Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval French by Michael Zimmermann (review)

Reviews 287 majorité reveals a tendency among young French speakers (ages fourteen and fifteen) toward plural verbs. They used a plural verb in 66.67% of cases, as compared to 56.25% for adults over sixty (87). She also found that definite and indefinite articles influence agreement: older speakers use a singular verb with la foule 100% of the time, but only 64.29% with une foule (93). Tristram’s review of the historical use of collective nouns shows variation over time. Through the eighteenth century, for example, use of plural verbs rose from 12.5% of cases to 37.31% and then declined to 31.78% (99). Her examination of twentieth-century grammar textbooks found that they approached verbal agreement with collective nouns flexibly, with no apparent change over time. This book undertakes so much that the reader sometimes feels lost in its multifaceted methodology and lengthy endnotes.A more straightforward research design and more concise writing style, along with more examples and discussions focused specifically on the results, would have helped to put the grammar in context and done greater justice to Tristram’s tremendous effort and rich data. Nonetheless, her book is an interesting invitation to learn about morphosyntactic variation in French using a variety of methodologies and corpora. Manhattan College (NY) Samira Hassa Zimmermann, Michael. Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval French. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. ISBN 978-3-11-037337-0. Pp. 246. 100 a. This monograph is a meticulous, corpus-based examination of the expression and non-expression of expletive and referential subject pronouns in Old and Middle French, which are often considered pro-drop or null-subject languages. The corpus represents a selection of 1,500 root and embedded clauses from the Chanson de Roland and twelve prose texts ranging from the mid-twelfth to mid-seventeenth centuries and chosen at roughly fifty-year intervals. The results of this well-defined diachronic database of 19,500 manually analyzed clauses are displayed throughout the book in over forty coherent, easy-to-read graphs, showing that Medieval French is clearly not a symmetrical V2 language; that the expression of subject pronouns is more frequent in embedded than in root clauses; and that even though by the end of the seventeenth century subject pronouns are consistently expressed, their increase is neither constant nor linear over the five centuries analyzed. After demonstrating how all previous approaches to the non-expression of subject pronouns (for example, V2, borrowing, disambiguation, grammaticalization) are either “highly problematic” or “empirically inadequate” (44–109), Zimmermann presents a solid argument for analyzing Old French as a non-pro-drop or non-null-subject language, which nonetheless allows the non-expression of subject pronouns in specific structural conditions, for example, the context of left-peripheral focalization (110–205). Zimmermann attributes the sudden abandonment of the non-expression of subject pronouns in Classical French to extralinguistic reasons: influential works of seventeenth-century grammarians (Maupas, Vaugelas, Chiflet) insisting upon the consistent expression of subject pronouns, along with strict SVX word order. When writers and eventually native speakers of the time followed, movement of the verb to the left periphery in the contexts of focalization was no longer allowed. Among alternative focalization strategies, Zimmermann suggests “cleft and dislocation constructions which in fact show an increase in frequency in the 17th century”(216). Like the graphs, the numerous linguistic examples throughout are remarkably accessible: each French word is accurately glossed in English, followed by an overall translation, and in several cases by a detailed contextual analysis of the preverbal constituents considered“focus elements.” Furthermore, this monograph is highly accessible to the non-French reader: the author consistently distinguishes relevant features in his linguistic examples, using italics for verbs, boldface for subject pronouns, underscore for constituents preceding the verb or pronoun, and dotted lines for preceding elements not considered relevant (clitics and coordinating conjunctions). Zimmermann even provides translations of all citations (with the original French or German quotations in footnotes), and many examples and some graphs are conveniently repeated, avoiding the need to thumb back for previous examples to follow an occasional arduous argument. The style varies from somewhat engaging in the introductory chapters to fairly dry in the...