I start by looking at the external history of French (§1.1), the distribution of the language around the world today (§1.2), the internal syntactic history of the language and the major typological features of the modern language (§1.3). In §1.4 I give a taste of what's syntactically interesting about French, both theoretically and cross-linguistically. Finally, I provide a brief overview of the syntactic framework in which the rest of the book is couched (§1.5).

Development and spread of French

Like all Romance languages, French has its roots in Latin, more particularly the vernacular spoken by the Romans who, in the first and second centuries BCE, colonised Gaul, at the time a predominantly Celtic-speaking area. Over the next five hundred years Celtic gradually gave way to Latin, the language of power, which therefore survived the demise of the Roman Empire towards the end of the fifth century CE. However, as was the case with varieties spoken in other regions of the Empire, the variety of Latin spoken in Gaul had begun to diverge from the Latin of Rome, and this process of divergence accelerated following the loss of the centralising influence of the Empire. Thus, while written Latin remained stable, the vernacular did not.

One major factor determining how the Latin of Gaul developed after the fall of Rome was the invasion of Germanic speakers, who by the end of the sixth century CE controlled most of Gaul. In contrast to the Romans, though, these Visigoths, Burgundians and Franks didn't impose their language on the indigenous peoples.

Having looked at the morphosyntax of verbs in §2.2.1, and lexically and pragmatically determined VP* structure in §§2.2.2, 2.2.3, I turn now to the extended VP*, that is, the clausal structure above the lexical VP*, encoding such inflectional features as tense, mood and aspect. The aim of the chapter is to explore how the interplay between verbs and other clausal constituents sheds light on the structure of the clause. As we shall see, even independently of the pragmatic properties of the left periphery (§5), much evidence suggests that the clause is a much more richly articulated structure than the traditional analysis in terms of a single IP projection suggests. Following the practice developed thus far, this domain of clause structure is therefore labelled IP*. We'll see that the IP*-internal hierarchy of FPs parallels the ClfP*-internal hierarchy of FPs seen in §3. For example, just as the mass–count distinction is an aspectual property of nominals encoded within ClfP*, so the perfective–imperfective distinction is an aspectual property of clauses encoded within IP*. This parallel between nominal and clausal structure is welcome in view of the various phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic similarities found across nominal and clausal structures in a number of languages (Bernstein 2001).

Inflectional heads and adverbial positions: Cinque (1999)

The discussion throughout the chapter relies heavily on the approach to clause structure set out in Cinque (1999).