Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | Modelling historical changes as information theoretic tradeoffs. Morphological impoverishment and word order fixation in the history of French |
| Conférencier | Benoît Crabbé (INRIA/Paris 7) |
| Date | mardi 21 avril 2015 |
| Heure | 12h15 |
| Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) |
| Description |
(this is joint work with Alexandra Simonenko and Sophie Prevost)
In this talk, we report the first results of a large scale observational study on the evolution of French syntax across its history. We try to provide new empirical observations to the understanding of the origins of word order fixation in Modern French. Taking advantage of the large MCVF treebank of historical French, we will show that :
(1) it is very unlikely that the loss of nominal case marking is the sole source of word order fixation in Modern French
(2) word order was already weakly used for the identification of grammatical roles in Old French.
(3) modern SVO order is likely to be partly caused, or accelerated, by the loss of the the pro-drop feature in the transition from Old French to Modern French.
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| Document(s) joint(s) |
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