Information Structure and Word Order Change in Medieval French.

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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.