The correlation of micro-cues: The case of medieval French verb second

The purpose of this paper is to test the correlation between V2 word order and its presumed micro-cues. Micro-cues are structural manifestations that have been suggested to associate to a syntactic phenomenon, making its organization and acquisition accessible to users and learners. Three micro-cues of declining Medieval French V2 identified in the literature are tested for their relation using a treebank method. Statistical analyses confirm the expected correlation. The results lend plausibility to a micro-cue model for the acquisition and structuration of syntactic phenomena.