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Article published In:
Transitivity and Valency: From theory to acquisition
Edited by Georgia Fotiadou and Hélène Vassiliadou
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes 40:1] 2017
► pp. 59–80

On, Se and related valency alternations in Medieval French

| Universität Salzburg

This article explores the question of why Medieval French does not use se-constructions as exhaustively as other Medieval Romance varieties and why the indefinite pronoun on is clearly the preferred choice. It is claimed that se exhibits affix-like behavior in passive constructions and that it is very likely to be a morphological exponent of absorbing the [+Def] feature on T in IACs. These assumptions are connected to the possibility within a language system to store affixes as independent lexical entries, following Speas, 1995. It will be shown that Medieval French seems to be a language system in flux in which signs of NSL > non-NSL were present over a longer period of time. The uncertain status of affixes within these radical changes would have prompted learners to go for a multifunctional solution that is readily available and unequivocally identifiable: on.

Keywords: on , se , pro-drop, syntax, Medieval French, Medieval Spanish, valency
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1. Se in MF – new data
    • 1.1Anticausatives and passive se
    • 1.2The passive > impersonal active shift
  • 2.A successfully competing construction from the beginning: on
  • 3. Se as an affix, pro-drop and why learners opted for on
    • 3.1The status of se
    • 3.2The role of pro-drop
    • 3.3MF as a language system in flux and why learners opted for on
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.40.1.04wol
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