Formal Approaches to Semantic Microvariation: Adverbial ...

(28) Peu portent fruit et assez fuelles
Few bring fruit and enough leaves
‘They bring little fruit and enough leaves’ or
‘They rarely bring fruit and enough leaves’
Gautier de Coinci. Miracles de Notre-Dame. p. 63
In summary, I have shown that the only type of split DP in OF was the kind created
by topicalization movement to satisfy the V2 constraint. I have shown, furthermore,
that the V2 property of this language created a situation in which the homophonous
determiners (object quantifiers) and adverbs (event quantifiers) frequently occupied the
same syntactic position. I suggest that this is the type of state of affairs that could have
given rise to the reanalysis of all degree quantifiers in split construction as adverbs
(syntactically speaking) with the loss of V2 in Middle French.
In the next section, I present data from MF and argue that the patterns found in
this era can be accounted for if the co-occurrence between the determiner and the
adverbial versions of degree quantifiers caused the adverbs to widen their domain to
include individuals.
3.3.2 Split DPs in Middle French
It is in Middle French that we first see examples of split DPs of the type found in
Modern French. We find examples of QAD across a past participle (29-a), and across
an infinitive (29-b). Unless otherwise indicated, all the data presented here comes from
the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (DFM) corpus (http://www.atilf.fr/dmf ).
(29) a. Mais j’ay peu veü de gens en ma vie qui sachent fouyr à
but I have few seen of people in my life who know flee on
temps
time ‘But I have seen few people in my life who know when to flee’
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