On bare subject relative clauses in Old French

This paper considers restrictive relatives in OF, of the type Car ne voi tertre nen soeit rases “For I see no small hill (that) is not razed to the ground”. We note that unlike MF, in OF, the relative pronoun qui could be unexpressed in such structures. OF bare subject relatives, we argue, are not instances of parataxis, or a juxtaposition of two independent clauses, because the syntactic characteristics which such an analysis presumes are lacking in OF. For similar reasons (cf. Arteaga 2009), we also reject a CP analysis of bare subject restrictive relative clauses in favor of an IP analysis in which no null relative is proposed. Following (Trihn 2009), we adopt a copy account of these constructions, part of a general rule of syntactic derivation. This, combined with feature checking, required within Minimalism, allows us to derive bare subject relatives in OF.

Published online: 30 November 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.318.07art