V2 phenomena in Old French: the topicality of preverbal constituents

It has been know to linguists for some time that the Old French data available to us show a frequent sentence order with the verb in the second place and preceded by one, and just one, other constituent, which might or might not be the subject. Some analyses connect this to verb-second constraints, such as found in certain contemporary Germanic languages. However, the question does not remain undisputed: other authors (Rinke & Meisel 2009, Elsig 2008) analyse the evidence from French in the light of constituent fronting motivated by topicality. Our data strongly suggest that, contra Rinke & Meisel, who claim that only topicalized elements can only occur in the sentence-initial position, the pre-verbal constituent position is available to XPs independently of their information structure status