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.Price 1984: 98).Sergijewski sees this development towards a fixed word order as being closely related to the abolishment of the two-case-system (cf.Sergijewski 1997: 116).Schøsler disagrees: taking into account a great number of statistics concerning the word order in OF, she concludes that "pendant toute la période de l'ancien français, l'ordre des mots v-s a constitué 2/3 à 3/4 des prop.princ.Il n'est donc pas possible de prétendre que la fixation de l'ordre des mots ait provoqué l'élimination de la déclinaison casuelle" (Schøsler 1973: 253).Additionally, Schøsler argues that word order alone is normally not sufficient to grant an unequivocal distinction between subject and object.Therefore, as already mentioned, various factors determining relations in a sentence have to come in to avoid ambiguity (cf.Schøsler 1973: 244, 254).She derives from this that word order cannot have contributed to the elimination of the case system (cf.Schøsler 1973: 254).Schøsler's line of argumentation is not entirely satisfactory in a number of aspects, as she contradicts herself by admitting that all the elements each of which she at first disproves as being a cause for case loss at all might have combined and thus led to the disintegration of the case system:Nous croyons donc avoir prouvé qu'aucun des éléments linguistiques présentés comme cause unique (phonétique, morphologique ou syntaxique) n'a pu expliquer l'évolution casuelle.Or, il nous semble probable que la cause consiste en un jeu combiné de ces éléments.(Schøsler 1973: 255).An important reason mentioned by various linguists why the case system was abolished was the functional overstraining of the various cases in CL.This is clearly visible in the case of the genitive, where distinctions were made between genitivus possessivus, subjectivus, objectivus, explicativus, qualitatis, partitivus, pretii (cf.Wolf and Hupka 1981: 93).Moreover, there were also prepositions to compete with the flexional case-ending system to express the same relation.Prepositions became increasingly dominant, since they seemed to be more expressive and easier to use, being followed by no other case than the accusative (cf.Wolf and Hupka 1981: 93).Thus the genitive was ever more frequently replaced by the preposition de, the dative by ad, both of which were followed by the the accusative (cf.Sergijewski 1997: 6).Also, as already mentioned, there are various instances of inappropriate case use in OF (cf.Price 1984: 96).This might account for a certain degree of confusion concerning the function and usage of case, which matches the theory that cases had been overstrained.Or it might equally show that there were no definite grammar rules to adhere to, as the first attempt to compose a grammar of French was made not before the Renaissance.Thus the usage might vary even in the same text from one line to the other: For instance, in a text dating back to the late twelfth century, the following lines show an inconsistency in case use:Riche homme furent et mananzEt chevaliers preuz et vaillanz.(1:5-6)Rich men (they) were and powerfulAnd knights bold and brave.(Cf.Le Fresne by Marie de France quoted in Kibler 1984: 3)Riche homme is correctly used as a predicate nominative to the verb to be, (here: preterite form furent).In the second line, however, chevaliers and the adjectives are incorrectly given oblique forms, although they have exactly the same function (cf.Kibler 1984: 3).Likewise, the oblique stressed forms of the personal pronouns (moi, toi, lui, li, eus, eles) were sometimes used instead of the corresponding nominatives.This can be exemplified by the following line from a 13th-century text: quant moi et li la mer passames = when she and I crossed the sea (cf.Price 1984: 145).This became even more common in MidF.At the same time, the original unstressed subject forms je, tu, etc., continued to be occasionally used as stressed forms until the 16th century.Today, the formula je sousigné = I the undersigned is a remnant of this construction (cf.Price 1984: 144)
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