Infinitive fronting as a transparency effect in Old and Middle French

In this article, we present a novel analysis of infinitive fronting in Old and Middle French (9th-16th century). We find that in sentences with modal verbs and clitic climbing, the infinitive may either follow the main verb or precede it. When the subject of the main verb is overt and the infinitive is fronted, the order is SUBJ-VINF-VFIN. Moreover, we find that the object of the fronted infinitive either cliticises onto the main verb (i.e. clitic climbing) or moves as a full DP with the infinitive, in which case the order is SUBJ-OBJ-VINF-VFIN. We compare our data to Stylistic Fronting, and we show that infinitive fronting in Old and Middle French is a different mechanism. Our analysis takes infinitive fronting to be vP-movement to Spec,TP, an operation which patterns alongside other Transparency Effects. Therefore, infinitive fronting provides further evidence for monoclausal restructuring in earlier French

Clitic climbing and restructuring in the history of French

This paper constitutes an empirical investigation into the diachrony of clitic climbing (and consequently restructuring) in French based on data from a novel corpus of legal texts, as well as a theoretical analysis of the loss of this phenomenon from the history of French. We show that clitic climbing was obligatory until the Middle French period, until its eventual loss before the start of the 19th century. Assuming that clitics are φ-heads that AGREE with v, we take restructuring to be monoclausal, despite apparent counterevidence where a subordinator or a Wh-item intervenes. We propose that restructuring is a necessary but not sufficient condition to clitic climbing, the latter depending on whether the upper v-head bears a set of unvalued φ-features. We associate the loss of clitic climbing to the loss of interpolation (i.e. the order [clitic-XP-V]), as we show that both constructions are available when cliticisation is a phonological mechanism only. In Modern French however, clitics are necessarily proclitic and verb-adjacent which indicates that cliticisation is syntactic. Lastly, we propose that French never lost restructuring, but instead it lost most transparency effects associated with it (such as clitic climbing), while retaining others (such as long passives and quantifier climbing)

Clitic Left Dislocation in Absence of Clitics: a Study in Trilingual Acquisition

This paper discusses an unusual structure in the English of a trilingual child acquiring English, Italian and Scottish Gaelic. The child uses a structure where it appears that an object DP is “dou-bled” by a pronoun for an extended period of time (10 months): (1) He don\u27t like it dinosaur (2) He forget it the teddy In Italian, sentences that contain old information take two possible structures: they might contain a left dislocated topic resumed by a clitic: (3) Il libro, l\u27ho letto the book it-have.1SG read \u27The book, I have read it\u27 These are called Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) structures in the literature. Alternatively, the topic (the given information) can be introduced as a right dislocated element, again linked to a clitic: (4) L\u27ho letto, il libro It-have.1SG read the book ‘I have read it, the book’ These are called clitic right dislocation (CLRD) structures. The structures produced in English by the subject of this study seem to be similar in some fundamental ways to this second kind of topi-calisation strategy. We suggest that this reflects a deep: transfer of CLRD structures from Italian, even though at the stage when the doubling structures occur, there is no evidence of overt clitics in the child’s Italian. Our paper contributes to the debate in the literature concerning the existence or not of some form of transfer in multilingual acquisitio