Re: THEORY: Can Ditransitive Verbs Agree With More Than Two Core Arguments?

Hi!

tomhchappell <tomhchappell@...> writes:
>...
> As for Modern Spoken French:  I can actually get along in Montreal or
> Istanbul on my French, which is not very good but apparently better
> than just speaking English louder and louder.  So I am *really*
> surprised that you say there are productive examples in Modern
> Colloquial French of ditransitive clauses where the verb must agree
> with both objects.  Maybe I'm just thinking of them wrong?  Show me
> some examples and explain why they are agreeing with both objects.
>...
It's a long-running gag on this list: the modern topic-comment
structure of French let's you analyse what was a pronoun in the
classical analysis as a verb marker.  E.g.

   Moi, je la bois, la biere.

You could analyse 'je la bois' [Zlabwa] as the verb and 'moi' as the
subject and 'la biere' as the object.  There seems to be good evidence
for this analysis to be working very well for spoken French.

I am not fluent in French either, so I was corrected last time I tried
to give a sentence :-), but the corrected sentence was still showing
indirect object agreement.  First of all, here's a verb marked for
indirect object:

   Toi, tu m'la dis pas, l'histoire.
   SUBJ \__VERB___/ NEG  \__OBJECT_/

You could probably also say:

   A moi, tu m'la dis pas, l'histoire.

There you have indirect object agreement.

There was a lot of discussion about Spoken French on this list, maybe
you want to discuss the archive.  E.g. the above was in a discussion
of indirect object agreement, too.  Interesting thread.  E.g. with
funny things about Classical Nahuatl, too:

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0503d&L=conlang&D=0&P=3029

**Henrik

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