Noun Gender Marking in Insular French legal texts

Richard Ingham - Language Transmission

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Noun Gender Marking in Insular French legal texts

A long-standing debate as regards the status of French in medieval

England

concerns when it ceased to be a spoken vernacular, and (by claim) continued to exist as an instructed second language. In a language such as French, a very reliable method of distinguishing native-like performance form that of L2 speakers is commonly supposed to be the use of noun gender, where L2 learners are liable to errors that are absent in native speakers. This brief report of the results of an initial pilot investigation looks at how reliable noun gender marking was in later insular French. It is intended to complement longer research studies we have presented elsewhere and is not presented as an academic paper (e.g. it does not review previous literature on the subject).

As a baseline comparison, we used five texts drawn from the latest period when French was in use in

England

as an official language of record, the Law French documents of the early 16^th century. By this time insular French was riddled with L1 English interference of all kinds, both lexical and syntactic, and it was assumed that gender marking would by this time be erratic at best. We wished to compare our results with the period two centuries earlier, around 1300, when, according to some earlier authorities, French was no longer a native language but had to be learned as an L2. To discover a similar pattern of erratic gender marking at this period would support this hypothesis.

The texts were chosen to be as comparable as possible. Since insular French by the early C16 is represented almost exclusively by legal texts, such as law reports, the same type of texts was selected for the period around 1300.

From each time-period, fifty nouns that were masculine in continental French, according to a standard Old French dictionary, were identified as well as fifty that were feminine. The aim was to base the conclusions on nouns representing ordinary commonly found items in the language; they were selected using the following criteria:. Nouns beginning with a vowel were excluded, to eliminate the issue of liaison, as were nouns having a special legal sense in England but not in

France

. The first fifty masculine and the first fifty feminine nouns answering these criteria were analysed for whether gender marking with a possessive determiner (mon/ma, ton/ta, son/sa) was targetlike. We used only these gender marking forms as dependent variables, since insular French phonology is suspected of having blurred gender marking contrasts in other contexts such as un/une.

The results produced outcome that was as sharply contrasted as can be imagined. In the samples of the five early LF documents, masculine and feminine nouns used with a possessive showed 100% correct gender marking. Details are in Table 1, grouped by target gender per text sampled. Targetlike gender marking is shown in italics, nontargetlike gender marking in regular font (numbers are to page references in the published texts):

TABLE 1: GENDER MARKING ON POSSESSIVE PREMODIFIERS IN INSULAR LEGAL FRENCH, C. 1300

Novae Narrationes
Feminine target
sa terre	3	sa volunte	8	sa guarantie	10
sa vie	11	sa court	14	sa chartre	13
sa proteccioun	15	sa reconissaunce	7	sa charete	22
sa main	29

Masculine target
sun droyt	2	sun cors	2	sun gage	3
sun marriage	11	sun maner	16	son chimin	22
sun marrays	22	Son moline	22	sun lyt	35
sun saunk	57

Brevia Placitata
Feminine target
sa carue	30	sa paye	28	sa voiz	20
sa terre	19	sa court	12	sa volunte	12
sa gent	36	sa main	37	sa chace	32
sa chambre	31

Masculine target
son droyt	2	son cors	2	son damage	17
son talent	19	son maner	23	son molin	29
son chemyn	32	son doneson	35	son cotel	37
son cheual	37

Year Books 1320
Feminine target
sa destresse	10	sa mayn	12	sa curt	27
ma seignune	30	sa volunte	32	sa persone	38
sa ley	39	sa force	45	sa mort	53
sa vie	53

Masculine target
sun dreit	7	sun tort	10	soun tens	12
son chival	29	son doun	63	son corps	63
son paril [peril]	66	son deces	68	son cas	85
son fet	97

Earliest English	law	reports vol. III		(Ms CUL dd 7.14)
Feminine target
sa vie	131	sa pleynte	144	sa bource	149
sa volunte	158	ma terre	158	ma charter	158
sa force	190	sa persone	190	sa demande	206
sa mort	283

Masculine target
sun service	72	son commandement	151	son dreyt	160
son cors	242	son desces	276	son fet	278
son peche	306	son maner	294	son ble	306
sun doun	321

Britton
Feminine target
sa mort	16	sa mesoun	23	sa prisoun	27
sa purgacioun	27	sa terre	32	sa cumpaynie	33
sa presence	37	sa garde	46	sa fute	50
sa persone	56

Masculine target
son cas	301	soen dreit	385	soen gré	315
soen noun	316	soen testmoignage	338	soen poer	353
soen cours	363	soen molyn	364	soen puis	400
soen dever	401

On the other hand, C16 Law French show the almost complete loss of contrastive gender marking using possessive determiners. Details are as shown in Table 2.

TABLE 2: GENDER MARKING ON POSSESSIVE PREMODIFIERS IN INSULAR LEGAL FRENCH, C. 1520

Readings & Moots	II
Feminine target
ma meason	224	ma terre	224	ma possession	239
son vie	221	son sale	239	son person	222
son justification	229	son mort	224	son demande	222
son confession	208

Masculine target
son fait	153	son maner	152	mon case	146
son droit	143	son terme	143	son corpz	134
son tort	128	son boys	119	son don	183
sa dower	143

Port’s notebook
Feminine target
son dett	177	son sale	175	son defence	163
son mayne (main)	162	son liberte	4	son mater	6
son dett	15	son charge	124	son volunte	90
son seignorie	169

Masculine target
son corps	57	son bonet	69	son commaundement	73
son nosme	75	son temps	96	son tort	100
son realme	119	son dower	132	son jugement	143
son saunke	159

Henry VIII law reports		Vol 1
Feminine target
son volunte	4	son declaration	9	son vie	9
son force	19	son renter	25	son confession	56
son bouche	56	sa terre	58	son vente	61
son part	77

Masculine target
son commandement	10	son corps	14	son molein	26
son manour	29	son parell	40	son fait	46
son nosme	47	son jugement	49	son droit	52
son privilege	74

Spelman’s reports	I
Feminine target
sa vie	13	sa ley	10	sa terre	17
son robe	5	son company	6	son foly	18
son conscience	22	son det	24	son declaracion	27
son demand	34

Masculine target
son profit	5	son noms	6	son caz	8
son liuer [livre]	15	son peril	18	son commaundement	29
son nome	30	son seale	43	son port	49
son pardon	51

Henry VIII year books
Feminine target
son meason	2	son terre	3	mon volunte	9
son cheyne	14	mon possession	16	mon robe	16
son perche	18	mon folys	24	mon burs	29
son confession	34

Masculine target
son poygne	4	mon licence	9	son damage	9
son cryme	15	mon corps	16	mon profit	17
son benefice	36	mon chyvall	43	son nosme	45
mon hanappe	46

The 16^th century text samples use only 6 feminine possessive forms for the 50 feminine target nouns (12%). They use 49 out of 50 masculine possessive forms for the masculine target nouns, however. The masculine possessive form thus seems to have been used as a default, suggesting L1 influence from English took the form of using the masculine to correspond to the gender-neutral English form.

That Law French was not a native-speaker variety is of course well-known, but the extent of the disregard of noun gender it displayed in the early C16 is nevertheless quite remarkable. In the majority of text samples, no use was made of the feminine possessive forms whatsoever. It must be assumed that the practitioners of early C16 Law French either received no instruction worth the name in the grammar of French, or did not heed it if they did.

A possibly greater surprise is that, in the data drawn from the period around 1300, gender marking was 100% targetlike. It certainly offers no grounds for considering insular French at this time to have been an instructed L2 liable to grammatical error. This outcome is consistent with acquisition as a native language in childhood, according to research into child bilingualism. Alternatively, French may have been acquired to a high standard of nativelike performance in a classroom or naturalistic setting, though it must be said that we have no evidence that French was a school subject at that period. Whatever the means of ensuring the accurate transmission of French may have been, it clearly disappeared subsequently, producing the complete collapse of gender marking shown in the early C16 legal French texts.

Further research is being undertaken in order to determine when gender marking, as measured here in terms of items having very distinct phonology, became liable to error in the genre studied here, and also in order to establish whether our results can be generalised to other genres in insular French of the period around 1300.

Data sources

Brevia placitata, ed. by G. Turner, and completed by T. Plucknett, Selden Soc. No. 66, 1951

Britton: The French Text Carefully Revised with an English Translation, Introduction and Notes, ed. by F. Nichol. Oxford, 1865

Earliest English Law reports Vol III, ed. by P. Brand, Selden Soc. No. 122, 2005

‘Henry VIII law reports’: Reports of cases from the time of King Henry VIII Vol. I ed. by J. Baker Selden Soc no 120, 2003. ‘

Henry VIII Year books: Year Books of Henry VIII, 12-14 Henry VIII, ed. by J. Baker, Selden Soc. no. 119, 2002.

Novae Narrationes, ed. by E. Shanks, completed by S. Milsom, Selden Soc. no. 80, 1963.

Port’s notebook Selden Soc. 102, ed. by J. Baker, Selden Soc. no. 80, 1986

Reports of Sir John Spelman Vol I, ed. by Soc. no. 93, 1977

Readings and moots at the Inns of Court in the fifteenth century, Vol. II, ed by S. Thorne & J. Baker Selden Soc. no. 105, 1990

‘Year Books 1320 Ms Y’: Year Books of Edward II, 14 Edward II Michaelmas 1320, ed. by G. Turner & W. Bolland. Selden Society no. 104, 1988

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