Re: THEORY: Ergativity and polypersonalism

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:53:40 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 07:30:49PM -0500, Roger Mills wrote:
> > Christophe's point, as I recall, was always about _spoken_ French, in which
> > "je l'aime" is indeed a phonological unit or "word", /ZlEm/. Note too that
> > the various parts never occur as independent words: /Z/ /l/ (one could say
> > that the schwas are predictable, thus non-phonemic!) /Em/ etc. Also, of
> > course, I like to think he was being only semi-serious :-))))))))
>
> I never got that impression at all.  I think he was quite serious that
> spoken French should be reanalyzed this way, and that the traditional
> analysis is of only diachronic value.
I had read similar arguments from Jacques Guy (a bona fide linguist,
as far as I know -- though his main field was languages in Vanuatu
rather than French IIRC; I believe he's a native speaker of French who
lives in Australia) in sci.lang. It might be possible to find some
quotes by using Google Groups, though he's a prolific poster and
sometimes has rather... interesting ideas. But I think his comments
about a polysynthetic(?) analysis of modern spoken French were also
meant fairly seriously.

He also occasionally talked about the specific dialect of his wife,
which bore a couple of differences to "standard" French. For example,
have a look at this thread:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/sci.lang/browse_thread/thread/fe5346ae7768ba0b
. Unfortunately, Jacques' ("JGuy" here) messages are not included
(perhaps he had used X-No-Archive?) but you can read his text where
he's quoted, e.g. by André Keshav on "Nov 27 2001, 2:30 am". See also
Mark Rosenfelder's comment (yes, he of the Language Construction Kit)
in message 26 of that thread ("Nov 27 2001, 9:07 am") where he points
out that someone is "misled by the spaces in the archaic French
orthography" and says that something which is traditionally written as
a separate "word" is part of the verb. (As evidenced, perhaps, by what
it does when word order is rearranged.) See also his later message of
"Nov 27 2001, 2:54 pm", which also includes this quote: "If colloquial
French were an unwritten langauge, it would be most clearly analyzed
as having a rather complex verb with prefixed subject and object
marking."


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On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:14:39 -0500, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
> We are all, and that certainly includes Christophe, well aware of the
> traditional explanation of French grammar.  And that traditional
> explanation is of course correct in that it describes how French
> developed.
>
> His point is that if you didn't know anything about its history came
> upon modern French as a spoken language with no writing system, there is
> absolutely nothing in the language that would lead you in the direction
> of the traditional analysis.  I'm not sure it would even be identified
> as a Romance language.  Almost certainly not at first.
>
> The implication of this discrepancy is that the traditional analysis,
> despite its correctness and utility from a historic standpoint, is
> not necessarily useful in analyzing the modern language from a
> linguistic standpoint.
*nods*

Similarly -- though not with as wide a discrepancy -- in English,
perhaps. (Already some features of Latin-derived traditional grammar
feel unnatural when applied to English, e.g. the sanction against not
splitting an infinitive; the rules on when to use subjective and
objective forms of pronouns is, perhaps, a similar thing.)


=================================================

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 13:45:56 +1100, Tristan McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:
> Actually, if anyone told you that English has a solid
> nominative--accusative distinction in pronouns, they were lying.
Though I'd say this depends on the speaker and how much they're
influenced by a traditional grammar analysis. (Hm, I wonder whether
this is the equivalent of a spelling pronunciation? Saying something
because it's how you were taught, not necessarily because it's what
sounds best.)

> I think also that normally when there's
> a strong nom./acc. distinction, the pronoun-in-isolation form is the
> nominative, whereas in English you'd use the so-called object-form
> (-'Who would?' -'Me!').
Well... I wouldn't. But my father subscribed to a fairly prescriptive
view of English grammar, and this influenced the way I speak. For
example, I try to keep my pronoun cases "correct" (and to use "whom"
when appropriate, etc.).

I used to think that people who spoke otherwise were "wrong" or
speaking English "badly". I'm starting to be a bit more lenient now
but I'm not sure I've entirely shaken off my roots in "English as she
*should* be spoke"-ism (or that I want to: I think the notions of
"grammar" and "grammatically correct" are useful... though my
understanding of "grammatically correct may not mesh with someone
else's internal grammar....).

> I think you'll probably find that analyses of spoken French and spoken
> (informal?) English are both behind the times.
Probably.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Watch the Reply-To!