Clitic placement with infinitives in the diachrony of French: from enclisis to proclisis

Conference item

This article presents an analysis of the evolution of clitic placement with infinitives in French. Quantitative data taken from a corpus covering French from the mid-12th to the mid-19th century show that enclisis is found until the first half of the 14th century. From a formal standpoint, I provide evidence in favour of the hypothesis that this word order connects to V-movement of the infinitive to the IP-domain. I argue that this operation is driven by the richness of tense inflection, specifically the expression of the /r/ morpheme which is completely lost during the 14th century. The empirical picture further contributes to the debate on the locus of cliticisation, for which I propose a refined distinction between phonological and syntactic cliticisation. The last part of the paper presents evidence for a pronominal tripartition in Middle French, which shows a failed change. The article concludes on how morphophonology is a window to the acquisition of syntactic operations.

Authors: Olivier, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Journal of Historical Syntax
• Host title: Proceedings of the 23rd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference
• Journal: Journal of Historical Syntax
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 2-10
• Pages: 1–45
• Article number: 7
• Publication date: 2025-02-04
• Acceptance date: 2025-02-04
• Event title: 23rd Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference
• Event location: New York, NY, USA
• Event website: https://wp.nyu.edu/digs23/
• Event start date: 2022-06-08
• Event end date: 2022-06-10
• DOI: 10.18148/hs/2025.v9i2-10.212
• EISSN: 2163-6001
• Language: English
• Keywords: clitics; verb placement; clitic placement; infinitives; language change; Old French