Change of Object Expression in the History of French: Verbs of Helping and Hindering by Michelle Troberg (review)

This revised version of the author’s doctoral dissertation analyses a valency change in pre-classical and classical French (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) with verbs of helping and hindering (VHH), from the dative form, including the dative form of the personal clitic pronouns and the introduction of nominal objects by the preposition à, or IO, to the accusative form, or DO. Arguing that this change was not accompanied by a change in meaning, and that change of expression of grammatical function need not be accompanied by changes in meaning, Michelle Troberg claims that this is a challenge for theories that assume a tight correlation between form, meaning, and syntactic relations. However, she states that this change was caused by a semantic change in the prepositional system. These statements — that the change of argument type is not accompanied by any change in meaning, and that a semantic change affects the preposition à, which is the marker of IO — are contradictory. If the meaning of à changes, causing a change in the prepositional system in general, and change of valency expression with VHH in particular, this convincingly supports the opposite claim that grammatical change is a phenomenon linking content, expression, and structure, as assumed in functional linguistics, which is usage-based. But this study is not functional; it is generative — more precisely, minimalist — implying that ‘language ... is something external to individuals’ (p. 8), and that syntactic change is construed as a change in some property of a particular lexical or functional item which has structural repercussions on the set of possible utterances (p. 10). Following the principles of the Minimalist Programme, Troberg’s goal is to identify what changed in the abstract grammatical system of French-speakers (Chapters 2–3), to relate it to the valency change occurring in a particular generation of speakers (Chapter 3), and to explain how (Chapter 4), why, and when (Chapter 5) this change occurred. The author proposes that the replacement of IO by DO was a result of children no longer acquiring the use of the preposition à for this specific use, which the author interprets as the loss of à encoding ‘Path’. Before 1500, ‘Path’ was expressed by a complex preposition conflating a ‘null Path’ morpheme Ø and the ‘Place’ morpheme à. From around 1500, children acquired a lexical item without phonological form, expressing ‘Path’ by means of the preposition, which is the ‘null Place’ morpheme Ø. For the present reviewer, such an explanation of change is nonsensical, it is simply a rewording of the explanandum, instead of an explanans, and it links together changes that are not proven to be connected. This is not meant to contest the changes presented in the study, such as the typological change of French from a satellite-framed language (section 5.3.1), but the relevance of this change for the valency change of the VHH is not presented convincingly.