Kilkonstruktionen, dvs. framflyttningen av ett satsled till en position före det finita verbet i en sats utan synligt subjekt, har i tidigare forskning visats bestämmas av en särskild hierarki, en kilhierarki, som styr valet av kil. Inom generativ grammatik har denna kilhierarki förklarats av en allmän syntaktisk regel i stil med Chomskys (1995) Minimal Link Condition, enligt vilken grammatiken alltid väljer den kortaste möjliga flyttningen. Föreliggande uppsats söker att pröva denna hypotes genom en empirisk undersökning av kilkonstruktionens användning under yngre fornsvenska och äldre nysvenska. Uppsatsen visar att kilkonstruktionen som helhet minskar i frekvens under övergången till äldre nysvenska, men att valet av kil under hela den undersökta perioden i stort tycks vara kompatibelt med den av Minimal Link Condition predicerade kilhierarkin. Ett antal undantag kvarstår dock som svårförklarliga inom ramen för MLC, framför allt under tidig yngre fornsvenska, vilket belyser behovet av vidare forskning om kilkonstruktionens syntaktiska villkor.

The present dissertation is a comparative investigation between the Germanic-like structural phenomena found in the left periphery of Old French (OF) clauses and the syntactic phenomena found in the left periphery of Old High German (OHG). The goal of this thesis is to provide evidence that only a synchronic analysis can explain the presence of Germanic-like structures in OF syntax. The reason for this lies in the similarities between the V2 properties found in OF and OHG. The two languages show V2 properties such as V-to-C movement and XP fronting, but also properties which are not found in Modern V2 languages such as a frequent V1 and V3 word order. The corpus I use consists of four OF texts from the 12th and 13th century which correspond to the late OF period. They are composed in different OF dialects from the northern part of France. The poetic texts chosen for this study are Le voyage de Saint-Brandan and Gormont et Isembart. The prose texts are Le Roman de Tristan en prose and Les Miracles de Saint Louis. I coded these OF documents according to certain criteria: main clause type, embedded clause type, finite verb position, first element preceding the finite verb, etc. The results indicate that OF can be considered a true V2-language that shares a certain amount of properties with OHG, namely V-to-C movement, XP fronting, Stylistic Fronting as well as verb-initial clauses. This thesis illustrates that the OF dialects closer situated to the Germanic language border show a higher frequency in Germanic-like syntactic phenomena than the dialects situated further away. A difference between poems and prose texts concerning the presence and intensity of certain syntactic phenomena can also be observed.