RoLinC talk: Pierre Larrivée

Speaker: Pierre Larrivée (Université de Caen Normandie)

Title: Subject inversion in the history of Gascon

Date/Time: 3 March, 2-3pm

Location: Zoom (Please register here  for the link)

Abstract

Gascon is a distinct variety in the Occitan continuum which has largely been understudied, especially where its syntax is concerned (an opinion shared by Sibille and Bach 2024). The received wisdom is that Gascon is a V2 language with null subjects of the consistent type, and that it was always thus (Ledgeway 2020, Vance et al 2010). This would lead to expect that the subject when expressed would be consistently found in a post-verbal position with a verb preceded by some other XP. The status of the post-verbal subject in Gascon is here investigated. The investigation is conducted in corpus CorAG, that contains calibrated legal texts representative of the language for the 13th and 15th centuries (Glessgen 2021). Exploiting the fully UD-annotated corpus, a treebank approach is used, with special attention to the clause-type distribution, and subject-type (noun vs. personal pronoun) of subject inversion. Concerning the time variable, we find that there is a rise of subject inversion in the 15th century as compared to the 13th. Regarding the clausal asymmetry, distribution is significantly greater in main clauses, and the differential between main and embedded increases from the 13th to the 15th century. On the configuration where inversion is found, it is noteworthy that V1 contexts seem rare. On subject type, inversion involves mostly the noun (phrase), and are rare with personal pronouns, except when the enunciative particle is intervening. The preliminary results suggest that the Gascon data is convergent with a V2 analysis, although of a relaxed nature: there appears to be a sizable proportion of V3, and the enunciative particle can but need not to trigger inversion. It is discussed whether inversion derives from a verb in a high position, or a subject in a low position (as per e.g. Pinzin and Poletto 2025). Future topics that the work invites relate to identifying the type of verbs and the potential influence of inaccusatives for inversion, the interaction between the realization of particle que and subject position, that with enclisis, the role of the weight of the subject, and whether preverbal subjects are indicative of a V2 or SVO structure