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 g rammaticalization, as developed for the French diachrony by C. Marchello-Ni zia and B. Combettes. It deals with the expression and position of the cons tituents in the utterance, by contrasting the subject and the object, and i ntends to show that in classical French, there are on the object, unlike th e subject, strong constraints of expression and position, which show the co nstitution 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 o r transpositions contrary to basic word order.