Preliminaries

To study the history of the French language, we must first revert to the questions we asked in the Introduction, concerning the definition of ‘French’. Today we think we know what the French language is: the lexicon, morphology, syntax, and phonology of the ‘educated native speaker’, sometimes supplemented by the geographical designation ‘Parisian’. That definition expresses a number of presuppositions: (1) the French language is the language of a particular social class in France; (2) some speakers are native and others are not, and the native speakers have special claims on authority; (3) speaking is more important than other language skills (hearing, writing, reading); (4) if ‘Parisian’ is included, that ‘standard’ French is indeed of geographical origin.

This definition of the French language has immediate implications for the linguistic analysis of the language. In this section we will consider how such a definition has developed and been supported by institutions of French government and society and how it influences the way the history of the French language has been approached. A history that accepts this definition looks for the changes of cultivated language from its origins, a triumphalist view of the current state of power within the French linguistic community. This approach excludes large amounts of data, and, particularly in the early stages of the language, when texts are few, leads one to view widely disparate texts as part of a single line of linguistic development.

This book makes the perhaps audacious presumption that it is possible to write an accessible, and yet state-of-the art, introduction to the structure of French for a motivated public of non-specialists.

As instructors in the French linguistics program of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we have long been confronted with the need for teaching graduate students of French and linguistics a highly technical literature about the structure of French, and simultaneously having to make ourselves understood by undergraduate students who, although having a sound knowledge of French, are not specializing in linguistics. Thus, upon an inquiry from Kate Brett from Cambridge University Press about writing such a book, we set out to combine our lectures notes, newspaper clippings, various technical and non-technical readings, and writing into a single book to be used to teach basic concepts of linguistic analysis through a panoramic tour of the defining characteristics of the French language.

As one of the volumes published in the Linguistic Introduction series of Cambridge University Press, this book provides a linguistic, i.e. relatively technical, overview of several fields of French linguistics. Its novelty resides in its pluralistic approach to French and its presentation of domains of linguistic analyses, e.g. pragmatics, that are rarely, if ever, discussed in similar works.

Preliminaries: words and morphemes

Just as Chapter 2 was concerned with the minimal units of sound, this chapter is concerned with the identification, classification, and possible combinations of minimum units of meaning. These minimal units of meaning, called morphemes, can be either bound or free. Morphemes such as affixes (e.g. prefixes and suffixes) are said to be bound because they cannot occur in isolation. By contrast, free morphemes can manifest themselves independently of other morphemes; in such cases, the overlap between a morpheme and an individual word is one hundred percent: très ‘very’, pour ‘for’, garçon ‘boy’, rouge ‘red’, tant ‘so much’, hélas ‘unfortunately’ are all simultaneously single morphemes and single (written) words. Free morphemes also frequently occur with one or more bound morphemes, as in for instance the verb stem chant of the verb form chantait ‘(he) was singing’ or the base word nation in the adjective international that also contains the prefix inter- and the suffix -al. Thus the verb form chantait has at least two morphemes: the verb stem chant- ‘to sing’, and the inflection -ait. The adverb heureusement is a single written word that can be broken down into three morphemes: heureux /œʁ/ ‘happy’ + feminine gender /øz/ + adverbial suffix /mɑ̃/ (on the concept of ‘word’, see section 4.1).

French is plural

What ‘French’ means seems intuitive: French is the language that French people learn in their childhood and that non-French people can acquire from them when learning French as a second language. A more specific definition going beyond this practical description and suitable for the purposes of this introduction to the structural properties of ‘French’, however, ends up either too restrictive or outright circular.

If, for instance, we stick to a geographic approach to ‘the French language’ by saying that it is the language spoken in France, we obviously leave out places like Belgium, Canada, Louisiana, and Switzerland, all of which have substantial French-speaking populations, as well as many other languages spoken within French borders. A definition based on speakers' social characteristics would not score any better. The educated elite in Montreal speak a different type of French than do educated people in Paris, and the same is presumably true for farmers in France, Nova Scotia, Switzerland, and other francophone countries and regions in the world. If one would try to pin down what unites varieties of French by simultaneously looking into social and dialectal differences, then the French spoken by diplomats at the United Nations and by a sizeable population of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa would fall out of our categories as well, since these varieties neither represent a single dialect, nor a single social group or community of practice.

Preliminaries

Sounds, spelling, and the IPA

Phonetics and phonology are related areas of the study of the sounds of languages. The phonetics concentrates on the physical properties of sounds, i.e. how speech sounds are articulated (‘articulatory phonetics’), how these articulations are manifested in the acoustic waveform (‘acoustic phonetics’), and how acoustic information is perceived and processed to form mental representations of sounds in the brain (‘auditory phonetics’, psycholinguistics). The phonetic sciences are also involved in documenting the sounds of the world's languages (e.g. Grimes and Pittaran 1996, Maddieson 1984), collecting information about endangered languages (e.g. Gordon 2003), lending expertise to forensic investigators on speaker identity and language identification (‘forensic phonetics’, e.g. Byrne and Faulkes 2004), and collaborating with paleo-anthropologists on issues such as the anatomical capacity of the Neanderthal to produce intelligible speech (e.g. Lieberman and Crelin 1971, Boë et al. 2002).

Systematic studies of the sound systems of languages go back to the earliest studies of Sanskrit in ancient India. In Western scientific thought, largely under the influence of structuralism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the study of the physical properties of speech sounds (‘phonetics’) became separated from – although remained associated with – studies of the function of speech sounds within and across languages. This latter approach received the name of ‘phonology’ from the association of the Greek words phone ‘voice/sound’ and logos ‘speech/voice’.

History, change and variation

Any system S (a language, culture, art-style, organism …) can be understood in a number of complementary ways. Two of the commonest are:

1. (a) Structural: what is S made of? How is it put together, and what are the relations among the different components?

2. (b) Functional: how do the components of S work to fulfil the overall function of the system, as well as their own special functions?

Such understanding often feels incomplete without a third dimension:

1. (c) Historical: where did S and its parts come from? How much change has there been to produce what we see now, and what kind?

This can be split into some interesting subquestions, which define one way of doing history:

1. (d) How much of what we see at a given time is old, and how much is new?

2. (e) Of the old: how much is doing what it used to? How much is doing new things? What is the new doing (e.g. has it taken over any old functions, or developed novel ones?); does anything appear to be ‘junk’, not doing anything at all?

Introduction

This chapter presents an outline history of English syntax. The main changes will be discussed and – where possible – something will be said about the factors that played a role in the changes, and about the effects of individual changes elsewhere. In its earliest stages English was a heavily inflected language with a relatively free word order and a lexical base of mainly Germanic words, rather like modern German today. A host of changes over the centuries has made it into what it is today: a language with a morphology and syntax radically different from that of German. The main causes of these changes, briefly touched upon in Chapter 1, are the rapid loss of inflections brought about both by internal, phonological weakening and by intense contact with other languages after the Viking and Norman invasions and perhaps from the continuing presence of a Celtic substratum. This chapter will document the ways in which these factors have led to a radical transformation of English syntax.

In doing so, we will be able to draw on the considerable volume of earlier work on English syntax. However, rather than going for breadth of coverage, we will try for representativeness of material in terms of importance and interest. This chapter contains full discussion of the major developments and a selection of further changes that we think are illuminating and/or intriguing, but there are inevitably many other changes that we could not include: our apologies for omitting these changes and to the scholars who have identified and written about them.

Who is this book written for? There are already so many books on the history of English, both large and small, that another one might at first sight seem otiose, redundant and unnecessary. But one of the beauties of the language is its ability to show continuous change and flexibility while in some sense remaining the same. And if that is true of the language, it is also true of the study of the language, whether undertaken for strictly academic purposes or not. This book is pitched at senior undergraduates in the main, though we trust that the general reader will also find in it much that is enlightening and enjoyable. Our justification for this work, then, is that knowledge of the history of English is a part of our common culture which needs – and repays – constant renewal.

But there is more to it than that. There are indeed many good existing accounts, including, in particular, Barbara Strang's first-class A History of English (1970). In the thirty-five years since its publication, the language has continued to change, and scholarship has advanced along several different paths. Most obviously, the advent of computerised material has enabled us to analyse and hence understand much material which was previously impractical for the individual scholar to assimilate. Secondly, the (very different) Chomskyan and Labovian revolutions in linguistics, both in their infancy in 1970, have had repercussions in many domains relevant to this book.

Introduction

The function of lexemes

The ‘normal’ native speaker of a language will probably regard sounds and words as the most basic building blocks of a language, because they are the elements which can be perceived most easily without specific training. We put sounds together to form words, and we put words together to form larger structures, i.e. sentences realised as utterances (at least that is what we think we are doing). Therefore, speakers tend to react most readily to variation and change of pronunciation and vocabulary. Words, or rather lexical items or lexemes (= dictionary entries), can be regarded as intermediate elements between the level of sounds and the level of syntactic structure. But there are some additional reasons having to do with the existence of certain types of lexemes and their function why lexemes have this bridge function between phonology, morphology, syntax and the lexicon (see Section 4.1.5. below).

Lexemes are the means by which we make direct reference to extralinguistic reality, converting our basic perception of the world around us into language. Their basic function thus is to serve as labels for segments of extralinguistic reality which a speech community finds nameworthy, so that it can talk about it in a simple and direct way.

Introduction

David Crystal estimates that about 400 million people have English as their first language, and that in total as many as 1500 million may be to a greater or lesser extent fluent speakers of English (see Chapter 9, Table 9.1). The two largest countries (in terms of population) where English is the inherited national language are Britain and the USA. But it is also the majority language of Australia and New Zealand, and a national language in both Canada and South Africa. Furthermore, in other countries it is a second language, in others an official language or the language of business.

If, more parochially, we restrict ourselves to Britain and the USA, the fact that it is the inherited national language of both does not allow us to conclude that English shows a straightforward evolution from its ultimate origins. Yet originally English was imported into Britain, as also happened later in North America. And in both cases the existing languages, whether Celtic, as in Britain, or Amerindian languages, as in North America, were quickly swamped by English. But in both Britain and the USA, English was much altered by waves of immigration. Chapter 8 will demonstrate how that occurred in the USA.

In Britain, of course, the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons brought their language with them as immigrants. The eighth and ninth centuries saw Scandinavian settlements and then the Norman Conquest saw significant numbers of French-speaking settlers.

The colonial period: 1607–1776

In 1607, following several failed attempts, the English succeeded at Jamestown, Virginia, with their first permanent settlement in the New World. In the decades to follow, other English settlements were made at Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Providence and elsewhere.

Explorers and settlers meet Native Americans

Along the Atlantic seaboard, explorers and settlers met, mixed with and sometimes married Native Americans and used Native American names for many artifacts in American life and culture, as well as for places and for unfamiliar plants and animals in the new environment. For other places and things English speakers invented new names or invoked familiar ones. Even before 1607, scores of Algonquian words already peppered English. In A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, first published in 1588, Thomas Harriot, an astronomer working for Sir Walter Raleigh, described openauk as ‘a kind of roots of round forme, some of the bignes of walnuts, some far greater’, and sacquenummener as ‘a kinde of berries almost like vnto capres but somewhat greater which grow together in clusters vpon a plant or herb that is found in shallow waters’; the berries would later be called cranberries. For various acorns, Harriot used their Algonquian names (sagatemener, osamener, pummuckoner, sapummener, mangummenauk), as he did for many New World plants, but these names did not survive in English.