Re: Two seperate questions: Rhoticity/Topic-Comment

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On Sat, 9 Dec 2006 08:08:36 +0100
Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> wrote:

> --- "Adam F." <hypaholic@...> xiè le:
>
> > Also, is it possible or common for highly synthetic
> > languages to follow topic-comment patterns and does
> > anyone know of any languages where this is the case?
>
> Well, French, for one, if you buy into the analysis
> that French is actually a polysynthetic language
> underneath and beyond its orthographic representation
> as an isolating/inflecting language. At least, I think
> French prefers to take a topic-comment structure;
> anyone who actually speaks French halfway decently (I
> don't, I'm afraid), please feel free to expound.
I'm not sure if the entire language would qualify as polysynthetic,
but certainly verb phrases with the number of clitics reaching critical
mass point in that direction, especially if you consider nominative
pronouns to be clitics as well (I don't recall seeing them separated
from verbs by anything but other clitics, at least). The use of what
I've seen termed a disjunctive, for emphasis, as in 'moi, je m'en vais'
also points towards the topic comment structure.  However, my French is
Quebecois French, and while there it is fine to put regular nouns in
the topic position, I'm not sure how much this applies to other
dialects.  That said, there does seem to be at least a bit more merging
of verb forms in this dialect, with 'nous' being pretty much completely
dropped except to distinguish exclusivity in a topic, and being
replaced with 'on' as in 'nous autres, on y va'.  In addition, first
singular forms have occaisonally merged as well, with 'vais' in 'je
vais' pronounced identically to the verb in 'tu vas' and 'il va'.  Of
course, I don't consider myself completely fluent, so this all might go
better with salt.

For what it's worth, I also get the feeling that the language there may
be in the process of regaining case to some degree via prepositions
like 'à' and 'de', but I don't think it will be generally analysed as
such for a long time yet.


- --
Mohan Sud
«C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose,
       qui fait ta rose si importante»
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