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Null Objects in Old French

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Research on Old French: The State of the Art

Part of the book series: Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ((SNLT,volume 88))

Abstract

Despite claims to the contrary, it has been shown that a number of modern Romance varieties—including European and Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and French—allow omission of the object of a verb, even when the object has a definite referent. Taking as a point of departure Arteaga’s (On null objects in Old French. In: Schwegler A, Tranel B, Uribe-Etxebarria M (eds) Romance linguistics: theoretical perspectives. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 1–11, 1997) study of null objects in Old French, this paper discusses contexts in which null objects are attested in Old French, including some not discussed by Arteaga, and including instances of manuscript variation. In addition, drawing on recent theories of null objects, and using the nature of the antecedent to the null object as a diagnostic, it is proposed that Old French possessed both null pronominals and null variables. The wide range of contexts in which Old French evinced null objects is taken to suggest that the ability to license object drop is not an innovation in Modern or even Middle French. Given that null objects are also attested in Latin, the data point to the continual availability of object drop from the earliest stages of French to the modern language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Glosses follow the Leipzig glossing rules. A null object is represented with [e] following the verb of which it is an argument; null subjects are not indicated in the morpheme glosses but are indicated by an underlined position in the literal gloss.

  2. 2.

    Yaguello (1998) suggested that écrasement is less likely to occur with a [+human] than a [−human] referent, an observation that remains to be investigated in Old French.

  3. 3.

    In the following example, the antecedent (la vile ‘the city’) of the null object in the second sentence is not the direct object of a prior verb but rather the object of a preposition:

    Lors sejorna   l’empereres               Henri    par cinq jorz,                    et puis chevaucha

    Then stayed-3-sg the-sg.emperor-m-sg-nom Henry for     five days-m-pl and then rode-3-sg

    trosque à la    cité   del    Dimot, por savoir   coment ele    ere

    until   to the-f-sg city-f-sg of-art-m-sg Dimot  for know-inf how  it-f-sg-nom was-3-sg

    abattue,     et  se on           la    porroit  refermer.  Et   se

    destroyed-f-ptcp and if one-3-sg-nom-indf it-f-sg-acc could-3-sg repair-inf and 3-sg-refl

    loja     devant   la   vile,   et vit,    et           il       et  si

    camped-3-sg in.front.of the-f-sg city-f-sg and saw-3-sg and he-3-m-sg-nom and his-3-pl-poss

    baron,      que il       n’estoit   mie leus    de fermer   en

    barons-m-pl-nom that it-3-m-sg-nom neg.was-3-sg neg place-m-sg of secure-inf [e] in

    tel    point.

    this-m-sg condition-m-sg

    ‘Then the emperor Henry stayed for five days, and then (he) rode as far as the city of Dimot, to see how it had been destroyed, and if one could refortify it. And (he) camped in front of the city and saw, he and his barons, that there was no place to secure __ in this condition.’ (Villehardouin, Conquête de Constantinople, §449)

    By way of contrast, note the expressed object la ‘it’ in the final se clause of the first sentence.

  4. 4.

    Modern French similarly allows LDs with or without a resumptive pronoun in wh-interrogatives, as in Jean-Claude, quand est-ce que tu l’as vu? ‘Jean-Claude, when did you see him?’ and Le chianti, qui aime? ‘Chianti, who likes?’ The second example, however, appears to be less acceptable for some speakers.

  5. 5.

    Arteaga’s (1997) analysis, following Cecchetto (1997), predicts that LDs will not appear with a resumptive pronoun in Old French. Further investigation of this point is left for future work.

  6. 6.

    I follow Roberts (1993) in analyzing these examples as LDs and not stylistic inversion.

  7. 7.

    There need not be an exact correspondence between a constituent’s discourse function and the functional projection in which it is situated (e.g., a topic in TopicP); what is important is that the LD is in a leftward (A-bar) position, as evidenced by the presence of a focus element in COMP.

  8. 8.

    An anonymous reviewer inquires how the arbitrary human null object has evolved dioachronically. The present research is restricted to the Old French period; future research is warranted to trace the development of the possibilities attested in Modern French (see examples 1, 3).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge Barbara Vance, Laurent Dekydtspotter, Julie Auger, Michael Johnson, the audiences at the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (University of Utah) and the University of Texas at Austin, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. All errors and shortcomings are my own.

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  1. Department of French and Italian, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

    Bryan Donaldson

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    Deborah L. Arteaga

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Donaldson, B. (2013). Null Objects in Old French. In: Arteaga, D. (eds) Research on Old French: The State of the Art. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4768-5_4

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