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emx.cc.utexas.edu>Like Julie Auger, I find the discussion on generic c,a fun and worth pursuing. Julie and I have discussed the matter of the status of bound or atonic subject pronouns for a while (with each other and in publications). I think Julie has demonstrated convincignly that Quebec French (QF) has gone a step further than European French (EF) if that is the right term) in that the subject pronoun has become obligatory in more contexts in QF than in EF. The quantifier issue is especially interesting. I can't see any French speaker saying (1) Quelques linguistes ils ont beaucoup parle' des pronoms en franc,ais. some l. they have much spoken about pronouns in French instead of, either, in written French (2) Quelques linguistes ont beaucoup parle'.... or, in spoken French (pretty much obligatorily instead of (2)) (3) Y a quelques linguistes qui ont beaucoup parle' ... while apparently (1) is just fine in QF. I know (thanks to the GARS team in Aix-en-Provence) of a few attested examples like the following (4) Un monsieur il a dit que... a man he has said that where the quantifier is the indefinite article. These examples all seem to be from children (sentences like (4) sound distinctly childlike to me), which is of course water on Julie's mill. Maybe in another hundred to five hundred years everyone will say (1) without blushing. Everyone seems to agree, at least since H. Paul, O. Jespersen, Vendrye`s, that French atonic subject pronouns have become more and more tightly connected with the verb over the centuries and are used more and more obligatorily in cooccurrence with a full lexical NP; there also seems to be general agreement that the sequence pro+V (where pro = atonic pronoun) is a constituent of type V (plus any bars or boxes you might want to add) rather than a sequence of type [NP + V]. (There is also the issue of whether we should continue speaking of "clitic" pronouns in French, rather than of atonic/bound pronouns or (subject) prefixes. I have always thought (and argued in writing) that the term clitic is a misnomer for "je, tu, il" etc. and I was pleased to hear Julie Auger and Rich Janda at the last LSA meeting arguing just that. I think (but have no proof) that the use of the term clitic for French bound pronouns got established because Dave Perlmutter, who was working on Slavic clitics, decided to apply the term to French in his seminal early book on deep and surface structure constraints (I forgot the the exact title). The term "clitic" was convenient at the time because it was theoretically compatible with the transformational view: a clitic is a word that sticks to another word but it doesn't really belong there because by its deeper nature it really is an independent constituent that fits a syntactic position in a tree structure. We now have a pretty good understanding of what clitics are (thanks to Zwicky and others) and it is easy to show that the French pronouns don't pass the tests. We now also have (fortunately) plenty of theories in which grammatical relations are not necessarily expressed configurationally. Let's get rid of the term "clitic" in the analysis of French!) As I see it, the real theoretical issue is not whether modern French subject pronouns should be called pronouns or prefixes and whether therefore (5) Les Romains ils+sont fous! the Romans they are crazy is an instance of left-dislocation or of the canonical NP VP sequence. To the extent that we are dealing with a squishy phenomenon I don't think we have gained much by opting for one term rather than another. There are lots of tests for distinguishing free from bound morphemes, and French atonic pronouns clearly are of the latter type. But to my knowledge noone has a solid enough formal definition of the category "pronoun" that would allow us to decide that in "ils+sont fous" ILS is no longer a pronoun. The really interesting question is, in my opinion, WHY linguists are so keen on drawing the line between French pronouns and prefixes and between canonical and dislocated sentence patterns and what they do once they have decided to put "je" etc. into either category. I have a strong suspicion that the main reason for discussing the issue, in generative grammar at least, is because of the fundamental assumption, which generative grammar has directly taken over from "traditional" grammar, which has it from Aristotle, who probably has it from people before him, that a real good sentence has the form "Socrates currit" (well, "Sokrates trechei" for Aristotle) "The farmer kills the duckling" or "The man hit the ball", with a full lexical subject NP and a predicate phrase after it (or before it, as the case may be). Ancient grammarians called this sentence type the "oratio perfecta", the type expressing a "complete thought". In the case of Aristotle and other philosophers and logicians this assumption does no harm to the extent that these people weren't interested in sentence structure but in sentence meaning and human thought. In the case of generative grammar, the assumption has had deep consequences and has influenced syntactic theory without anyone being clearly aware of it (or at least without stating it explicitly). The generative grammarian's desire has been to reduce as much as possible all sentences to the NP-VP type (with or without AUX or INFL or AGR or whatever), where the NP has the function of expressing the subject argument of the verb. Deviations from this type have typically been addressed in such terms as "clitic doubling" (you say the same thing twice) or "pro drop" (you drop an essential element from the surface, but deeper down it's really there). The reason for this, I think, is the preconceived idea of what a sentence is. In the case of a large number of modern syntacticians this idea is crucial, because grammatical relations are defined structurally and because the same grammatical relation is assumed to be instantiable only once for a given predicate. So, for example, to say that in "Les Romains ils sont fous" both "les Romains" and "ils" are subjects is a no-no for most of us, because... well because that's the way it has always been. We take our task to be that of figuring out which of the two is the real subject, so we can close the debate. But maybe we just aren't asking the right questions. I hope to have opened a can of worms with these remarks. I apologize for their length. Knud Lambrecht UT AustinMail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue