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Article published In: Journal of Historical Linguistics
Vol. 10:3 (2020) ► pp.389–426

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Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated by e

A variationist analysis

 | University of California
Published online: 8 December 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.19002.don
Abstract
This paper offers a variationist analysis of object and adverbial clitic position in coordinated affirmative verb-first main declaratives introduced by e(t) “and” in Old Occitan. In this context, clitics occur in either preverbal (e·l vestit “and clothed him”) or postverbal position (e perdonet li “and pardoned him”). Following recent work on Medieval Romance coordination, I posit that proclitic and enclitic examples reflect different coordination structures at the underlying syntactic level. Data from complete analyses of five major 13th- and 14th-century texts, analyzed in a variationist approach using logistic regression, reveal that the choice between coordination structures – and hence, between proclisis and enclisis – is principled rather than random and depends on the degree of continuity or rupture/discontinuity between the conjuncts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Clitic placement in OOc
  • 3.Verb-second and generative analyses of medieval Romance and clitic position
    • 3.1Verb-second
    • 3.2Tobler-Mussafia revisited
    • 3.3Generative studies of coordination in medieval Romance
    • 3.4Proposal
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Overview
    • 5.2Main declaratives
    • 5.3Subordinate clauses
    • 5.4Rupture between conjuncts
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • Secondary sources
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Donaldson, Bryan
2021. Clause Structure and Illocutionary Force in Medieval Gallo-Romance: Clitic Position in Old Occitan and Early Old French Sentential Coordination. Probus 33:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Donaldson, Bryan
2021. Clause Structure and Illocutionary Force in Medieval Gallo-Romance: Clitic Position in Old Occitan and Early Old French Sentential Coordination. Probus 33:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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