LINGUIST List 5.1036

Fri 23 Sep 1994

Sum: Topicalization in French

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1. Steven Schaufele, Sum: topicalization in French

A couple of weeks ago i posted the following query in LINGUIST 5-957:

> While revising a paper over the weekend, it occured to me that
> while i can easily come up with examples in French of prolepsis
> or, as it is often called nowadays, 'Left Dislocation', such as
> those in (1),
>
> (1) a. Monsieur Jourdain, il part tous les jours a 8:40.
> 'Mr. Jourdain, he leaves every day at 8:40 = As for Mr.
> Jourdain, he leaves every day at 8:40 = Mr. Jourdain
> leaves every day at 8:40.'
>
> b. Ces journeaux, je les ai lus hier.
> 'These newspapers, i read them yesterday = As for these
> newspapers, i read them yesterday = I read these news-
> papers yesterday.'
>
> c. Mon pere, je viens de lui ecrire une lettre.
> 'My father, i've just written him a letter = As for my
> father, i've just written him a letter = I've just
> written my father a letter.'
>
> i find it quite hard to come up with good French examples of 'topica-
> lization', in which the 'resumptive' pronoun is replaced by an empty
> category. Yet i get the impression from Cinque's discussion of such
> things that constructions like those in (2) are not uncommon in Italian.
>
> (2) a. Nessun museo credo che abbia visitato 0.
> 'I believe that he has visited *no museum*.'
>
> b. Gianni riteniamo 0 essere intelligente.
> 'We consider *Gianni* intelligent.'
>
> c. Quatro pare che ne siamo arrivate 0.
> 'It seems that *four* of them arrived.'
>
> (Cinque distinguishes between garden-variety Left Dislocation and what
> he calls 'clitic left dislocation', in which the resumptive pronoun is
> in the form of a pronominal clitic. The latter he notes is quite com-
> mon in all Romance languages including both French and Italian, but for
> the former his examples are all from English.)
>
> Am i right in thinking that prolepsis is easier/more common than topi-
> calization in French and that the opposite tendency is characteristic
> of Italian? Or is it just my imperfect knowledge of both languages
> deceiving me? And if i'm right, has any research been done trying to
> account for the difference? For instance, has anyone intelligently
> discussed the hypothesis that such a discrepancy might be linked to
> the fact that Italian is a 'pro-drop' language but French isn't?

Thanks, first of all, to the people who responded, all of whom are quoted
and credited in the following summary.

A frequent theme in the responses was that, at least at a 'colloquial'
level (which probably only means that the Academy is, as one would
expect, a century or two behind the times), French is becoming a pro-
drop language. This is evident not only from clauses like (3), reported
by Harris 1978 (who if i remember correctly was arguing that French is
evolving into a verb-initial language), but clauses like (4), which are
just plain null-subject. In general, the argument is that nominative-
case subject pronominals, being clitics even in the 'literary' language,
are being reinterpreted as prefixed agreement morphemes on the verb,
suppleting the degenerate suffix morphemes inherited from Latin.

(3) Il t'a vu, le docteur?
 'Has the doctor seen you?'

(4) Tombera? Tombera pas?
 'Is he gonna fall or isn't he?'

Knut Lambrecht <lambrechspot.colorado.edu> pointed out that

> "Topicalization" (i.e. the fronting construction in which you leave an
> "empty category" behind) is very common in (spoken) French. Some very
> natural and commonly heard examples:
>
> (5) Picasso connais pas 0 (Picasso i don't know)
> Le poisson j'aime bien 0 (Fish i like very well)
>
> Your Italian ex. (2b) would be [in French]:
>
> (6) Jean nous considerons 0 intelligent.
>
> Don't let anyone tell you that these examples are not OK. I have
> checked carefully, and have a whole corpus. Plus one of my students is
> working on a dissertation on this question ... I plan to publish my
> ideas on pseudo-topicalization in French soon.
>
> Notice that your ex. (2a) is (I think) possible in French only without
> the long-distance movement, i.e., it's fine to say [(7a)] but not
> (subject to verification) [(7b)] (sounds definitely awful to me).
>
> (7)a. Aucun mus'ee il a visit'e
> b. *?Aucun mus'ee je crois qu'il a visit'e

Knut also notes that, in both Italian and the registers of French on
which he is reporting, this 'fronting' is not so much 'topicalization' as
'(contrastive) focus movement', which as far as i can tell is definitely
true, though slightly tangential to my query.

<matthewshkucc.hku.hk> notes,

> Cinque is right to make the distinction he does but his term "clitic
> left-dislocation" is unhelpful. Apart from the sheer frequency of the
> construction(s), they do not *necessarily* show any pause or intonation
> break between the inital NP and the rest of the clause, as one would
> expect in a "dislocated" structure.

Given the responses of these two scholars, i must conclude that at least
some of the gaps i was noticing earlier this month were in fact
epiphenomena of gaps in my own knowledge of the relevant languages.
However, no one has addressed the other side of my question: Is
topicalization/focus movement (i.e., 'fronting' of an argument without
pronominal copy) more characteristic of Italian than prolepsis/left
dislocation (in which there is a pronominal copy, with or without a
prosodic pause after the 'fronted' constituent)? Marianna Pool
<mpoolcolmex.edu> says 'It seems that both French and Spanish share the
penchant for left dislocation'. Marianna lives in Mexico and is presuma-
bly surrounded by Spanish every day, whether she herself is a native
speaker or not. I don't have very good access myself to the Spanish
facts, being more familiar with French and Italian; hence my question.

On a broader topic, Stephen Spackman <spackmandfki.uni-sb.de> says,

> This of course is one of the reasons that French is clearly an American
> language [don't ask me what precisely he means by 'American', folks! --
> SWS]. ... We're here seeing a very important process happening: the one
> that's responsible for SVO-dominance, topic -> subject reanalysis ...
> The argument is that, even if it isn't true yet, we're within a century
> or so of an analysis where the preverbal pronoun complex has become
> tightly and irrevocably bound to the verb, the topic has been reana-
> lysed as the subject, and the language has become pro-drop, with a new
> functional stratum of agreement affixes on the left of the verb repla-
> cing the older suffix system, which is already well enough levelled to
> provide the start of an amusing reconstructive problem (at least if you
> work only from spoken data). I can't help feeling that this has alrea-
> dy happened, and only the orthography is holding it back.

Some helpful references:

Auger, J. 1993. 'More Evidence for Verbal Agreement-Marking in Colloqui-
 al French' in W. Ashby et al., eds., Linguistic Perspectives on
 the Romance Languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Harris, M. 1978. The Evolution of French Syntax: a Comparative Approach.
 London: Longmans.

Matthews, S. 1989. 'French in Flux: Typological Shift and Sociolinguis-
 tic Variation' in T. Walsh, ed., Synchronic and Diachronic Ap-
 proaches to Linguistic Variation and Change. Washington, DC:
 Georgetown University Press.

---------------------
Dr. Steven Schaufele
712 West Washington
Urbana, IL 61801
217-344-8240
fcoswsprairienet.org

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