Obviation and Old French Subjunctive Clauses

Document Type

Book Section

Publication Date

3-19-2019

Publication Title

Contributions of Romance Languages to Current Linguistic Theory

Publisher

Springer

Volume

95

First page number:

203

Last page number:

229

Abstract

Obviation, or the fact that the subject of the subjunctival subordinate clause cannot be coreferential with the subject of the main clause, as seen by the French example, *je veux que je parte ‘I want that I leave’ (cf. Ruwet 1984), is a topic that has been discussed widely in the literature, especially for the Romance languages, including Catalan (Picallo 1985), French (Jackubowicz 1985), Old French (Martineau 1994; Arteaga 2015), Italian (Costantini 2005, 2016), Portuguese (Raposo 1987), Romanian (Farkas 1984), and Spanish (Kempchinsky 2009). This chapter considers the lack of obviation in Old French. After reviewing analyses proposing that obviation effects are related to tense construal in the subordinate clause, it is proposed that the analyses in San Martín (2007) and Laskova (2017) can be adapted to account for the lack of obviation effects in Old French and Romanian. Our analysis is an extension of Arteaga (2015), in that it is valid cross-linguistically and does not rely on the morphological development from Old French to Modern French.

Keywords

Old french; Obviation; Sequence of tense; Binding theory; Bulgarian

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | French and Francophone Language and Literature

Language

English

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