Systemic Effects of Oxytonisation in French

Abstract

Accentuation plays a dominant historical role in French prosody. At a very early stage of its systemic evolution, as early as the 6th century, Gallo-Romance develops a process of oxytonisation, i. e. stabilisation of the accent on the last syllable of the accentual unit. Oxytonisation led to the reduction of what in Latin appeared as post-accentual syllable(s), which were preserved in other Romance languages, and also to the formation of accentual units. The main consequence of this process is the extension of the accentual unit that in French could no longer be identified as a lexeme, but rather as a syntagm. The fixing of the accent on the last syllable of the unit brought some fundaamental structural changes to the French linguistic system. Nouns and certain verb forms could no longer be inflected on post-accentual syllables. As a result, nominal number and the person of the verb came to be marked (in speech as opposed to in writing) at the beginning rather than the end of the verbal phrase. Nominal number is determined in spoken French not by the lexeme itself, but by the quality of the vowel as the nuclear element of the article or other possible determinants. An analogous situation is observed in the verbal flexion in the singular present paradigm where the oxytonisation removed the possibility of marking the person on a post-accentual suffix and provoked an isomorphism of the three basic verb forms. The marking of the person of the verb is assigned to personal or pronominal indices je/tu/il as subject constituants. These indices do not have the syntactic properties of independent personal pronouns - as they cannot be used autonomously - but function as proclitic morphemes.