This book has two distinct but related goals: broad description and selected theoretical depth. On the one hand, it provides a concise, empirical overview of the syntax of Modern French for the benefit of linguists unfamiliar with the language. While it doesn't rely on readers having any particular theoretical background, it does assume familiarity with traditional grammatical terminology.

On the other hand, it offers in-depth discussion of selected syntactic features of the language which are of particular interest, from either a theoretical or a cross-linguistic perspective. This is of relevance to syntacticians generally, irrespective of their degree of familiarity with, or specific interest in, French: my intention is to show how aspects of French syntax are relevant to syntacticians, whatever their theoretical or language-specific interests. Thus, unlike other English-language books on French syntax, or French linguistics generally, this book isn't specifically aimed at students or researchers with a particular focus on French. If anything, it aspires to take (the syntax of) French beyond its traditional constituency, showing a wider audience how it relates to their concerns.

For the benefit of readers in need of ‘raw’ data, the discussion is based on an uncontroversial empirical presentation of the facts relating to the syntax of French. For the benefit of theoreticians, the discussion goes on to show how the analytical tools of contemporary syntax have been able to shed light on those facts. Bearing in mind the interests of readers with comparative interests, I concentrate on syntactic aspects of French of cross-linguistic interest. Without making claims of comprehensiveness (this would be unreasonable given length constraints), the book thus has both breadth and depth.

Nominal inflection

Historical prelude: Indo-European heritage and Germanic innovation

Affixes in GMC, as elsewhere, serve one of two functions. Derivational affixes are applied to derive new words. Thus, locate, relocate, relocation are distinct words, and each might be expected to be listed separately in a dictionary. On the other hand, locate, locates and located, distinguished from each other by inflectional affixes, are in an intuitively clear sense simply variant forms of the same word, and would accordingly not be listed separately in the dictionary. Derivational affixes were discussed briefly in Chapter 2. The paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships among inflectional morphemes in the GMC languages (or their analytic equivalents – see below) will be treated in the next two chapters.

Synchronically, few typological generalizations can be made about the shape of inflectional morphology across the GMC languages, except that suffixes are by far the most frequent and productive type of inflection. This is in part a reflection of their IE heritage. Suffixes were the prevailing (though not the exclusive) device for signaling grammatical contrasts in IE as well. Inflectional prefixes are only marginally present in GMC (see Section 5.1.1), and infixes play no role in GMC (though IE had one). However, another type of word-internal inflectional morphology – replacives, in which one segment or string of segments within a root is replaced with another – is encountered quite frequently. Some GMC replacive morphemes – the ablaut patterns of strong verbs (sing, sang, sung) – are of IE origin.

Some remarks on the organization of this volume

No single volume can adequately address a topic area as broad as “The Germanic Languages” in all of its aspects. It is necessary to single out a particular dimension on which to focus. Languages can be looked at in their societal context, for example, with attention to such questions as their use and significance in the communities of speakers who employ them, their relationship with the associated cultures (including, for example, literary uses), their demographics and their variation along geographical and demographical dimensions. One can alternatively regard language from a historical perspective, as chronological sequences of divergences and convergences, states and transitions. Each of these points of view has provided the organizational framework for successful volumes on the subject. It is also possible, abstracting away from their social, geographical, cultural and temporal contexts, to examine the languages of the family as assemblages of grammatical units, rule systems and constructions. This is the perspective which I will adopt here. The present volume is aimed primarily at those who are interested in how the Germanic languages are put together – what they have in common in terms of their linguistic organization and how they differ from each other structurally. That choice in turn determines several other features of the organization of the volume. In particular, I will not adopt the standard and often successful approach of covering the territory by means of a series of self-contained descriptions of individual languages.

The focus of this chapter is in fact considerably narrower than the title might suggest. The study of the lexicons of languages is a multifaceted pursuit. The words of a language are the interface between its internal aspect, as a cluster of linguistic systems, and its external aspect, as a way of encoding and cataloguing the experiences of its speakers (Lass 1994: 178). Study of the lexicon thus straddles the study of purely linguistic aspects of language and the more general study of culture, since the vocabularies of languages are shaped by and reflect the intellectual and material culture in which their speakers function. Both of these are worthwhile undertakings. Much can be learned about the developmental histories of societies by studying the ways in which their vocabularies change over time. Indeed, in the case of cultures no longer extant, language often provides prospects for a reconstruction of the life of the mind which is finer-grained and more nuanced than what is possible through the more ambiguous and indirect evidence of physical remains and artifacts. The GMC languages in particular possess rich and multilayered lexicons which, when carefully examined, can generate an intricate picture of contacts, events, influences and cultural trends spanning millennia, even in the absence of a direct historical record. However, the focus of the present volume is on the GMC languages as systems and structures, and in keeping with that focus I will forego discussion of the possibilities for linguistic archaeology which the GMC lexicon affords, and concentrate exclusively on its more purely linguistic aspects – on the processes of word formation and the ways in which the shape of the lexicon and changes in the lexicon affect the other linguistic subsystems of the language.