Re: Question about transitivity/intransitivity

En réponse à Douglas Koller, Latin & French :


>I'm not disputing your point, and I haven't done a statistical survey
>(leave that to the grad students), but I think English may be a tad
>more liberal than the French in this regard.
And I completely agree with you. I was just comparing French and English
with languages where transitivity is stricter, not French and English
together. Both are quite liberal in terms of transitivity, but there's no
doubt that English is more liberal than French in that matter. I just
didn't mention it because it was irrelevant to the explanation :) .

>  Many prominal verbs are
>such because they require an object. "I'm shaving" is okay English,
>but "*je rase" in French is as jarring as saying "I'm wearing" in
>English, hence "je me rase";
Yep.

>  "I'm hurrying" vs. "je _me_ dépêche",
>usw.
Nope. "se dépêcher" is not a good example in this case, as its meaning is
not simply "dépêcher" with subject identical to object. "dépêcher" means:
"to go and fetch someone", and thus has little to do with hurrying ;))) .
Why the verb is pronominal here is purely an etymological thing, but
doesn't have any reflexive meaning anymore today. It's the same with "se
repentir": to repent, "s'échapper": to escape. The reflexive pronoun is
unanalysable here. This can be seen in the rules of agreement of the past
participle in compound tenses. For true reflexive forms like "je me suis
rasé", the rule is actually complicated (see:
http://www.synapse-fr.com/manuels/PP_PRONO.htm). For pronominal verbs like
"se repentir", the past participle agrees in gender and number with the
subject, always.

>I'm thinking of bazillions of counterexamples as I reread this, but I
>hope you get what I mean.
Of course :) . The only thing is that pronominal verbs in French are a
curious bunch. Between the true reflexive or reciprocal verbs, you have
those "middle voice" verbs like "se dépêcher", but also those "transfer of
propriety" verbs, often mistaken for reflexive verbs, like "je me lave les
mains" (the difference between this and "je me lave" appears in the past
compound. For a femninine speaker for instance, you have "je me suis lavée"
- agreement with the direct object when placed before the verb -, but "je
me suis lavé les mains" - here the direct object is behind the verb, so no
agreement. "Me" here is indirect object -).

And I'm not talking about those "inclusion of the listener" forms frequent
in colloquial speech like "... et je te lui ai flanqué une sacrée raclée
!", where "te" has no function in the sentence except conviviality :))
(strangely enough, Basque is the only other language I know which has the
same feature).

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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