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This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It covers syntactic variation and change across all periods of French, and in standard and non-standard varieties, and explores phenomena such as subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, and negation.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Grammatical change from Latin to French
- 3: The left periphery
- 4: Verb placement and verb movement
- 5: The subject system
- 6: OV orders and the middlefield
- 7: A new perspective on syntactic change in French
About the author
Sam Wolfe is Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Official Fellow of St Catherine's College, having previously held teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. His first book, Verb Second in Medieval Romance, was published by OUP in 2019, and he is the co-editor, with Rebecca Woods, of Rethinking Verb Second (OUP 2020) and, with Martin Maiden, of Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar (OUP 2020). The focus of his current research is syntactic change in French, closely related Gallo-Romance varieties, and Northern Italian Dialects.
Summary
This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It covers syntactic variation and change across all periods of French, and in standard and non-standard varieties, and explores phenomena such as subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, and negation.
Additional text
Wolfe's new contribution to the history of French is undeniable and will surely be of interest not only to Romanists, but also to any generative linguist interested in language change, word order and syntax in general.
