Department of French and Italian

• Department of Linguistics

• French linguistics
• Syntax
• History of French (including Occitan)

I am interested in understanding how and why language changes, and particularly in changes in syntactic systems (= changes in word order or in relations among parts of sentences). Although observation of contemporary variation and change-in-progress is important to my work, my primary focus is the 1200-year history of written French, a time period that is large enough for us to see the reflection of major upheavals in grammatical patterns. My investigation of syntactic change is couched in terms of contemporary generative syntactic theory, and my most recent research adds a dialectological and cross-linguistic perspective by examining regional variation in Old French and Old Occitan (the language of southern France).

Books

• Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics edited with Julie Auger and J. Clancy Clements (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004).
• Syntactic Change in Medieval French (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997).

Articles

• Vance, Barbara. 2014. "La syntaxe des pronoms clitiques objet de l'ancien occitan: système stable ou dynamique?" Los que fan viure et treslusir l'occitan (Proceedings of the 10th Congress of the Association Internationale d'Etudes Occitanes, Béziers, France.) pp. 202-212.
• Scrivner, Olga, Sandra Kuebler, Barbara Vance, and Eric Beuerlein. 2013. "Le Roman de Flamenca: An annotated corpus of Old Occitan." Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-3). Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Scienes. 85-96.
• "V2 Loss in Old French and Old Occitan: the Role of Fronted Clauses." In Romance Linguistics 2009: Selected Papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (March 2009), ed. by Sonia Colina et al. (Bryan Donaldson and B. Devan Steiner, co-authors). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 301-320.

• Advanced French Grammar
• Introduction to French Linguistics
• French Morphology
• French Syntax
• Syntactic Analysis
• History of French I and II
• Advanced Syntax
• Diachronic Syntax

• Trustees Teaching Award, 2003, 2007
• Honorary Faculty member, IU Chapter of Golden Key Society, inducted 2006
• Teaching Excellence Recognition Award, 1997