Information Structure and Word Order Change in Medieval French.

中世纪法语中的信息结构和词序变化。

• 批准号: 2438140
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2438140
• 关键词: Information; Structure; Word; Order; Change

My research project is focused on the interplay between Information Structure (IS) and word order change in Medieval and Early Modern French. My research focuses on three issues: the extent to which IS has a role in driving syntactic change; the extent to which syntactic change drives change in IS and the expression of IS roles and finally, the role of stylistic variation in syntactic change. Through my study of Medieval and Early Modern French I aim to deepen our understanding of syntactic change cross-linguistically as well as our broader understanding of linguistic change and how less explored factors, such as IS, text-type and the verse-prose distinction affect these changes.Previous studies of Medieval French word order are many and complex. During the 1980s and 1990s studies, such as Vance (1997) and Platzack (1995) focused on Verb Second (V2) in Old French (OFr) and its collapse in the Middle French (MFr) period. In more recent years, with the advent of Rizzi's (1997) cartographic approach to the left periphery, focus has shifted to descriptions of Old French (OFr) Verb Second (V2), detailing the exact positions occupied in the left periphery (Rouveret, 2004; Wolfe, 2018a; Labelle and Hirschbuhler, 2018). Among these works, several focus on the importance of IS (Steiner, 2014; Rinke and Meisel, 2009; Larrivée, 2019), although their claims are heavily debated.Most of these studies focus on a specific aspect of the IS-syntax relationship and limit their scope to the OFr period. For example, Zimmermann (2014) focuses only on pronominal subjects and Labelle and Hirschbuhler (2018) only discuss verb first and verb second clauses. There is a tendency in studies of OFr to utilise verse data for syntactic analysis due to the rarity of pre-13th century prose texts. While this is not intrinsically problematic, the distinction often goes unaddressed, leading to "a near conflation of text genre and time variables" (Labelle & Hirschbuhler, 2018:266). Simonenko, Crabbé and Prévost (2018) have shown that whether a text is verse or prose exerts a substantial influence on its grammar in OFr. That said, this issue is beginning to be addressed in more recent research (namely Labelle & Hirschbuhler, 2018 and Larrivée 2019). By engaging critically with each text - discussing its background, manuscript history, text type and dialect - and considering these factors in the comparative analysis between texts, added insight can be gained. As for my own methodology, I will gather several hundred clauses from a variety of French texts ranging from the 12th to 17th centuries using the Base de Français Médiéval corpus and, for later texts, the MCVF corpus, hoping to improve on previous work by using a large dataset and a wider timescale. Additionally, due to the lack of accessible corpora for some later data, I may choose individual digitised texts to access instead. I shall then mark up these clauses for IS relations, taking as my starting point Steiner's (2014:91-95) decision tree for coding IS values on corpora, since it strikes me as the most fine-grained approach available, allowing for new insights into IS. Analyses will be conducted with these data on the relationship between word order and IS in Medieval French and how this shifts diachronically. I will look at the sorts of IS constituents which can occur preverbally and postverbally, their order, and implications of this for diachronic word order change. I will also compare differences across dialect, text-type, verse and prose making sure to take account of all possible reasons for variation, rather than assuming that the diachronic element is primary. This study represents a novel approach to the syntax-IS interface in Medieval and Early Modern French as well as to historical linguistics data which may have widespread implications for both the field of historical syntax, Romance linguistics and general historical linguistics.

我的研究项目专注于中世纪和早期现代法语中信息结构（IS）与词序变化之间的相互作用。我的研究集中在三个问题：IS 在推动句法变化方面发挥作用的程度；句法变化在多大程度上推动了 IS 的变化以及 IS 角色的表达，最后是文体变化在句法变化中的作用。通过我对中世纪和早期现代法语的研究，我的目标是加深我们对跨语言句法变化的理解，以及我们对语言变化的更广泛的理解，以及较少探索的因素，如IS、文本类型和诗歌散文的区别如何影响这些变化。以前对中世纪法语词序的研究很多而且很复杂。在 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代的研究中，Vance (1997) 和 Platzack (1995) 等研究重点关注古法语 (OFr) 中的第二动词 (V2) 及其在中古法语 (MFr) 时期的崩溃。近年来，随着 Rizzi (1997) 左外围制图方法的出现，焦点已转移到古法语 (OFr) 动词第二 (V2) 的描述，详细说明了左外围所占据的确切位置 (Rouveret, 2004; Wolfe, 2018a; Labelle 和 Hirschbuhler, 2018)。在这些著作中，有几篇著作重点关注了 IS 的重要性（Steiner，2014；Rinke 和 Meisel，2009；Larrivée，2019），尽管他们的主张受到了激烈的争论。这些研究大多数集中于 IS 语法关系的特定方面，并将其范围限制在 OFr 时期。例如，Zimmermann (2014) 仅关注代词主语，Labelle 和 Hirschbuhler (2018) 仅讨论动词第一和动词第二从句。由于13世纪前散文文本的稀有，OFr的研究有利用诗歌数据进行句法分析的趋势。虽然这本质上不是问题，但这种区别往往没有得到解决，导致“文本类型和时间变量的近乎合并”（Labelle＆Hirschbuhler，2018：266）。 Simonenko、Crabbé 和 Prévost (2018) 表明，文本是诗歌还是散文对其 OFr 中的语法产生重大影响。也就是说，这个问题开始在最近的研究中得到解决（即 Labelle & Hirschbuhler，2018 和 Larrivée 2019）。通过批判性地研究每一篇文本——讨论其背景、手稿历史、文本类型和方言——并在文本之间的比较分析中考虑这些因素，可以获得更多的见解。至于我自己的方法，我将使用 Base de Français Médiéval 语料库从 12 世纪到 17 世纪的各种法语文本中收集数百个条款，对于后来的文本，使用 MCVF 语料库，希望通过使用大数据集和更广泛的时间尺度来改进以前的工作。此外，由于缺乏一些后续数据的可访问语料库，我可能会选择单独的数字化文本来访问。然后，我将标记 IS 关系的这些条款，以 Steiner（2014：91-95）在语料库上编码 IS 值的决策树为起点，因为它让我觉得这是可用的最细粒度的方法，允许对 IS 有新的见解。我们将利用这些数据对中世纪法语中的词序和 IS 之间的关系以及这种关系如何历时变化进行分析。我将研究可以出现在动词前和动词后的 IS 成分的种类、它们的顺序以及这对历时词序变化的影响。我还将比较方言、文本类型、诗歌和散文之间的差异，确保考虑到所有可能的差异原因，而不是假设历时元素是主要的。这项研究代表了中世纪和早期现代法语句法-IS接口以及历史语言学数据的一种新颖方法，可能对历史句法、浪漫语言学和普通历史语言学领域产生广泛的影响。