Variation and Change in Gallo-romance Grammar

This volume offers a wide-range of case studies on variation and change in the sub-family of the Romance languages that includes French and Occitan: Gallo-Romance. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data can be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data have often been lacking in both synchronic and diachronic studies. Following an introduction that sets out the conceptual background, the volume is divided into three parts whose chapters explore a variety of topics in the domains of sentence structure, the verb complex, and word structure. The empirical foundation of the volume is exceptionally rich, drawing on standard and non-standard data from French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Picard, Wallon, and Norman. This diversity is also reflected in the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted, which span traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal morphological and syntactic theory, semantics, and discourse-pragmatics. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and (Gallo-) Romance linguistics as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.

Sam Wolfe, Associate Professor of French Linguistics, University of Oxford,Martin Maiden, Professor of the Romance Languages, University of Oxford

Sam Wolfe is Associate Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Tutor and Official Fellow of St Catherine's College, having previously held teaching positions at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. The principal focus of his current research is a monograph on syntactic change in French, and he has ongoing projects on Venetian and on contact-induced changes in Romance languages. His first book, Verb Second in Medieval Romance, was published by OUP in 2019, and he is the co-editor, with Rebecca Woods, of Rethinking Verb Second (OUP 2020).


Martin Maiden is Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and Director of the Oxford Research Centre for Romance Linguistics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea, and In 2014 he was appointed 'Commander' in the 'National Order for Faithful Service' of the Republic of Romania for services to knowledge of the Romanian language in Britain. His many publications include The Romance Verb: Morphomic Structure and Diachrony (OUP 2018), and, as co-editor with Adam Ledgeway, The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (OUP 2016). He is currently preparing, in collaboration with colleagues in Romania, the forthcoming OUP volume The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology.