24.2502, Disc: Germanic Influence on French Syntax

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Thu Jun 20 13:30:07 UTC 2013


LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2502. Thu Jun 20 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2502, Disc: Germanic Influence on French Syntax

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Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 09:30:01
From: Kevin McCabe [contacc at att.net]
Subject: Germanic Influence on French Syntax

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French is singled out as exceptional for being a non-null subject Romance
language, with a set of syntactic features characteristic of such languages
(European ones, anyway).

I don’t understand why explanations for its divergent nature commonly mention
underlying influence from Germanic languages. It’s acknowledged that French
was originally a null-subject language and remained so until about the mid
16th century, a time of major phonological changes, including the effacement
of most final consonants in speech except in liaison situations, which
rendered many verb endings indistinguishable by ear.

Did Germanic influence suddenly flare up in 16th century France? This would be
more plausible with a minority tongue surrounded by a dominant Germanic
language, as is thought to have happened with Swiss Rhaeto-Romance varieties.
The explanation that French went through a period when its syntax became
strongly verb-second doesn’t sound especially convincing, given that other
Romance languages seem to have gone through a similar phase.

Wouldn’t the loss of rich agreement in the spoken verb, as the result of those
radical phonological changes during the Middle French period, have been
sufficient to trigger the change to a non-null subject type of language?

Thanks for your consideration.



Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics

Subject Language(s): French (fra)






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