On the origins of French and Occitan

The status of the language found in the Clermont-Ferrand manuscript of the Passion and St Leger is unclear. Should it be regarded as French, or French with an admixture of Occitanisms, or something else? A concordance of the early mostly short texts shows that they share a range of common forms, across all three Gallo-Romance languages. A study of the books and manuscripts which have preserved these texts show that they are part of the learned culture of their day. Reading and writing are done in Latin, and the early texts are both innovatory in writing literary vernacular and conservative in keeping as close to Latin conventions as possible, as expected by the church institutions in which these materials were used and preserved.

The verbs ‘rain’ and ‘snow’ in Gallo-Romance, and other morphological mismatches in diachrony

The historical morphology of the verb ‘snow’ in Francoprovençal presents a conundrum, in that it is clearly analogically influenced by the verb ‘rain’, for obvious reasons of lexical semantic similarity, but the locus of that influence is not the ‘root’ (the ostensible bearer of lexical meaning) but desinential inflexion-class members, which are in principle independent of any lexical meaning. Similar morphological changes are also identified for other Gallo-Romance verbs. It seems, in effect, that speakers can identify exponents of the lexical meaning of word-forms in linear sequences larger than the apparent ‘morphemic’ composition of those word-forms, even when such a composition may seem prima facie transparent and obvious. It is argued that these facts are inherently incompatible with ‘constructivist’, morpheme-based, models of morphology, and strongly compatible with what have been called ‘abstractivist’ (‘word-and-paradigm’) approaches, which generally take entire word-forms as the primary units of morphological analysis.

Appositive compounds in dialectal and sociolinguistic varieties of French

Over the last 100 years, appositive compounding—combining two nouns in apposition—has become one of the most productive word formation processes in French. In an attempt to account for this dramatic spread and building on existing diachronic research, this article examines the occurrence of appositive compounds in non-standard French during the twentieth century, in a number of Gallo-Romance dialects and in Poilu, a sociolect from the early twentieth century, bringing together historical, dialectal, and sociolinguistic data. Analysis includes the identification of the different types of appositive compound and their underlying structure. Moreover word order patterns and their potential geographic correlates will be investigated as well as the role of metaphors and metonymy. Data reflecting geographic variation and sociolinguistic stratification will thus help to determine what factors were at play in the expansion of appositive compounding in contemporary French.

Active-middle alignment and the aoristic drift

In the classification of Romance along a northern–southern continuum the languages which exhibit patterns of active-middle alignment (notably, the HABERE ~ ESSE alternation in the perfect) are also known to have undergone the aoristic drift. This article starts from Smith’s (2016) observation that the north-western oïl varieties have maintained the preterite, while also alternating the two auxiliaries, whereas the north-eastern oïl varieties have lost the HABERE ~ ESSE alternation and undergone the aoristic drift. It is argued that the developments which have occurred in the north-western varieties are not theoretically challenging or unique within the Romània. With respect to the generalization of habere in the north-eastern areas and, less conspicuously, throughout Gallo-Romance, it is claimed that this development was engendered by the rise of a dependent-marking system which follows undifferentiated nominative alignment. It is concluded that the modern Romània exhibits a stronghold of active-middle alignment in a group of central languages, which are essentially head marking.

Postverbal negators in Gallo-Romance

This chapter offers a diachronic investigation of the Occitan post-verbal negators pas and ges through the analysis of a selection of narrative texts covering the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Addressing an area that has received little attention in the literature, this chapter identifies the first occurrences of these negative markers and discusses in detail their characteristics, their development and, for ges, its decline. The data suggest that while the minimizer pas possibly started off as a marker of emphatic negation, becoming also a negator of discourse-old propositions, the generalizer ges followed the inverse path, starting as a negator of a presupposition and gradually moving to be an emphatic negator. In the case of pas, its presence in negative polar questions may hold the key to understanding the reasons behind its establishment as the generalized negative marker in modern Languedocian.

Syncretism and metamorphomes in northern Occitan (Lemosin) varieties

By detailed comparative study of data from historical and descriptive grammars, this chapter traces the source of pervasive syncretism patterns in Occitan varieties of the Limousin region (‘Lemosin varieties’). The majority of these patterns are shown to result from regular sound change causing mergers of previously distinct forms; subsequently, speakers are able to infer a morphological generalization that the forms realizing a given pair of cells are identical, and exploit the patterns as productive templates for morphological analogy. The behaviour of these patterns, and their interaction with established ‘metamorphomes’ (abstract templates for the paradigmatic distribution of inflectional exponents), is captured by treating the rise of syncretism as an example of ordinary change to metamorphomes, in which paradigm cells are reassigned from one metamorphomic template to another: this approach facilitates principled predictions about the susceptibility of metamorphomes to change in diachrony.

Dialectological evidence for a predicate focus analysis of Gascon que

This contribution provides evidence for a predicate focus analysis of Gascon que, based on unpublished dialectological material gathered in the 1970s in the Occitan area. Even though Pusch (2000: 201) observes that ‘any dia- or panchronic account of Gascon enunciatives inevitably remains conjectural, since we lack sufficient textual data from earlier stages of this Occitan variety’, the data of the locality of Les Esseintes discussed in this paper clearly show that the particle que is used in the context of a fossilized cleft sentence.

Introduction

The introduction to the volume lays out its conceptual, theoretical and empirical background. It highlights how grammatical change has been a major area of interest within French linguistics, but that standard French is too often the exclusive empirical focus, while insights from comparative Gallo-Romance data tend to be lacking. Sociolinguistic theory has traditionally formed a modest part of linguistic research on both historical and contemporary French, but the introduction highlights a renewed interest in variationist sociolinguistics, issues of language contact, and the status of minority languages with France. The introduction concludes with an overview of Smith’s contribution to linguistics and summaries of the chapters that together form the volume.

Mainland and insular Norman

Although, as Winford (2003) states, ‘There are in principle no limits […] to what speakers of different languages will adopt and adapt from one another’, it is generally accepted that open class items such as nouns and verbs are more easily borrowed than closed class items, such as pronouns, which are generally considered to be embedded at a ‘deeper’ level of the linguistic system. This chapter presents a case study of four different varieties of Gallo-Romance spoken in Mainland and Insular Normandy, which are in contact with two different superstrates, respectively French and English. It explores whether contact with its typologically different superstrates is causing change within the pronominal systems of Mainland and Insular Norman. Specifically, it examines whether we find ‘pronoun sharing’ (where borrowed surface forms are integrated ‘wholesale’ into the Norman utterance) or ‘pronoun sparing’ (where, despite the intensive contact, the pronouns of Norman remain ‘intact’).

A comparative analysis of French auxiliation, with new evidence from Montréal

This chapter provides an overview of various auxiliation patterns that occur in French since many dialectological and sociolinguistic studies suggest that in various parts of the Francophonie (in Laurentian and Acadian French, and in certain regions of France and Belgium) native speakers employ both auxiliaries, être BE and avoir HAVE, in the spoken language with the twenty-or-so intransitive verbs that, prescriptively, require the exclusive use of être. The chapter also provides new evidence from a 2016 corpus of spoken Montréal French, which will be contrasted with syntactic/semantic theories of auxiliary selection, and shows that these theoretical approaches are inadequate to account for the Canadian French patterns.