Re: Standard Average European

Selon Tim Smith <tim.langsmith@...>:

>
> If I understand correctly what Christophe said (and remember that we're
> talking about colloquial, spoken French, not the kind of French that one
> learns in school or in a "Teach Yourself" book), the word order is
> determined solely by pragmatics (topic-comment), not by grammatical
> roles.  Thus, "L'agent de police, le bandit, il l'a vu" could mean
> either "the policeman saw the gangster" or "the gangster saw the policeman".
>
Actually, it could only mean "the gangster saw the policeman" (or rather: "as
for the policeman, the gangster saw him"). That's because while the word order
is topic-comment, whatever the grammatical function of the topic, the word order
in the "comment" (basically the remainder of the sentence) is not completely
free. In particular, only the subject of a verb can be in front of it in the
comment. The rest can only be placed after the verb.

So if you want to say "the policeman saw the gangster" while topicalising the
subject, the only possibility is:
"l'agent de police il l'a vu le bandit" ("as for the policeman, he saw the
gangster)

Word order in Spoken French is not simply SVO, since the topic-comment structure
takes priority above it, but there are still remains of this word order in the
word order usual in the comment. If anything, Spoken French might be even
stricter than Written French in some cases, in that it restricts the position of
adverbs in the sentence even more than Written French (in many cases because
they get incorporated in the verbal complex, in which they only can take a few
specific positions).
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.