Abstract
This chapter considers the evolution of the mood system in concessive clauses during the period from Old to Modern French. It is argued that the mood system in these clauses undergoes a reorganization, whereby it passes from a relatively flexible system in Old French to a system in Modern French which is highly constrained. The evolution of the mood system is described within the framework of an extended grammaticalization theory, referred to as a process of regrammation. It is argued that the subjunctive undergoes this process, since on one hand its functional content is reduced from two values to a single value, and on the other, its alternation with the indicative ceases to exist. It is proposed that, even though the indicative is also reorganized, it does not undergo a process of regrammation, since its functional content is enhanced. This contribution also attempts to illustrate how the evolution of the mood system and of concessive conjunctions contributes to our current understanding of language change per se.
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Notes
- 1.
The term obligatorification is a neologism introduced by Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 139) to designate a form which loses its variability with other forms and thus becomes obligatory. Since this term has been used in many works on grammaticalization, it will be maintained in this study.
- 2.
Note that Lehmann’s theory is essentially concerned with the development from lexical to grammatical material, but I contend that it can be extended to reorganizations of grammatical systems, as well, if it is specified that desemantisization concerns a reduction of the grammatical-functional content and that obligatorification or specialization is a reduction of the alternation between items that have already become grammatical.
- 3.
The distance pole has to do with text genres characterized by e.g. public communication, an unknown addressee, a weak degree of emotionality, planned communication, whereas the proximate pole is characterized by e.g. private communication, a known and/or intimate addressee, a high degree of emotionality, and spontaneous communication. See Koch and Oesterreicher (2001: 586).
- 4.
See Lindschouw (2011: 42–44) for further discussion.
- 5.
It is true that in Modern French the subjunctive expresses irrealis modality in utterances like quoi que vous fassiez, je vous aiderai ‘whatever you do, I will help you’, but I analyse these concessive relative clauses with quoi as the antecedent of que, while quoique in (4) introduces an adverbial clause. The two structures display important syntactic, semantic and pragmatic differences compared to the fixed conjunction quoique and will therefore not be taken into account here.
- 6.
The subjunctive may also appear in concessives introduced by encore que (see Sect. 7.5.3).
- 7.
Note that these ambiguous forms are not of the same nature as those in Modern French, where the subjunctive of verbs ending in –er in the infinitive is identical to the indicative in some persons, which is often used as an argument in favour of the general narrowing of the use of the subjunctive. However, in the case of fut/fust we are also dealing with a confusion between the moods, as we cannot know for sure the mood of the form even though they formally represent two different moods.
- 8.
It could be argued that the following detailed discussion regarding the distribution of these two conjunctions is unnecessary, since, like all other concessive conjunctions of Old French, they disappear during the Middle French period (Soutet 1992: 213). I contend, however, that it is very important to take them into account, since the modal values that they introduce by means of the indicative and the subjunctive do not disappear and are, in fact, taken over by conjunctions that have survived into Modern French. See Sects. 7.5.2 and 7.5.3 below.
- 9.
Andersen (2001a) is particularly concerned with the semantic or grammatical values of linguistic signs or words in his hierarchy of markedness agreement, i.e. the present is the unmarked grammatical counterpart of the past, since the present indicates the present and the (historical) past, while the past only indicates the past. I argue that the markedness opposition is also a useful descriptive parameter on a more general level, including chronological expansion over time and representation of linguistic forms across text genres.
- 10.
As shown in Table 7.1, 46 occurrences of ja soit (ce) que were attested. In addition, one occurrence of ja fust (ce) que followed by the subjunctive with irrealis value was found. Due to this modest number, no separate table was produced for ja fust (ce) que.
- 11.
The same tendency holds for Renaissance French, where the indicative also occurs with a far lower frequency than the subjunctive (see Sect. 7.5.2).
- 12.
Recall that, according to Andersen, externally motivated language changes do not necessarily imply language contact, but may also be caused by dominant groups of speakers’ perception of style and register (see Sect. 7.2.1.), which is the case here.
- 13.
Statistical tests have not been performed on these results, but I contend that they are nevertheless reliable to a large extent, since the results are based on a fair number of samples (14 occurrences in the sixteenth century and 24 occurrences in the twentieth century).
- 14.
In the counts in Fig. 7.1, only the occurrences of the irrealis use of the subjunctive for bien que and encore que and the irrealis use of the indicative for même si are given, because these cases are by far the most frequent in the corpus to express irrealis modality.
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Text Corpora
Base de Français Médiéval (BFM). http://bfm.ens-lsh.fr
Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (DMF). http://atilf.atilf.fr/dmf.htm
Frantext. http://www.frantext.fr
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Inger Mees as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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Lindschouw, J. (2013). Evolution and Regrammation in the Mood System: Perspectives from Old, Middle, Renaissance and Modern French. In: Arteaga, D. (eds) Research on Old French: The State of the Art. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4768-5_7
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