LINGUIST List 5.1248

Mon 07 Nov 1994

Disc: French clitics/French agreement

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1. Philip H. Miller, French clitics and past participle agreement with avoir
2. , Re: 5.1224 French clitics/French agreement
3. Jacques Guy, Re: 5.1224 French clitics/French agreement
4. Logical Language Group, Apology

In his message of Oct 26 on LINGUIST 5.1198 Dick Hudson asks:

>If `object pronouns' are just inflections, why is it that they are treated
>like separate object NPs by the rule that makes a past participle agree
>with its object provided the latter precedes it?

I don't think that the classical prescriptive agreement rule for the past
participle with auxiliary 'avoir' ("the past participle agrees with its
object, provided that the latter precedes it") captures the correct
generalization for speakers of French who have past participle agreement
with 'avoir' in their competence [NOTE: it is difficult to use past
participle agreement with 'avoir' data, given that for many speakers, the
rule is entirely a prescriptive construct, learned during schooling. This
is for instance the case for me, and I personally have no judgements at all
on any cases of past participle agreement with 'avoir' that go beyond the
classical cases of direct object clitics and wh extraction of direct
objects. However, there are speakers of French for whom past participle
agreement with 'avoir' is alive, at least in certain registers. The
following data are reported from the judgements of some such speakers. END
NOTE]. Specific evidence against the classical rule comes from at least
two types constructions, 'tough-movement' (1a,b) and 'infinitival
relatives' (2). [Note that I know of no discussion of these cases in
prescriptive or descriptive grammars of French, e.g. Grevisse does not
mention such cases in 'le bon usage'.]

(1)a. De telles lettres sont difficiles a avoir ecrit / *ecrites a temps.
 Such letters are difficult to have written on time.

 b. Ce sont des fautes dangereuses a avoir commis/*commises dans sa jeunesse.
 These are mistakes dangerous to have committed in one's youth.

(2) Il m'a donne des lettres a avoir remis/*remises aux parents avant
 He gave me letters to have delivered to the parents before

 son retour.
 his return

To the extent that the informal condition 'the object precedes the past
participle' characterizes relative clauses with wh-extracted objects, it
should presumably also apply to these constructions since both the verbs
'commettre' and 'remettre' subcategorize for an obligatory direct object,
thus predicting that agreement should take place here, contrary to fact as
the above judgements show.
Thus, I conclude that the classical rule does not capture the data, at
least for some variants of French.

Note also that these data are problematic for Knud Lambrecht's analysis of
past participle agreement since in both cases "the discourse referent is
known to be feminine by the time the past participle is uttered". (LINGUIST
5.1204).

In Miller & Sag 1994, we argue that past participle agreement is common
both to cliticization and extraction of objects for the following reason.
We assume, following Pollard & Sag 1994, Chapter 9, that there is a lexical
rule (the Complement Extraction Lexical Rule, CELR) which creates verbal
entries missing an object ("SLASHED" entries) from entries subcategorizing
an object. These entries are used to create the 'bottom' of a long distance
extraction construction. We assume furthermore that the lexical rule
producing agreeing past participle forms requires the presense of a SLASHED
direct object, produced by the CELR. Furthermore, we assume that verbal
forms with affixed pronominals ("cliticized verb forms") are prodced by a
lexical rule (the Complement Cliticization Lexical Rule, CCLR) which
requires the presence of a SLASHED complement i.e., the CCLR is fed by the
CELR. Hence the presence of a SLASHED argument is common to both extraction
and cliticization contexts, and this explains their similar behavior with
respect to past participle agreement, without in any way entailing that the
'clitics' are syntactic words, in any sense of the term. On the other hand,
tough-movement and infinitival relatives in French do not involve the CELR
nor the SLASH feature. This is because, as is well known, these
constructions are bounded in French, contrary e.g. to English (cf. Huot
1981, Rizzi 1982), and SLASH only is involved in unbounded dependencies.

Our analysis, in which the CELR feeds the CCLR, with both cliticization and
extraction sharing a SLASHED complement position, thus allows us to treat
the classical set of data that are shared by extraction and cliticization
constructions as dependent on the presence of such a SLASHED complement,
e.g. floating of quantifiers out of object NPs, extraction out of object
NPs, etc.

Thus, Sag and I agree with the general thrust of the argument provided by
Flehman (LINGUIST 5.1224), to the effect that there are common *syntactic*
characteristics shared by those syntactic constructions where past
participles agree with direct objects. However, obviously, we do not share
Flehman's theoretical presuppositions about the nature of these
characteristics. Specifically, it is not clear to us that GB frameworks
provide a relevant distinction, on which agreement could depend, between
cliticization and wh-extraction of objects on the one hand, and
tough-construction and infinitival relatives on the other, contrary to
HPSG.

To conclude, returning to Hudson's query, it is not surprising on general
theoretical grounds that 'pronominal clitics', as a form of inflectional
morphology, should interact in syntactically relevant ways with the rest of
the sentence. This is a typical characteristic of inflectional morphology.

Philip Miller
Universite de Lille 3

References:

Huot, Helene. 1981. Constructions infinitives du francais : le subordonnant de,
 Geneve: Droz.
Miller, Philip H. and Ivan A. Sag. 1994 ms. "French clitic
 movement without clitics or movement".
Pollard, Carl and Ivan A. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.
 Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1982. Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.

Message 2: Re: 5.1224 French clitics/French agreement

> From: "R.Hudson" <uclyrahucl.ac.uk>

> Thanks to Knut Lambrecht for his message about my examples (1-3).
>
> (1) Je l'ai e'crite.
> `I it (fem) have written (fem sing)'
>
> (2) la lettre que j'ai e'crite..
> `the letter (fem) which I have written (fem sing)'
>
> (3) J'ai e'crit la lettre.
> `I have written (no agreement) the letter.'
>
> The traditional explanation (which makes good sense to me) is
> that the past participle agrees with the object whenever the
> object comes first (as it does in (1) and (2), but not in
> (3)). Knut's alternative is as follows:
>
> What counts is that in the *discourse* the referent be
> known to be feminine by the time the participle is
> uttered. I don't think it's primarily the presence of the
> bound object pronoun *before* the participle that
> triggers the agreement but the fact that a pronoun *can
> be used* in the first place, i.e. the fact that the
> referent can be assumed to be taken for granted by the
> addressee at utterance time.
>
> According to this analysis, the following should be possible.
> You and I are talking about a letter and a report, both of
> which have to be written. They're both entities you and I can
> take for granted, because we're talking about them. So it
> ought to be correct for me to utter (4).
>
> (4) J'ai e'crite la lettre, mais pas le compte-rendu.
> I've written (fem sing) the letter (fem), but not the
> report. (Assuming compte-rendu = report ...)

No it isn't; discourse pragmatics may have something to do with why
you sometimes don't get agreement with a preceding object where you'd
expect it, but the basic rule isn't overridden in the opposite
direction.

The rule itself is a normative grammarian's resolution of the
hesitation about agreement that arose in the transition from a purely
adjectival (and hence concord-marked) past participle to its
grammaticalisation as part of a periphrastic verbal structure. I've
always assumed the rationale (such as it is) to be that where the
past participle follows the object (pro)noun it stands in the normal
position for adjectives vis-a-vis heads in French, and may to that
extent be seen as more adjectival than in the case where it precedes.
So if "la lettre ecrite" 'the written letter', then "la lettre [que
j'ai] ecrite". But non-agreement -- for whatever reason -- has
always been common outside formally correct writing. One simple
likely reason is that very few past participles end in consonants; in
most cases the agreement isn't going to show up in (standard or
northern) speech anyway.

************************

Nigel Love
Linguistics
Cape Town

NLOVEBEATTIE.UCT.AC.ZA
************************

Message 3: Re: 5.1224 French clitics/French agreement

> From: "R.Hudson" <uclyrahucl.ac.uk>
>
> Knut's alternative is as follows:
>
> What counts is that in the *discourse* the referent be
> known to be feminine by the time the participle is
> uttered. I don't think it's primarily the presence of the
> bound object pronoun *before* the participle that
> triggers the agreement but the fact that a pronoun *can
> be used* in the first place, i.e. the fact that the
> referent can be assumed to be taken for granted by the
> addressee at utterance time.
>
> According to this analysis, the following should be possible.
>
> (4) J'ai e'crite la lettre, mais pas le compte-rendu.
> I've written (fem sing) the letter (fem), but not the
> report. (Assuming compte-rendu = report ...)
>
>

Never!!!!

> In fact, I doubt if such a rule applies to *any* language -

I believe, but my Italian is rusty, long forgotten, that you can
equally well say and write: Ho scritto questa lettera and: Ho
scritta questa lettera. Why? Don't ask me, ho imparato l'italiano
leggendo "Topolino".

> From: NLOVEbeattie.uct.ac.za
> Subject: Re: 5.1204 French clitics
>
>
> (7) C'est une lettre que j'ai ecrite, et non pas celle que j'ai
> recue.

"C'est une lettre que j'ai ecrite" = "this is a letter I wrote"
"C'est une letter que j'ai ecrit" = "what I wrote is a letter"

> From: Logical Language Group <lojbabaccess.digex.net>
>
> Well, the question "gender or sex?" is not so clear. In a related domain,
> the pronoun "ils" refers (I am told; I am not a francophone) to any group
> of persons that contains at least one man, whereas "elles" is used to refer
> to a group of all women. However, in legal writing, "elles" may be used
> of a mixed or all-male group, in agreement with "personnes"; this usage
> tends to deteriorate in a long document: "personnes...elles...elles...ils".
>

The question of gender vs sex is perfectly clear. Gender is grammatical, sex
biological. La sentinelle moustachue, la vigie pere de famille, l'estafette
mon oncle, Mickey la souris. d

The comment on French agreement written by me and published in issue 5.1224
was intended to go to the author only, but incorrectly sent by me to the whole
List. My apologies, and please disregard it.

John Cowan sharing account <lojbabaccess.digex.net> for now
 e'osai ko sarji la lojban.