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On bare subject relative clauses in Old French

  • Deborah Arteaga
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Romance Linguistics 2010
This chapter is in the book Romance Linguistics 2010

Abstract

This paper considers restrictive relatives in OF, of the type Car ne voi tertrenen soeit rases “For I see no small hill (that) is not razed to the ground”. We note that unlike MF, in OF, the relative pronoun qui could be unexpressed in such structures. OF bare subject relatives, we argue, are not instances of parataxis, or a juxtaposition of two independent clauses, because the syntactic characteristics which such an analysis presumes are lacking in OF. For similar reasons (cf. Arteaga 2009), we also reject a CP analysis of bare subject restrictive relative clauses in favor of an IP analysis in which no null relative is proposed. Following (Trihn 2009), we adopt a copy account of these constructions, part of a general rule of syntactic derivation. This, combined with feature checking, required within Minimalism, allows us to derive bare subject relatives in OF.

Abstract

This paper considers restrictive relatives in OF, of the type Car ne voi tertrenen soeit rases “For I see no small hill (that) is not razed to the ground”. We note that unlike MF, in OF, the relative pronoun qui could be unexpressed in such structures. OF bare subject relatives, we argue, are not instances of parataxis, or a juxtaposition of two independent clauses, because the syntactic characteristics which such an analysis presumes are lacking in OF. For similar reasons (cf. Arteaga 2009), we also reject a CP analysis of bare subject restrictive relative clauses in favor of an IP analysis in which no null relative is proposed. Following (Trihn 2009), we adopt a copy account of these constructions, part of a general rule of syntactic derivation. This, combined with feature checking, required within Minimalism, allows us to derive bare subject relatives in OF.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Foreword and acknowledgements ix
  4. Editor’s introduction xi
  5. Theory and practice in Romance linguistics today 1
  6. Part I. Morphophonology
  7. On the origins of /ɨ/ in Romanian 17
  8. An acoustic investigation of nasal place neutralization in Spanish 33
  9. An acoustic study of rhotics in onset clusters in La Rioja 49
  10. Mid front vowel lowering before rhotics in Ibero-Romance 63
  11. Plural formation in Galician 79
  12. Part II. Syntax
  13. On bare subject relative clauses in Old French 101
  14. Directed motion in Medieval French 117
  15. An ergative analysis of French valency alternations 137
  16. Peninsular Spanish pre-nominal possessives in ellipsis contexts 155
  17. On the nature of nominal features 177
  18. On the nature of bare nouns in Afro-Bolivian Spanish 191
  19. Negative imperatives in Portuguese and other Romance languages 205
  20. Part III. Semantic interfaces
  21. Another look at Italian generic sentences 223
  22. The agreement of collective DPS in Romanian 239
  23. A multidominance account for conjoined questions in Romanian 257
  24. The Romanian verbal cluster and the theory of head movement 271
  25. New challenges in the area of semantic dependencies 287
  26. Polarity particles in English and Romanian 303
  27. Index 329
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.318.07art

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents vii
  3. Foreword and acknowledgements ix
  4. Editor’s introduction xi
  5. Theory and practice in Romance linguistics today 1
  6. Part I. Morphophonology
  7. On the origins of /ɨ/ in Romanian 17
  8. An acoustic investigation of nasal place neutralization in Spanish 33
  9. An acoustic study of rhotics in onset clusters in La Rioja 49
  10. Mid front vowel lowering before rhotics in Ibero-Romance 63
  11. Plural formation in Galician 79
  12. Part II. Syntax
  13. On bare subject relative clauses in Old French 101
  14. Directed motion in Medieval French 117
  15. An ergative analysis of French valency alternations 137
  16. Peninsular Spanish pre-nominal possessives in ellipsis contexts 155
  17. On the nature of nominal features 177
  18. On the nature of bare nouns in Afro-Bolivian Spanish 191
  19. Negative imperatives in Portuguese and other Romance languages 205
  20. Part III. Semantic interfaces
  21. Another look at Italian generic sentences 223
  22. The agreement of collective DPS in Romanian 239
  23. A multidominance account for conjoined questions in Romanian 257
  24. The Romanian verbal cluster and the theory of head movement 271
  25. New challenges in the area of semantic dependencies 287
  26. Polarity particles in English and Romanian 303
  27. Index 329
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