Grammatical Markers and Grammatical Relations in the Simple Clause in Old French

The focus of this paper is the description of the surface syntax relations in the simple clause in Old French and the way they can be described in a dependency grammar. The declension system of Old French is not reliable enough to cope with the identification of the dependents of the main verb, but it remains true that related grammatical markers are still observable and obey rules that forbid them to appear in specific syntactic positions. This study relies on three previous accounts; Igor Mel’čuk’s “criteria B”, the criteria that are used to determine which is the syntactic governor in a syntactic dependency relation, Thomas Groß’s intraword analysis, which grants morphs node status in the tree, and the concept of specification as used by Alain Lemaréchal, who understands grammatical markers as a set of formal constraints that stack over a relation. I demonstrate that the structure of the nominal dependents of the verb is highly unstable, ranging from explicit marking of the relation to constructions that do not make use of any segmental marker: some structures use bound morphemes, some others use free morphemes and some use only semantic features to express the relations. Moreover, markers are mainly optional and can stack up in a hierarchical way, which results in variable structural organization of the nominal phrase.