Content area
Full Text
*
Sophie Prévost's affiliation has been corrected and funding sources have been added to the acknowledgments. An addendum detailing this change has also been published (doi: 10.1017/S0954394519000267).
This work has been supported by the Labex EFL and Research Foundation Flanders. The authors are very thankful to three anonymous reviewers of Language Variation and Change for extremely helpful comments. We would like to express our deep gratitude to Yves Charles Morin, Henri Kauhanen, George Walkden, Paul Hirschbühler, Philippe Schlenker, and Hedde Zeijlstra for discussions and suggestions. The project has benefited from the feedback from the audiences at WCCFL 34, DiGS 2016, XLanS: Triggers of language change in the Language Sciences, workshop Linguistic Knowledge & Patterns of Variation, Texts, Tools, and workshop Methods in Digital Classics and Medieval Studies, seminars at Institut Jean Nicod, Université Diderot Paris 7, and the University of Manchester. The first author acknowledges the support of the Research Foundation Flanders. The work of the third author has been supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d'Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université de Paris - ANR-18-IDEX-0001.
This paper examines the nature of the relation between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Taraldsen, 1980), from the point of view of grammar change in Medieval French. The original generalization based on synchronic observations states that a language having sufficiently discriminating, or nonsyncretic, subject agreement entails the possibility of nonexpression of subjects. In terms of diachronic developments, it was argued that there is a causal relation between the loss of nonsyncretic subject agreement and the emergence of obligatory subject pronouns (e.g., Ewert, 1943; Vennemann, 1975:298), the underlying intuition being that overt subjects take over the role of identifying the subject's person which can no longer be fulfilled by verbal inflection due to its phonological erosion. Haspelmath (1999:14) said that “… in languages that are losing their rich subject agreement morphology on the verb … speakers will increasingly tend to choose the option of using the personal pronoun, because the verbal agreement does not provide the information required for referent identification in a sufficiently robust way.”
This diachronic scenario,...