Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 16:2 (2015) ► pp.159–186

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Discourse functions of subject left dislocation in Old Occitan

 | University of California, Santa Cruz
Published online: 28 January 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.16.2.01don
This paper reports an empirical study of the discourse-pragmatic functions of subject left dislocation (LD) in Old Occitan. Data come from the complete troubadour biographies, in which the most common manifestation of subject LD is a nominal subject + sentence adverb si + verb, as in “Bertrans de Born si fo uns castellans” [Bertran de Born was a nobleman]. Whereas previous accounts fail to integrate syntax with discourse-pragmatic function, these results reveal the importance of both in explaining the occurrence of subject LD. Using recent approaches to the clausal left periphery (e.g., Benincà 2006), I distinguish LD subjects from conventional (i.e., non-dislocated) pre-verbal subjects. Next, following Fleischman’s (1991) analysis of si in Old French, I illustrate how subject LD structures the flow of information in discourse. In particular, subject LD marks a constituent as a discourse topic and can also introduce a new referent into the discourse and thereby mark it as topical.
References (79)
Akehurst, F. Ron P. 2010. The Costuma d’Agen: A Thirteenth-Century Customary Compilation in Old Occitan. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boutière, Jean. 1964. Biographies des troubadours: Textes provençaux des XIIIe et XIVe siècles. Paris: A.-G. Nizet.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gout, Raoul. 1927. La vie de Sainte Douceline. Paris: Ars et Fides.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Palermo, Joseph. 1963. Le roman de Cassidorus. Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schneegans, Friedrich Eduard. 1898. Gesta Karoli Magni ad Carcassonam et Narbonam. Halle: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Adams, Marianne. 1987. “From Old French to the Theory of Pro-Drop”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5 (1): 1–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Alibèrt, Loís. 2000. Gramatica occitana segon los parlars lengadocians [Occitan grammar based Languedoc varieties]. (Second edn). Toulouse: Institut d’Estudis Occitans.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anagnostopoulou, Elena. 1997. “Clitic Left Dislocation and Contrastive Left Dislocation”. In Elena Anagnostopoulou, Henk van Riemsdijk and Frans Zwarts (eds), Materials on Left Dislocation, 151–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anglade, Joseph. 1963. Grammaire de l’ancien provençal ou ancienne langue d’oc. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ashby, William J. 1988. “The Syntax, Pragmatics, and Sociolinguistics of Left- and Right-Dislocations in French”. Lingua 75 (2–3): 203–29. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bec, Pierre. 1995. La langue occitane. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benincà, Paola. 1995. “Complement Clitics in Medieval Romance: The Tobler-Mussafia Law”. In Adrian Battya and Ian Roberts (eds), Clause Structure and Language Change, 325–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. “A Detailed Map of the Left Periphery of Medieval Romance”. In Rafaella Zanuttini, Héctor Campos, Elena Herburger and Paul H. Portner (eds), Crosslinguistic Research in Syntax and Semantics: Negation, Tense, and Clausal Architecture, 53–86. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Besten, Hans den. 1983. “On the Interaction of Root Transformations and Lexical Deletive Rules”. In Werner Abraham (ed.) On the Formal Syntax of the Westgermania, 47–131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bocchi, Andrea. 2004. “‘Sì’ nel ‘Livero de l’abbecho.’” In Michelangelo Zaccarello and Lorenzo Tomasin (eds), Storia della lingua et filologia, 121–59. Florence: Sismel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Buridant, Claude. 2000. Grammaire nouvelle de l’ancien français. Paris: Sedes.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna. 2004. “Towards a Cartography of Syntactic Positions”. In Luigi Rizzi (ed.), The Structure of CP and IP: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, 115–65. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
de Cat, Cécile. 2007. French Dislocation: Interpretation, Syntax, Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Combettes, Bernard. 1971. “Remarques sur la structure grammaticale et l’organisation thématique de la phrase dans les vies de troubadours”. In Actes du VIe congrès international de langue et littérature d’oc et d’études franco-provençales, 293–308. Montpellier: Centre d’Estudis Occitans.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Donaldson, Bryan. 2012. “Initial Subordinate Clauses in Old French: Syntactic Variation and the Clausal Left Periphery”. Lingua 122 (9): 1021–46. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. Forthcoming. “Preverbal Subjects, Information Structure, and Object Clitic Position in Old Occitan”. Journal of Linguistics.
Egan, Margarita. 1984. The Vidas of the Troubadours. New York: Garland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ferraresi, Gisella and Maria Goldbach. 2002. “V2 Syntax and Topicalization in Old French”. Linguistische Berichte 1891: 2–25.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1990. Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1991. “Discourse Pragmatics and the Grammar of Old French: A Functional Reinterpretation of si and the Personal Pronouns”. Romance Philology 44 (3): 251–83.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fontana, Josep M. 1993. Phrase Structure and the Syntax of Clitics in the History of Spanish. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foulet, Lucien. 1928. Petite syntaxe de l’ancien français. Paris: Honoré Champion.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frascarelli, Mara. 2007. “Subjects, Topics, and the Interpretation of Referential pro: An Interface Approach to the Linking of Null Pronouns”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 25 (4): 691–734. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hamlin, Frank R., Peter T. Ricketts and John Hathaway. 1967. Introduction à l’étude de l’ancien provençal. Geneva: Librairie Droz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Härmä, Juhani. 1990. “Les constructions disloquées en ancien français: problèmes de définition et de délimitation”. In Georges Kleiber and Jean-Emmanuel Tyvaert (eds), L’anaphore et ses domaines, 159–82. Metz: Presses de l’Université de Metz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herman, Josef. 1954. “Recherches sur l’ordre des mots dans les plus anciens textes français en prose”. Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 41: 69–93, 351–79.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hinzelin, Marc-Olivier. 2007. Die Stellung der klitischen Objektpronomina in den romanischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holmberg, Anders. 2014. “Verb Second”. In Tibor Kiss and Artemis Alexiadou (eds), Syntax: An International Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Research, 343–84. Second edn. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jensen, Frede. 1972. From Vulgar Latin to Old Provençal. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1983. Provençal Philology and the Poetry of Guillaume of Poitiers. Odense: Odense University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1986. The Syntax of Medieval Occitan. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. Syntaxe de l’ancien occitan. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kunert, Hans P. 2003. “L’ordine degli elementi della frase in occitano antico”. Romanische Forschungen 115 (2): 194–209.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Labelle, Marie. 2007. “Clausal Architecture in Early Old French”. Lingua 117 (1): 289–316. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. “Dislocation”. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher and Wolfgang Raible (eds), Language Typology and Language Universals, 1050–78. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ledgeway, Adam. 2008. “Satisfying V2 in Early Romance: Merge vs. Move”. Journal of Linguistics 44 (2): 437–70. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Marchello-Nizia, Christiane. 1985. Dire le vrai: L’adverbe “si” en français medieval – essai de linguistique historique. Geneva: Librairie Droz.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. “Dislocations en ancien français: Thématisation ou rhématisation?” [Dislocations in Old French: Topicalization or focalization?]. Cahiers de Praxématique 30: 161–78. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mathieu, Eric. 2013. “The Left-Periphery in Old French”. In Deborah Arteaga (ed.), Research on Old French: The State of the Art, 327–50. Berlin: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Melander, Johan. 1943. “Le tour français Cet homme, je le connais ”. Studia Neophilologica 16 (2–3): 195–200. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ménard, Philippe. 1994. Syntaxe de l’ancien français. Pompignac, France: Editions Bière.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ochs Keenan, Elinor and Bambi Schieffelin. 1976. “Foregrounding Referents: A Reconsideration of Left Dislocation in Discourse”. In Henry Thompson et al. (eds), Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 240–57. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paden, William D. 1998. An Introduction to Old Occitan. New York: Modern Language Association of America.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia. 2005. “ Sì and e as CP Expletives in Old Italian”. In Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz, Carme Picallo and Francesc Roca (eds), Grammaticalization and Parametric Variation, 206–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poole, Geoffrey. 2006. “Interpolation and the Left Periphery in Old Spanish”. Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 12–13: 188–216.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Posner, Rebecca. 1996. The Romance Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Priestley, Leonard. 1950. “Reprise Constructions in the ‘Song of Roland.’” Archivum Linguisticum 2 (2): 144–57.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1955. “Reprise Constructions in French”. Archivum Linguisticum 7 (1): 1–28.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1997. “On the Functions of Left-Dislocation in English Discourse”. In Akio Kamio (ed.), Directions in Functional Linguistics, 117–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Raynaud de Lage, Guy. 1962. Introduction à l’ancien français. Paris: Société d’Edition d’Enseignement Supérieur.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reenen, Pieter van and Lene Schøsler. 1992. “Ancien et moyen français: si ‘thématique’—analyse exhaustive d’une série de textes”. Vox Romanica 511: 101–27.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reinhart, Tanya. 1981. “Pragmatics and Linguistics: An Analysis of Sentence Topics”. Philosophica 27 (1): 53–94.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ribeiro, Ilza. 1995. “Evidence for a Verb-Second Phrase in Old Portuguese”. In Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts (eds), Clause Structure and Language Change, 110–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery”. In Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of Grammar, 281–337. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roberts, Ian. 1993. Verbs and Diachronic Syntax: A Comparative History of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Agreement and Head Movement: Clitics, Incorporation, and Defective Goals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rohlfs, Gerhard. 1970. From Vulgar Latin to Old French: An Introduction to the Study of the Old French Language. Trans. by Vincent Almazan and Lillian McCarthy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Romieu, Maurice and André Bianchi. 2002. Iniciacion a l’occitan ancian: dètz e nòu tèxtes de l’Edat Mejana comentats. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Salvesen, Christine M. 2013. “Topics and the Left Periphery: A Comparison of Old French and Modern Germanic”. In Terje Lohndal (ed.), In Search of Universal Grammar: From Old Norse to Zoque, 131–72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Salvi, Giampaolo. 2000. “La formazione del sistema V2 delle lingue romanze antiche”. Lingua e Stile 35 (4): 665–92.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sauzet, Patrick. 1989. “Topicalisation et prolepse en occitan”. Revue des Langues Romanes 43 (2): 235–73.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schutz, Alexander H. 1938. “Where Were the Provençal Vidas and Razos Written?” Modern Philology 351: 225–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1939. “Were the Vidas and Razos Recited?” Studies in Philology 36 (4): 565–70.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sitaridou, Ioanna. 2005. “A Corpus-Based Study of Null Subjects in Old French and Old Occitan”. In Claus D. Pusch, Johannes Kabatek and Wolfgang Raible (eds), Romance Corpus Linguistics II: Corpora and Diachronic Linguistics, 359–74. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Skårup, Povl. 1975. “Les premières zones de la proposition en ancien français: essai de syntaxe de position”. Copenhaguen: Akademisk Forlag. (Études Romanes [Revue Romane numéro spécial] 6).
Smith, Nathaniel B. and Thomas G. Bergin. 1984. An Old Provençal Primer. New York: Garland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2007. “Old English Left-Dislocations: Their Structure and Information Status”. Folia Linguistica 41 (3–4): 405–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vance, Barbara. 1997. Syntactic Change in Medieval French: Verb-Second and Null Subjects. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vanelli, Laura, Lorenzo Renzi and Paola Benincà. 1985. “Typologie des pronoms sujets dans les langues romanes”. In Actes du XVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes 3, 161–76. Aix: Université de Provence.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wheeler, Max. 1988. “Occitan”. In Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent (eds), The Romance Languages, 246–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Wolfe, Sam
2018. Occitan, verb second and the Medieval Romance word order debate. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 13 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 13], ► pp. 315 ff. DOI logo
DONALDSON, BRYAN
2016. Preverbal subjects, information structure, and object clitic position in Old Occitan. Journal of Linguistics 52:1 ► pp. 37 ff. DOI logo
Donaldson, Bryan
2019. The Variable Position of Initial Subordinate Clauses in Old French: Arguments Against a Semantic Account. In Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 95], ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue