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Socio-stylistic reflexes of syntactic change in Old French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 August 2013

BRYAN DONALDSON
BRYAN DONALDSON*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
*
Address for correspondence: Department of French and Italian, University of Texas at Austin, 201 W 21st Street, B7600, HRH 2.114A, Austin, TX 78712, USA e-mail: bdonaldson@austin.utexas.edu
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Abstract

This paper analyses aspects of the loss of verb-second (V2) in Old French in a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Data come from sequences in which a main declarative is preceded immediately by a tensed subordinate clause (Vance, Donaldson, and Steiner, 2010). Following Romaine (1982), represented speech and narrative are considered to represent distinct registers within a single text. An analysis of intra-textual variation between narrative and represented speech reveals stylistic variation, in that represented speech evinces higher rates of surface subject-verb-(object) orders in main clauses than narrative passages within the same text. The data also reveal gender variation, as the represented speech of women tends to be more linguistically conservative than that of men.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 319 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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