Information structure, syntax and sociolinguistics through the history of French

Thesis

This thesis examines the impact of information-structural and social factors on syntactic change in declarative main clauses in the history of French. It provides a novel perspective on French historical syntax by synthesising methodologies from historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics with the cartographic approach to syntax across an extensive timespan, from the earliest texts to the contemporary spoken language. The thesis employs a wide variety of corpora and texts from varied registers and genres, including works of less-educated authors, alongside 17th-century metalinguistic texts, to provide a highly varied dataset through which examples of syntactic change are studied.

Through three case studies: post-verbal subjects, left and right dislocations and clefts, the thesis shows that information-structural and social factors have a crucial role to play in syntactic change. In each case study, we analyse the frequency of the construction across our dataset, assessing the impact of so-called external factors on syntactic variation and change. The thesis presents a qualitative cartographic analysis of the construction in question and its developments over the history of the language, with a particular focus on information-structural functions. Finally, the thesis concludes by contextualising these analyses with a discussion of the wider literature on information structure and syntactic change in French: it shows that the cartographic approach provides a powerful framework through which to analyse the role of information structure in syntactic change. However, in each case, external factors also play a considerable role, with social factors often mediating micro- and nano-parametric variation in a change in progress. Overall, the thesis shows that both external and internal factors must be considered to form an accurate description of a given syntactic change.

Authors: Shaw, W

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nrkegmxdv
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: information structure; syntax; sociolinguistics; historical sociolinguistics; French historical syntax
• Subjects: Corpora (Linguistics); Historical linguistics; French language--Syntax