Syntactic Change in French

This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It makes use of the latest formal syntactic tools and combines careful textual analysis with a detailed synthesis of the research literature to provide a novel analysis of the major syntactic developments in the history of French. The empirical scope of the volume is exceptionally broad, and includes discussion of syntactic variation and change in Latin, Old, Middle, Renaissance, and Classical French, and standard and non-standard varieties of Modern French. Following an introduction to the general trends in grammatical change from Latin to French, Sam Wolfe explores a wide range of phenomena including the left periphery, subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, negation, and the makeup of the nominal expression. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of how French has come to develop the unique typological profile it has within Romance today. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and comparative Romance linguistics, as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory and historical linguistics more broadly.

Sam Wolfe, Associate Professor of French Linguistics, University of Oxford

Sam Wolfe is Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Official Fellow of St Catherine’s College, having previously held teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. His first book, Verb Second in Medieval Romance, was published by OUP
in 2019, and he is the co-editor, with Rebecca Woods, of Rethinking Verb Second (OUP 2020) and, with Martin Maiden, of Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar (OUP 2020). The focus of his current research is syntactic change in French, closely related Gallo-Romance varieties, and Northern
Italian Dialects.