the pre-1250 period, which is particularly strong in the earliest texts. No such effect is found in lyric texts or plays, or in narrative from after 1250. Additionally, a phonological phrase boundary is commonly found in the middle of the line. Iambic rhythmic organization is argued to be incompatible with group stress and associated ‘stress deafness’ effects observed in modern French. From this data, group stress is argued to have developed between the mid-12th and mid- 13th centuries. Work on modern French (e.g. Post, 2000) suggests that the stress group is the phonological phrase. Through reconstruction of the phonological phras- ing of medieval French, the thesis demonstrates that regular word-final stress, the phonological phrase internal process of stress clash resolution, and the fre- quency of monosyllabic words combine to favour reanalysis of the French stress system in the pre-1250 period. Finally, the hypothesis that prosodic change af- fected verb-second word order in medieval French is reconsidered. It is argued that light clause-initial constituents which do not form their own phonological phrase (i.e. short adverbs, subject pronouns) become unstressed, a develop- ment which triggers syntactic changes that lead to the introduction of non verb-second word orders. v vi Contents Acknowledgements xiii Key to abbreviations and symbols xv Introduction 1 1 Viewsofprosodicchange...................... 3 2 Research questions ......................... 7 3 Useofwrittensources....................... 9 4 Structureofthethesis....................... 12 1 Group stress: present and past 13 1 GroupstressinmodernFrench.................. 13 1.1 The syntax–prosody mapping ............... 15 1.1.1 Overview..................... 15 1.1.2 The problem of phonological phrase restructuring 18 1.1.3 Theproblemofvariation............. 21 1.2 Intonation-basedapproaches................ 22 1.3 The problem of secondary stress .............. 25 1.4 Summary .......................... 28 2 Stress ‘deafness’ in modern French . ............... 28 3 Stress-related phenomena in medieval French ........... 31 3.1 Evidencefromphonologicalchange............ 32 3.1.1 Theemergenceoffixedstress.......... 32 3.1.2 Stress-conditioned allophony ........... 36 3.1.3 Summary ..................... 39 3.2 Evidencefrommorphosyntacticchange?......... 39 3.2.1 Verb-second effects ................ 40 3.2.2 The form of pre-verbal non-subject pronouns . 44 3.2.3 Summary ..................... 48 4 Verseevidence............................ 48 vii viii CONTENTS 4.1 Syllabicmeter........................ 49 4.2 Syllabo-tonicmeter..................... 50 4.3 Cæsura and the octosyllable ................ 53 4.4 Summary .......................... 55 Chapter summary ............................. 56 2 Building a corpus 57 1 Selectionoftexts.......................... 59 1.1 Divisionintosubcorpora.................. 59 1.1.1 Form........................ 60 1.1.2 Dialect...................... 61 1.1.3 Texttype..................... 63 1.2 Overviewoffullcorpus................... 69 1.2.1 Extracts ...................... 69 1.3 Philological problems: pre-1150 texts as a case study . 70 1.3.1 Dateandplaceofcomposition.......... 70 1.3.2 Transmissionandeditorialpolicy........ 73 1.4 Thebaseandprosesubcorpora.............. 75 1.5 Summary .......................... 77 2 Annotation............................. 77 2.1 Syllabicannotation..................... 78 2.1.1 Overview..................... 78 2.1.2 Concordance................... 79 2.1.3 Tagset....................... 80 2.2 Metricalannotation(scansion)............... 83 2.2.1 MeterofFrenchverse:standardrules...... 83 2.2.2 Exceptionstoscansionrules........... 86 2.2.3 Textswithdifferentmetricalnorms....... 90 2.3 Part-of-speechannotation................. 91 2.3.1 Tagset....................... 92 2.3.2 Treatmentof‘greyareas’............ 94 2.3.3 Implementation .................. 95 2.4 Structuralannotation:previousmodels.......... 95 2.4.1 Pennsystem................... 96 2.4.2 Paris7Corpus.................. 98 2.4.3 Dependentialanalyses..............100 2.5 Structuralannotation:currentcorpus...........101 2.5.1 Wordsandsentences...............102 CONTENTS ix 2.5.2 Markingconstituentswithinclauses......104 2.5.3 Markingclauseswithinsentences........106 2.5.4 Discontinuity...................109 2.5.5 Full worked example ...............109 Chapter summary .............................109 3 Evidence from versification 111 1 Methodology............................112 1.1 Labelling prominent syllables ...............112 1.2 Labelling phonological phrase edges ............117 1.3 Measures used to present results ..............121 1.3.1 Thesyllableandthepatternmethod......121 1.3.2 Dealing with unlabelled positions ........122 1.3.3 Strength of rhythmic organization ........123 1.4 Noteontheuseoftexts..................124 2 Study 1: Rhythmic change in narrative verse ...........125 2.1 Octosyllabicverse......................125 2.1.1 Stresscurves...................125 2.1.2 Change in each metrical position over time . 125 2.1.3 Patternmethodanalysis.............129 2.1.4 Variationbetweentexts.............134 2.2 Six-syllablehemistichs...................136 2.2.1 Twelve-syllableverse...............136 2.2.2 Ten-syllableverse.................139 2.2.3 Variationbetweentexts.............142 2.3 Conclusionsfromstudy1..................143 3 Study 2: The effects of dialect and text type on rhythm .....144 3.1 Dialect............................145 3.1.1 Quantitativeoverview..............147 3.1.2 Variationbetweentexts.............150 3.2 Texttype..........................151 3.2.1 Quantitativeoverview..............151 3.2.2 Significance of differences due to text type . 154 3.2.3 Variationbetweentexts.............160 3.3 Conclusionsfromstudy2..................160 4 Study 3: Phonological phrasing in the narrative octosyllable . 163 4.1 Phonological phrase edges in lines of verse ........163 4.2 Mid-line mismatches . ..................165 x CONTENTS 4.3 GormIsem and Brendan ..................168 4.4 Conclusionsfromstudy3..................171 5 Study4:Prosecontrolsforversedata...............172 5.1 Pseudo-verse........................173 5.1.1 Theoreticalbackground.............173 5.1.2 Creatingpseudo-verse..............173 5.2 Rhythmofpseudo-verse..................174 5.3 Mid-line marking in pseudo-verse .............177 5.4 Conclusionsfromstudy4..................180 Chapter summary .............................180 4 From word to phrase 183 1 Reanalysisofstress.........................184 1.1 Background.........................184 1.1.1 Thedomainofthephonologicalphrase.....184 1.1.2 Wordstressandclashresolution........185 1.1.3 Theprosodicword................186 1.2 ThestresspatternoftheN-PhPh.............187 1.2.1 Numberofprosodicwords............187 1.2.2 Stress patterns of two prosodic word N-PhPhs . 188 1.2.3 FrequencyofthesixtypesofN-PhPh.....190 1.3 Summary ..........................194 2 Development of post-verbal non-subject pronouns ........195 2.1 Background.........................196 2.1.1 Threetypesofpost-verbalpronoun.......196 2.1.2 Historicallackofstress..............196 2.1.3 Phonologicalphrasing..............198 2.2 The situation from the 12th centuryonwards.......199 2.2.1 TheMOItype..................199 2.2.2 TheY-NOUS-LEStype.............201 2.2.3 Le .........................203 2.3 Analysis...........................204 2.4 Conclusions.........................207 3 Clause-initial constituent ......................207 3.1 TheclausestructureofMedFr...............208 3.1.1 The Adams (1987b) model . ...........209 3.1.2 The pragmatic function of the initial constituent210 3.1.3 Verb-thirdexceptions..............211 CONTENTS xi 3.2 V2andprosodicchange..................215 3.2.1 Kroch (1989) ...................215 3.2.2 Anewprosodicconstraint............216 3.2.3 The phonological phrasing of the initial con- stituent......................217 3.3 Change and light initial constituents . .........220 3.3.1 Reanalysis of subject pronouns .........221 3.3.2 Frequency of light initial adverbs ........222 3.4 Moult and bien .......................223 3.4.1 Syntacticproperties...............224 3.4.2 Pragmaticproperties...............226 3.4.3 The decline of moult and bien fronting.....228 3.5 Or ..............................231 3.6 A brief note on si ......................234
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