Old Gallo-Romance, periodization, and the left periphery

This chapter seeks to reappraise the value of periodization for both early French and Occitan, by analysing a range of syntactic changes including verb placement, inversion effects, the structure of the left periphery, the null subject system and the particle SI. On this basis, it is argued that in syntactic terms there is some value in assigning the label ‘middle’ to a particular period in the history of French, whereas there is minimal empirical basis to assign the same label to a particular stage in the history of Occitan. Overall in terms of comparative Romance syntactic typology this is linked to the fact that medieval and modern Occitan are syntactically closer to the ‘southern’ Romance prototype than French.