Adverbial and non-adverbial pronouns in the grammaticalization of future and conditional in Old Catalan

Abstract Future and conditional tenses had two different forms in Old Catalan: the so-called analytical forms , characterized by pronominal mesoclisis ( cantarlo he ) and the so-called synthetic forms , which could appear alone ( cantaré ) or with proclitic ( lo cantaré ) or enclitic pronouns ( cantaré-lo ). The distribution of the two constructions was conditioned by the restrictions of clitic placement in the Middle Ages (Sentí/Bouzouita 2022; Torres-Latorre 2023 a, 2023 b; Torres-Latorre/Sentí 2023), and also by some morphosyntactic characteristics of the verbal form, mainly verbal syncope and rhizotonic verbs (Torres-Latorre submitted). In this paper, we tackle the role of the type of pronoun and the number of pronouns in this variation. The results show that there is no significant difference between adverbial and non-adverbial pronouns, although pronoun hi shows a slight tendency in favour of the synthetic construction.