Re: Genitives NPs as Relative Clauses
| From: | Douglas Koller, Latin & French <latinfrench@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, November 15, 2001, 16:05 |
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>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>>We'd say: "l'adoption d'Irène par John". The use of an agent
>>complement ("par"
>>is the preposition used to include the agent in a passive sentence) as noun
>>complement shows that the structure is seen as passive in French:
>
>
>Interesting! In Early ModE, the regular preposition of the agent was
>in fact "of" rather than "by", so that passives and subjective
>genitives were in a sense the same thing:
>
> And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return
> to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.
> (Matt. 2:12, 1611 trans.)
Si je ne me trompe, French does allow "de" in passive constructions
when it's not a one-shot deal (when it last came up, someone talked
about emotional states, if I remember correctly). So (talking about
Irène) "adoptée de Jean" is weird, but "aimée de Jean" (loved by
John) is good ("aimée par Jean", to me, suggests some sort of sexual
congress, but I'm not a native. Christophe?). Dunno if you can get
away with "l'amour de Jean d'Irène".
Kou
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