Eric Mathieu

Stylistic Fronting in Old French

Abstract The aim of this paper is two-fold: on the one hand, its purpose is to show that Stylistic Fronting was very productive in Old French; on the other, its rationale is the introduction of a novel hypothesis according to which Stylistically Fronted elements in Old French target a special Topic phrase. This phrase is labelled TopicP+ to distinguish it from TopicP, the position where topicalized elements in V2 structures raise to in Old French. The special topic position accessed by Stylistic Fronting is motivated by the main pattern emerging from a series of carefully studied Old French texts: two elements can undergo SF at the same time, but the two elements cannot both be XPs or both be heads. It is further demonstrated that the subject gap constraint that accompanies Stylistic Fronting in Modern Insular Scandinavian languages is also relevant for Old French and that the most natural way to account for it is to suppose that Stylistically Fronted XPs move through (rather than into, cf. Holmberg 2000) the specifier of Spec-TP. This is made to follow from the fact that TP in Old French is a (strong) phase. The account relies on the splitting of the EPP between two features, [P] and [D], and on the idea that these features may not necessarily come packaged as a bundle. [P] can appear on one head while [D] surfaces on another, with [P] depending on [D]. In the second part of the paper, an explanation is given as to why Stylistic Fronting disappeared from French grammar: the hypothesis put forward is that once verbal agreement lost its pronominal properties, the EPP could no longer undergo feature fission and spread its features on distinct heads, since the mechanism by which the [D] feature on T0 is checked by the verbs agreement is a necessary condition for the occurrence of Stylistic Fronting.

Flavors of Division

The theoretical aim of this article is to integrate the singulative into the theory of division proposed by Borer (2005) and other theoretical linguists (e.g., Krifka 1995, Doetjes 1996, 1997, Chierchia 1998, Cheng and Sybesma 1999). To illustrate my claim, I offer a brief case study of Ojibwe, an Algonquian language, which I argue uses gender shift (from inanimate to animate) to mark singulativization. Singulatives, as morphological markers, are primarily known from Celtic, Afro-Asiatic, and Nilo-Saharan languages, but are not a known feature of Algonquian languages. Further support for my claim that the grammar of Algonquian languages embeds a singulative system comes from Fox (Mesquakie).

The Left-Periphery in Old French

The goal of this chapter is to give an account of the distribution of left-periphery elements in Old French. In addition to the familiar FinP and TopicP categories that are traditionally taken to have existed in the pre-verbal area in V2 languages, I argue that the Old French CP consisted of a rich array of additional topic positions. Three positions are identified: one for Stylistically Fronted elements, one for left dislocated elements, and one for hanging topics. The decomposition of the CP layer in Old French gives a rationale for the possibility of V3 and V4 order in that language. Stylistic Fronting is argued to be available throughout the Old French period (both the Early and the Late period), making Old French consistently a non-Generalized V2 language (contra Labelle (Lingua 117:289–316, 2007) and several others). Finally, it is shown that left dislocated and hanging topics appeared much earlier than traditionally thought in the literature.

Denominal Verbs in Ojibwe

This paper argues that denominal verb formation in Ojibwe is similar to nominal incorporation: a complex nominal (containing inflectional and derivational affixes) incorporates into a verb. This process differs from denominalization in languages such as English where denominal verbs are the result of the concatenation of derivational affixes and nouns that are simple roots. This paper contributes to ongoing discussion on the composition of words in polysynthetic languages, the nature of nominal incorporation, and the relationship between morphology and syntax. [KEYWORDS: denominal verbs, nominal incorporation, Ojibwe, Algonquian]

Interfacing Syntax and Semantics

In this chapter we take a break from looking at split construction phenomena to introduce Predicate Logic with Barriers, together with the family of systems that it builds on. This will give us a formal architecture with which we can complete in the next chapter our account of intervention effects in split constructions. Also, in this chapter, we link Predicate Logic with Barriers to a Minimalist syntax by assuming what is in the generative literature a standard conception of the interface between syntax and semantics. This interface sees syntax and semantics as constituting autonomous but closely related systems. It views syntax as a recursive procedure that generates syntactic Logical Form representations (LFs), while semantics is a recursive procedure that assigns assembled LFs an interpretation. We take as our basic assumption the architecture of Chomsky (1995) depicted in (1).