Expression and the position of constituents in classical French: the relationship between subject and verb and between verb and object

This paper, devoted to classical French, falls within the problematics of grammaticalization, as developed for the French diachrony by C. Marchello-Nizia and B. Combettes. It deals with the expression and position of the constituents in the utterance, by contrasting the subject and the object, and intends to show that in classical French, there are on the object, unlike the subject, strong constraints of expression and position, which show the constitution of a hierarchical syntactic unit, the verb phrase, within which the nominal object is postposed to the verb and closely linked to it. From this point of view , classical French is a main stage in French diachrony, because it establishes the verbal phrase and definitively marginalizes, as archaisms or stylistic fact, free patterns, inherited from ancient French, that are regarded from then on by the grammarians as unjustified ellipsis or transpositions contrary to basic word order.