Re: Aluric So Far

At 7:58 pm -0500 8/2/99, Tony Harris wrote:
>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
=2E......
>>         As far as I know, we call "y" an adverbial pronoun (strange
>>designation,
>> isn't it?). Like "en", it's a pronoun that replaces a whole phrase _with
>> preposition_ ("=E0" for "y" and "de" for "en"). Does any other natlang or
>> conlang use such a feature? I'm interested in knowing it.
>>
>
>I had always thought that y and en in French were pronouns of some sort,
>or at least that what they had told us in school.
They are certainly pro-forms of some sort, but not pronouns in the strict
sense.  All the various pro-forms which attach themselves, usually
proclitically, to verbs in the Romance langs are often termed simply
'pro-complements' of the verb and 'y' & 'en' are certainly such.

However, unlike 'je', 'te', 'la', 'lui' etc., they do not substitute for
nouns or noun phrases; as Christophe says, 'y' replaces _phrases_ beginning
with '=E0' and 'en' replaces phrases beginning with 'de'.  In the older
terminology that I was brought up with such phrases are called "adverbial
phrases" because the phrase acts as an adverb, but many now-a-days call
them "prepositional phrases" because the begin with a preposition.  I don't
know what the latter linguists, thereform, term 'y' and 'en', but I'd call
them pro-adverbs - or more strictly, maybe, adverbial pro-complements.

Ray.