The loss of clitic climbing in French

This chapter examines the loss of clitic climbing in French from a Gallo-Romance perspective. A corpus of four hagiographical texts published in the second half of the seventeenth century is used to explore when clitic climbing ceased to be preferred in complex verbal predicates. The results confirm the main research hypothesis, namely that the variant with clitic climbing was retained for longer in texts published in Toulouse than in those published in Paris. The longer retention of clitic climbing is likely to be the effect of contact with varieties of Occitan in which clitic climbing was never lost. The results also contribute to research on text types in historical linguistics by showing that the change took place in the same way in hagiographical texts as it did in other types of text, even if there is variation regarding its dating.