Re: Optimum number of symbols, though mostly talking about french now

-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU] On
Behalf Of Thomas R. Wier
Sent: vendredi 24 mai 2002 09:48
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
Subject: Re: Optimum number of symbols, though mostly talking about
french now

>>Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:
>>
>> Verbs agreeing in gender? Sorry but that's not the case. What you're
>> talking about is past participles.
>>
>Well, that depends on your theory of morphology.  Do you call
>clitic pronouns a agreement markers?  If so, some French verbs
>(IIRC) inflect for person, number and gender of subject, direct
>object, indirect object.  Working linguists I know actually
>disagree about this fact, so I think it's fair to claim that
>French verbs inflect for gender.
I would be glad to take part in the debate, if possible. I think if you
consider clitics as  agreement markers, actually all verbs inflect for
person, number and gender of subject, direct object, indirect object.
According to me, there are good arguments to consider that it is the
case, I mean at least in spoken French, whose structure is rather
informational. Compare :
 1.a.  Pierre, je l'aime bien. ('Peter, I like him'.)
 1.b. *Pierre, j'aime bien. ('Peter, I like')

 2.a.  Marie, sa réponse, elle me l'a pas encore donnée. ('Mary, her
answer,                   she has not yet given it to me ').
 2.b. *Marie, sa réponse, m'a pas encore donnée. ('Mary, her answer, has
not yet given to me').
But (3) is correct (at least for me):
 3. Sa réponse, Marie, elle me l'a pas donnée. ('Her answer, Mary, she
has not yet given it to me').

I would consider in that case that there is an incorporation in the verb
that allows to put arguments as we want, just because we know which
function they have as it is indicated on the verb. But I understand that
some people could have a different view. This situation reminds me of
classical nawatl, where Topic is an important notion and where subject
and object have to be incorporated into the verb. In my opinion, French
is having more and more a syntactic but pragmatic organization.

Julien.