1. 0. V2 AND NULL SUBJECTS IN THE HIS TORY OF FRENCH The
prototypical Romance null subject language has certain well known
characteristics: verbal inflection is rich, distinguishing six per
sonlnumber forms; subject pronouns are generally emphatic; and,
when there is no need to emphasize the subject, the pronoun is not
expressed at all. Spanish and Italian, for example, fit this
description rather weIl. Modem French, however, provides a striking
contrast to these lan guages; it does not allow subjects to be
missing and, not unexpectedly, it has a verbal agreement system
with few overt endings and subject pronouns which are not emphatic.
One of the goals of the present work is to examine null subjects in
two dialects of Romance that fit neither the Italian nor the French
model: later Old French (12th-13th centriries) and MiddIe French
(14th- 15th centuries). Old French has null subjects only in
contexts where the subject would be postverbal if expressed (cf.
Foulet (1928)), and Mid dIe French has null subjects in a wider
range of syntactic contexts but does not freely allow a11 persons
of the verb to be null. The work of Vanelli, Renzi and Beninca
(1985) (along with many other works by these authors individually)
shows that a number of other geographically proximate medieval
dialects had similar systems, though it appears that there are
significant differences in detail among them."
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