Phililogical Research : Pronominal Verbs in Old and Middle French

Dai Yokoyama

　In my graduation thesis I am going to write about pronominal verbs in Old and Middle French. Old French is from the mid-ninth century to the first half of the fourteenth century and Middle French is from the second half of the fourteenth century to the sixteenth century. A pronominal verb is a verb accompanied with a reflexive pronoun that is the same object as the subject. In Modern French there are four kinds of usage (reflexive, reciprocal, passive, and essential). However, in Old and Middle French there wasn’t an essential usage but a middle usage (a usage mainly stressing the participation of the subject). And although we find many verbs of middle usage (middle usage was productive), passive usage was very rare at that time.

I am going to research pronominal verbs from a document. The period is the fifteenth century. I will use BEAUNE, Colette : Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris de 1405 à 1449. Le Livre de Poche, 1990. The reason why I choose this document is that it is written in a natural word order because it is a prose, and that it might be valuable because it wasn’t used in earlier researches. Because a pronominal verb is a verb accompanied with a reflexive pronoun, we must know what morphs reflexive pronouns were then. These are morphs of reflexive pronouns in Middle French:

1st, sg	2nd, sg	3rd, sg	1st, pl	2^nd,pl	3rd, pl
me/m’/moi	te/t’/toi	se/s’/soi	nous	vous	se/s’/soi

Everything is the same as pronouns in Modern French, except moi/toi/soi are pronouns at the beginning of the sentence. It is all right to find reflexive pronouns referring to this table in order to look for pronominal verbs from the document. We have to pay attention to the fact that reflexive pronouns except the third person have the same morphs as objective personal pronouns and we must check the conjugation then.