The Categories of Grammar

French lui and le

Author

Alan Huffman | The City University of New York

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027230331 (Eur) | EUR 144.00

ISBN 9781556193828 (USA) | USD 216.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027281975 | EUR 144.00 | USD 216.00

This book offers an analysis of the French clitic object pronouns lui and le in the radically functional Columbia school framework, contrasting this framework with sentence-based treatments of case selection. It suggests that features of the sentence such as subject and object relations, normally taken as pretheoretical categories of observation about language, are in fact part of a theory of language which does not withstand empirical testing. It shows that the correct categories are neither those of structural case nor those of lexical case, but rather, semantic ones. Traditionally, anomalies in the selection of dative and accusative case in French, such as case government, use of the dative for possession and disadvantaging, its use in the faire-causative construction, and other puzzling distributional irregularities have been used to support the idea of an autonomous, non-functional central core of syntactic phenomena in language. The present analysis proposes semantic constants for lui and le which render all their occurrences explicable in a straightforward way. The same functional perspective informs issues of cliticity and pronominalization as well.

The solution offered here emerges from an innovative instrumental view of linguistic meaning, an acknowledgment that communicative output is determined only partially and indirectly by purely linguistic input, with extralinguistic knowledge and human inference bridging the gap. This approach entails identification of the pragmatic factors influencing case selection and a reevaluation of thematic-role theory, and reveals the crucial impact of discourse on the structure as well as the functioning of grammar. One remarkable feature of the study is its extensive and varied data base. The hypothesis is buttressed by hundreds of fully contextualized examples and large-scale counts drawn from modern French texts.

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 30] 1997. xiv, 379 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.30

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements | p. xi

Introduction | p. xiii

1. The Problem of lui and le

1. Traditional Grammatical Categories | p. 1

2. The Problem to Be Solved | p. 3

3. Language-specific Grammatical Categories | p. 9

4. The Goal of this Study | p. 11

5. The Framework of the New Analysis | p. 14

6. Columbia School Contrasted with Other Meaning-based Schools of Analysis | p. 22

7. Grammatical Categories as Hypotheses | p. 24

8. Lui versus the à Phrase | p. 25

9. Precursors to this Analysis | p. 29

2. The System of Degree of Control

1. Participants and Events | p. 30

2. Degree of Control | p. 31

3. The Status of the Highest Controller | p. 32

4. The Satellite Relationship and Degree of Control | p. 34

5. The Assigning of Roles via Degree of Control | p. 36

6. Where the Roles Come From | p. 38

7. Meaning Not in the Sentence | p. 40

8. Precision as a Factor in Choice of Meaning | p. 41

9. Strategies of Exploitation | p. 42

10. A Look Ahead | p. 43

11. Participants in the Event vs. Non-participants | p. 44

11.1. Participants in Events vs. Circumstances of Events
11.2. Participants vs. Prepositional Phrases
11.3. Participants vs. Possessive Adjectives
3. Semantic Substance: Exploitations of Degree of Control

1. Types of Involvement Associated with the Mid Controller | p. 83

2. Lui- with “Predicate” Nouns and Adjectives | p. 114

3. Illusory Categories of Fractional Meaning: “Dative of Possession” and “Dative of the Disadvantaged” | p. 124

1. Substance and Value in Linguistic Analysis | p. 160

2. Validating the Opposition between lui- and le- | p. 162

3. The Superagent: A Striking Manifestation of Value | p. 164

3.1. Harmer's Examples with faire
3.2. Other Instances of the Superagent

4. Three- versus Two-participant Messages | p. 180

5. Animacy Skewing in Two-participant Messages | p. 182

6. Low Level of Activity with le- | p. 183

7. Wider Exploitation of the Control Opposition in Two-Participant Messages | p. 185

8. Occurrences of lui- and le- with Semantically-Defined Verb Classes | p. 188

9. The Network of Oppositions: Verbs of “Commanding” | p. 199

5. Networks of Oppositions

1. The System of Participants | p. 206

1.1. The Grammatical Interlock
1.2. Focus
1.3. The Focus-Control Interlock
1.4. The First and Second Persons
1.5. Deixis
1.6. Communicative Motivation for Paradigmatic Structure

2. The High Controller in Two-Participant Messages | p. 212

3. Interaction of the High- and Non-High Controller Strategies | p. 215

4. Case Study: Verbs of “Asking” | p. 219

5. The Pseudo-Phenomenon of “Government” | p. 230

Appendix A: Verbs Included in Counts of Tables 5.3 and 5.4
Appendix B: Additional Charts Showing Control Level in Relation to “Government”
6. The Theory of the Sentence and the Traditional Canon

1. Lui- and le- as a Linguistic Problem | p. 257

2. The Theory of the Sentence | p. 258

2.1. Deductively Motivated Categories
2.2. The Tripartite Relationship
2.3. Testing the Theory of the Sentence: The Appendix

3. Traditional Grammar and Generative Grammar | p. 264

4. Direct and Indirect Object in the Grammar of French | p. 266

5. Notional or Formal Categories? | p. 267

6. A Morpho-syntactic Approach: Blinkenberg | p. 270

7. The Notion of “Transitivity” | p. 273

8. Transitivity as an Explanatory Construct | p. 276

9. The Traditional Canon of Categories | p. 280

10. A Functionalist View: Hopper & Thompson | p. 282

11. Linguistic Resources vs. Linguistic Products | p. 284

7. A New Perspective on the Notions “Pronominalization” and “Cliticity”

1. The “Pronoun” as a Grammatical Category | p. 288

1.1. The Problem of Pronominalization
1.2. Taking the Morphemes Seriously
1.3. The Term “Dative” and the Problem of the Dative

2. A Columbia-school approach to à phrases | p. 293

2.1. Degree of Control with Nouns
2.2. Choice of Preposition
2.3. The Contribution of à
2.4. From Circumstance to Control
2.5. The Precision Factor
2.6. A vs. par: An Exploitation of Relative Precision
2.7. Summary

3. The Function of Cliticity | p. 315

1. Grammar as Explanation | p. 321

2. Language, Thought, and Communication | p. 324

3. Functionalist Schools of Grammar | p. 328

4. The Nature and Role of Linguistic Theory | p. 333

5. The Acquisition and Use of Language | p. 334

6. Observations and Hypotheses in Linguistics | p. 337

7. The Human Factor in Language | p. 339

Notes | p. 342

Abbreviations | p. 368

Abbreviations of Texts Cited | p. 368

Index | p. 371

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