Fronting in Old Catalan: Asymmetries between Narration and Reported Speech1

Abstract

This article explores the distribution, syntax, and information structure of XVS clauses in the narrative text and the reported speech of a thirteenth‐century Old Catalan chronicle, the Llibre dels Fets. It is shown that XVS occurs mainly within reported speech and in embedded clauses. This corresponds with the conservative nature of these syntactic domains (the former reproducing syntactic structures echoing epic literature, the latter being inherently conservative syntactically), while XVS is less frequent in narrative text, which, in this chronicle, is more innovative and closer to spoken language. The data presented demonstrate that by the thirteenth century, XVS constructions were mainly used to express verum focus within the scope of nonveridical operators and their use only connected with a structural V2 requirement que in conservative domains. This variation captures the loss of V2 in Old Catalan and the emergence of modern SVO grammar.