Re: Standard Average European

Eugene Oh wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:02 AM, Tim Smith <tim.langsmith@...> wrote:
>> Very interesting. This pretty much agrees with some stuff I've read elsewhere,
>> but it's good to see it confirmed by a native speaker. But I do wonder about
>> one thing: with a transitive verb, how do you tell the subject from the
>> object, if they aren't distinguished by word order as in written French
>> (assuming that both arguments are third person, and have the same gender and
>> number, so the agreement prefixes (or proclitic pronouns, or whatever you
>> choose to call them) won't disambiguate them)?
>
> Could you give some examples? I can't think of any off the top of my
> head and without examples I'm actually quite confused as to what
> you're asking.
>
>> I realize that in the majority of cases, the context and/or the semantics of
>> the nouns themselves will be such that only one of the two grammatically
>> possible interpretations makes sense, but I would think that there must be a
>> fairly large residuum of situations where that doesn't work.
>>
>> - Tim
>>
>>
>
>
Actually, I was hoping to avoid giving examples, because my French isn't
very good, but since you ask, I'll do so, apologizing in advance for any
errors.

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".

- Tim

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