Section: New Results

Word order variation in Old French

Participants : Benoit Crabbé, Alexandra Simonenko, Benoît Sagot.

As participant of the strand Experimental Grammar of the Labex EFL project Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (www.labex-efl.org ) we study word order issues on Old French and more specifically the relative ordering of complements of ditransitive verbs. The inquiry seeks to identify several factors influencing the ordering of Old French complementation in different texts (varying in dates and genres) by carrying quantitative and statistical work from annotated Old French data. (SRCMF corpus: http://srcmf.org/ ; MCVF: http://www.voies.uottawa.ca )

The quantitative results will be compared with what is known from corpus studies on the relative ordering of subject and complement in Old French [90] . It will also be compared to the quantitative results obtained on the relative ordering of complements of ditransitive verbs in Modern French [8] and modern English [64] . This comparative perspective is expected to provide new insights on French language evolution.