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This comprehensive case study of a systematic shift in object expression provides insight into the construal of a class of two-place activity verbs in the history of French and proposes that a change in the prepositional system underlies the shift. The book focuses on nineteen verbs of helping and hindering whose single internal object shifts from indirect to direct object during the 15th and 16th century. It describes how these verbs are distinguished from all other verbs that take indirect.

We present a descriptive generalisation according to which a verbal or an event argument is merged as an indirect object (IO) when the direct object (DO) position is occupied. Our goal is to formalise this generalisation and to show how current syntactic theory provides the necessary tools to support it. Specifically, the converging consensus that all so-called intransitive verbs have an internal nominal argument resolves previous exceptions to the generalisation and shows that the transitivity restriction on thematic IOs is structural.

This dissertation provides an account of an often-noted change in the history of French: the shift in the expression of the internal argument of a small class of dynamic two-place verbs best represented by aider ‘to help’ from “dative”, i.e., as an indirect object with the preposition à, to “accusative”, i.e., as a direct object with no preposition. The change does not appear to be correlated with a change in the meaning of the verbs. Traditional commentators have viewed it as random, affecting only a few lexical items, rather than systematic. One of the central results of this thesis is that the valency change affects a class of some twenty verbs at approximately the same period and that it follows the same time course. Moreover, three properties distinguish this class of verbs from all others taking indirect objects in French: following current ideas about the syntactic manifestation of verbs and their arguments, they have a non relational argument structure, they do not possess lexical directionality, and they select for first or third order entities. These facts suggest that a structural change underlies the change in the realization of the internal argument. Adopting Lightfoot’s (1999, 2006) “cue-based” approach to language change, it is proposed that the valency change is a result of the loss of a functional item encoding directionality. Directionality is a derived property in Medieval French, available in particular to prepositions. It is demonstrated that when à was able to encode direction, first and third order indirect objects were licensed in a broader range of contexts, namely, with aider-type verbs. The loss of this functional item is also correlated with several other structural changes that occurred in the 16th and 17th century.