A diachronic consequence of intransitivity: structural underspecification and processing biases in Old French

Abstract

Abstract The present study examines the diachronic consequence of a class of words that are superficially intransitive but that often have more than one possible underlying representation. We consider the hypothesis that structural underspecification and structure-based economy constraints on processing may drive a well-studied syntactic change in medieval French: the loss of directional/aspectual verb particles. A corpus-based approach demonstrates that, despite the prominence of Old French verb particles in the expression of motion events, they frequently occur in underspecified contexts for which a prepositional parse involving an implicit object is favored. The net result is very sparse unambiguous evidence for the conservative Old French grammar that underlies the particles.