Lecture: “Reflexives in the Historical Language Contact Situation between French and English”
Achim Stein (University of Stuttgart) and Carola Trips (University of Mannheim)
Room 560A, Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St George Street
Presented by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto
In this talk we will discuss the development of the reflexive system in Middle English (ME) and elaborate on recent findings of Percillier & Trips (2020) that argue for influence from Old French (OF). While focusing on the historical contact situation that affected Middle English (1150–1500), we will present the reflexive systems in both languages in the medieval and modern periods, discuss the general problem of grammatical contact with matching and non-matching grammars and highlight the empirical problems of corpus-based evidence and the quantitative interpretation of data.