Adjective positioning in French
Diachronic change and language contact
Abstract
The focus of this study is to trace the positionings of adjectives in French throughout time. Historical linguists claim that the most common position for adjectives in Old French and Middle French was pre-nominal (before the noun) but today, the most common position is post-nominal (after the noun). Though it is said that this pattern reversal happened in the 17th century, very few quantitative studies have been carried out to assess this. What is more, the situation of adjective positioning in French today is a little uncertain. Some claim that, because of contact with English, adjectives are now more likely to follow the English pattern and are being placed more often before the noun. Though this has been tested a few times, the results are often inconclusive. Thus, my goal is to contribute data to both questions with two corpus studies. The first, based on texts ranging from the 14th to the 21st centuries, shows a decline in pre-nominal adjectives throughout time, with the 17th century being the turning point. The second study shows that texts that reflect contact with English will place adjectives, especially adjectives of subjective evaluation, pre-nominally more often than texts that do not reflect such contact.Keywords
adjective positioning, historical linguistics, language contact, word orderReferences
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