Sur les premiers stades de développement de l’article partitif

Abstract - This paper deals with the development of the partitive article in French during the XIVth to XVIth century, a period that was crucial for shaping the partitive article as we know it today. My study is based on a comparison of four consecutive translations of a same Latin text, which date from different moments along this period. My data suggest that the partitive structure in Old French conveys the meaning that a contextually determined referent is not globally affected by the verbal action, but only in part. This results in a number of constraints in the use of this structure, that have already been observed by other researchers : the partitive constituent is in a direct object position, the verb has a ‘fragmentative meaning, the head noun is concrete, and the definite article with specific interpretation is used almost obligatorily. Middle French represents an important stage in the shift in the constituent order, from OV to VO. For the NP this evolution corresponds to the migration of lexical modifiers, which to that date could be found at both sides of the head noun, to postnominal positions. As a corollary, the grammatical markers that were still attached as suffixes behind the noun (e.g. die plural marker -s) weaken and are replaced by free morphemes put in front of the noun. In the context of this evolution, the partitive construction as it existed in Old French is recuperated to mark grammatically, in prénommai position, the opposition between singular and plural for indefinite uncount nouns. It thus acquires the function of an article. This stage in the grammaticalization process is reflected in the loosening of some distributional constraints and in a semantic reorientation. The new article, called ‘partitive’ , once created and extensively used, reduces considerably zero determination. In this way it permits to generalize the tripartite NP structure consisting of “determinant -noun -modifier”, in which the determinant placed upfront assures the syntactic cohesion of the NP. On the basis of a quantitative corpus analysis, it is possible to affirm that this evolution shows up plainly in the XVth century, in particular in a register close to the spoken language.