Re: Aluric So Far

Sorry - didn't finish this at 22:00 last evening - I felt too tired after
having been at College since 8:00.

What made me start thinking my original reply was too simplistic was the
phrase "j'en doute"  where "en" corresponds to English 'it'!

At 1:21 pm +0800 10/2/99, Douglas Koller wrote:
>Raymond A. Brown wrote:
>
>> >Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>> >> Does any other natlang or
>> >> conlang use such a feature? I'm interested in knowing it.
>
>Doesn't Italian do something similar with "ci" and "ne"?
Yep - I'm pretty sure it does.

[my reply snipped - I admit I was to some extent "thinking aloud" :)  ]
>
>I can deal with this for sentences like "J'y vais" ("y" replacing
>something like "a` la piscine") or "J'en sors" ("en" replacing something
>like "de la bibilothe`que"), but isn't the stickiness in terminology
>caused by the fact that "de" does double duty as the partitive marker?
And also possession!

When 'de' is used to mean 'from' we do have a true adverbial phrase as in
"de la bibliothe`que" above so in "J'en sors" we do have "en" functioning
as a pro-adverb.   But when 'de' is used in a possessive phrase then the
phrase is _adjectival_ as in the stereotype grammar book example: la plume
de ma tante.

Indeed, phrases beginning with "a`" are very often adjectival in French,
cf. the difference between "un tasse de the'" and "une tasse a` the'".  In
all the Romance languages, as in English and most (all?) modern European
langs, prepositions may introduce either adjectival or adverbial phrases.
In Classical Latin, on the other hand, with the sole exception of the
uncommon 'erga', prepositions introduced adverbial phrases only.

But, I digress; I can't see how adjectives/ adjectival phrases will
function as complements of verbs but the simplistic notion that since they
replace prep.+ noun, they must be adverbial needs rethinking.  I guess it
was Latin leading me astray  :)

>Je veux du cafe' => J'en veux (I want *some*. [which in the English
>dictionary, at least, is termed an indefinite pronoun]).
>
>French speakers, do you consider "du cafe'" as a prepositional phrase
>(or adverbial phrase) in this instance?
The grammar books will tell us that "du" is a form of the partitive
article.  But even if one still thinks of 'de' in "je veux de l'eau" as a
preposition, the phrase is clearly not adverbial; both "du cafe" and "de
l'eau" function as a _direct objects_ of "Je veux", i.e. the phrase
functions as a noun.

>Less convincingly, perhaps, what about verbal expressions like:
>
>avoir besoin de
I suppose "de" is connecting the following noun to the noun "besoin", i.e.
it's the adjectival use but with the partitive meaning of 'de'.  But I
guess one could regard "avoir besoin de" as a set phrase, i.e. a sort of
'phrasal verb' so the following noun is the object!

>obe'ir a`
>se souvenir de
These seem to me more akin to 'verb governing the dative' and 'verb
governing the genitive' of Classical Latin & Greek - a feature which I
believe still survives in many IE langs which haven't dropped the case
system.

>While in a sentence like "Je me souviens de mon se'jour a` Nice." I
>would consider "de..." a prepositional phrase, it is so intimately
>linked to the verb, I don't feel this is being used adverbially (as an
>English speaker, I'd parse "se'jour" as the object of "se souvenir de").
>So the "en" in "Je m'en souviens." feels more like a (special) pronoun
>here. That there is a relative pronoun that covers similar turf:
Indeed not - it's more reminiscent of the 'genitive object' of Latin verbs
such as 'obliuiscor' (I forget), 'memini' (I remember) etc.

The phrases here are, it seems to me, being used no less nominally than "du
cafe" above.


>le se'jour *dont* je me souviens (not *que je me souviens)
>
>seems to me to indicate that "en" has a pronounish function in these
>types of expressions. So yes, not pronouns in the strictest sense, and
>yes, they have adverbial functions, but I think "pro-adverbs" or
>"adverbial pro-complements" are too limiting to describe all that these
>words can do.
'pro-adverb' is certainly too limiting for "en".  Interestingly "y" cannot
be used to substitute for all instances of a` plus noun.  While "y" may be
the pro-complement for "a` Paris" (je vais a` Paris ~ j'y vais), the
pro-complement for "a Jean" is LUI. e.g. j'ai donne' les livres a` Jean  ~
je les lui ai donne's.

Also, of course, the phrase 'adverbial pro-complement' is itself
potentially ambiguous.  Does it mean "a pro-complement which functions as
an adverb" or "something which substitutes for the complement of an adverb"
(after all, 'complement' means a thing must be a complement of _something_
!)  ?

All we safely say, I think on reflexion, is that both "y" and "en" are
verbal pro-complements of verbs.

Ray.