Re: NATLANG: French past participles

Trebor Jung wrote:

>In French, you form the passé composé with the formula Pronominal
>Prefix+avoir/être+past participle (I think Christophe is right in his
>classification of French as polysynthetic--I didn't learn it in school that
>way, that'd be pretty cool--but I'll start describing French like that).
>Usually, the infix is <avoir>, but the past participles of 16 special verbs
>(the "Dr Mrs Vandertramp" verbs) take <être>. Even more interesting (and
>odd), these past participles act like adjectives (but *only* these):
>Il est allé. He has gone.
>Elle est allée. She has gone.
>Ils sont allés. They-masc. have gone.
>Elles sont allées. They-fem. have gone.
>
>Is there a reason for this?
>
>

Not only those, actually.  Reflexive verbs also do this, as do verbs
with preceding objects(taking the gender of the object, though not using
etre).

So, you have:

Il me lève - I (am) get(ting) up
and
Il s'est levé - he (has) got up
Elle s'est levée - she (has) got up
Ils se sont levés - They (have) got up
Elles se sont levées - They (have) got up

Also, with preceding direct objects:

Il le mange - He (is) eat(s)(ing) it
Il l'a mangé - He  (has) ate/eaten it(masc)
Il l'a mangée - He (has) ate/eaten it(fem)
Il les a mangés - He (has) ate/eaten them(masc)
Il les a mangées - He (has) ate/eaten them(fem)

I suspect the first lot came from passives.  'He is gone' has a very
similar meaning to 'he has gone', and, as such, can be used in place of
it.  I suspect that, in passive sentences, participles=adjectives.  It
happened in the Indic languages too, but rather than restricting it to
merely intransitives, it did it for everything.  This led to an ergative
system in the past tense - or rather, the old instrumental turned into
an ergative case, while the nominative acted as an absolutive case.
This happened trhough the following chain(I can't be bothered to type
out Sanskrit, so I'll use English).

If 'Ryan is beaten' has the same meaning as 'Ryan has been beaten', we
can replace one by the other.  So, if we take that, and add an
agent(Charles), we can say 'Ryan has been beaten by Charles'.  This is
equivalent to the statement 'Charles beat Ryan'.  And since Sanskrit(or
Old Indic, to be more precise), dropped copula('to be'), it was more
like 'Ryan beaten by-Charles'.  Eventually, the original meaning was
lost, and it became a simple past tense, the  Instrumental in that
sentence turning into an Ergative.  In fact, I believe that, in some
forms of Nepali, the same is done to the present tense, optionally, by
analogy.

And now you know.