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Abstract The present study examines the diachronic consequence of a class of words that are superficially intransitive but that often have more than one possible underlying representation. We consider the hypothesis that structural underspecification and structure-based economy constraints on processing may drive a well-studied syntactic change in medieval French: the loss of directional/aspectual verb particles. A corpus-based approach demonstrates that, despite the prominence of Old French verb particles in the expression of motion events, they frequently occur in underspecified contexts for which a prepositional parse involving an implicit object is favored. The net result is very sparse unambiguous evidence for the conservative Old French grammar that underlies the particles.
Michelle Troberg (Thu,) studied this question.