Topic, Antitopic and Verb Agreement in Non-Standard French

120 Pages·1981·8.28 MB·English

by  Knud Lambrecht

TOPIC, ANTITOPIC AND VERB AGREEMENT
Pragmatics & Beyond
An Interdisciplinary Series of Language Studies
Editors
Herman Parret Jef Verschueren
(Belgian National Science Foundation, (Belgian National Science Foundation,
Universities of Antwerp and Leuven) University of Antwerp)
Editorial Board
Norbert Dittmar (Free University of Berlin)
David Holdcroft (University of Warwick)
Jerrold M. Sadock (University of Chicago)
Emanuel A. Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles)
Daniel Vanderveken (Unversity of Quebec at Trois-Rivières)
Teun A. van Dijk (University of Amsterdam)
Editorial Address
Department Germaanse
University of Antwerp (UIA)
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk
Belgium
II:6
Knud Lambrecht
Topic, Antitopic and Verb Agreement
in Non-Standard French
TOPIC, ANTITOPIC AND VERB AGREEMENT
IN NON-STANDARD FRENCH
KNUD LAMBRECHT
University of California at Berkeley
AMSTERDAM/JOHN BENJAMINS B.V.
1981
© Copyright 1981 - John Benjamins B.V.
ISSN 0166 6258 / ISBN 90 272 2526 5
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint,
microfilm or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Karl Zimmer, Wallace Chafe, Suzanne
Fleiscnman, Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay for many helpful comments
on the content of this paper. I am particularly grateful to Suzanne
Fleischman, who not only helped me clarify some of the ideas expressed
here but who with great patience made innumerable stylistic improve­
ments on the manuscript.
This research was supported by a University of California Fellow­
ship. I wish to thank the Berkeley Linguistics Department for its sup­
port and the University for its generous help over the past three
years.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements v
0. Introduction 1
1. The Standard/Non-Standard Distinction in Modern French.
Theoretical Implications 5
2. Clitic pronouns as Agreement Markers 17
2.1. Properties of Clitic Pronouns in Standard French and 17
in Non-Standard French.
2.2. Summary 44
2.3. Clitic Pronouns and the Verb 47
3. Verb Agreement in Non-Standard French 51
3.0. Introduction 51
3.1. Topic Agreement 53
3.1.1. Formal Properties of Topics 53
3.1.2. Pragmatic Properties of Topics 60
3.2. Antitopi Agreement 75
3.2.1. Definition 75
3.2.2. Formal Properties of Antitopics 76
3.2.3. Pragmatic Properties of Antitopics 84
Notes 99
References 109
0. INTRODUCTION
The goal of this monograph is to describe and to some extent ex­
plain the syntactic and the pragmatic properties of the nominal and
pronominal elements in sentences of two types, both very common in
modern spoken French, and illustrated in (1) and (2) below:
(1) a. Ces Romains ils sont fous
b. Ces Romains je les aime pas
c. Ces Romains je leur fais pas confiance
(2) a. Ils sont fous, ces Romains
b. Je les aime pas, ces Romains
c. Je leur fais pas confiance, à ces Romains
In each of these sentences, the NP ces Romains is paired with a pro­
noun of the so-called conjunctive or clitic series: ils in (a), les
in (b) and leur in (c). In spite of their frequent occurrence, these
two sentence types have until very recently received little attention
among linguists and grammarians . When mentioned at all, the simul­
taneous occurrence of a noun and a coreferential pronoun within the
same clause has typically been considered redundant and therefore anom­
alous and therefore uninteresting. I will argue that far from having
the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly, this cooccurrence of co-
referential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an im­
portant functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-
comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. This
relationship exists side by side with the subject-predicate relation­
ship, which until recently has been the major focus of syntactic re-
2 TOPIC, ANTITOPIC AND VERB AGREEMENT IN NON-STANDARD FRENCH
search in French as well as in other European languages. Thus I will
argue for a synchronic functional opposition between the sentence
types in (1) and (2) and the "canonical" type illustrated in (3):
(3) a. Ces Romains sont fous
b. J'aime pas ces Romains
c. Je fais pas confiance à ces Romains
My hypothesis is that modern spoken French has more than one basic
sentence type and that these types are distinguished by the presence or
absence and the nature of noun-verb agreement. In section 2 of this
paper I will present an analysis of the pronouns in (1) and (2) that
will make plausible their interpretation as grammatical agreement mar­
kers. These agreement markers have the dual function of indicating the
case role of an NP within the clause and the pragmatic role of the ref­
erent of this NP within the discourse. Thus in example (1) the NP ces
Romains is the topic, and the pronouns ils, les and leur are the agree­
ment markers that link the topic and the verb. The verb, followed or
not by further constituents, represents together with the agreement
markers the comment or part of the comment if, as usual, the topic
governs more than one clause. In example (2) the function of the pro­
nouns is similar to their function in (1), but the topic is now posi­
tioned after the comment and has become an antitopic. The syntactic
and pragmatic differences between topics and antitopics will be ana-
lyzed in section 3 of this paper3.
A problem for my analysis is the data and how to use them. Anyone
who has tried to analyze language pragmatically, to figure out why and
when people use certain syntactic constructions in discourse and to
determine the role of the referents of the different noun phrases in
the communicative situation, will have noticed that it is almost im­
possible to rely on introspection. While it is often possible to judge
the grammatical well-formedness of a construction by appealing to in­
tuitions, these intuitions are unfortunately of little help in judging
the pragmatic appropriateness of a construction, unless this construc­
tion is embedded in its context of discourse. This problem is partic-
INTRODUCTION 3
ularly acute for the linguist who works with a non-standard language,
for which his intuitions are shaky to begin with since he is used to
equating well-formedness with the norms associated with the standard
language. My goal in this paper being partly to establish the pragmatic
function of certain syntactic configurations in the non-standard ver­
sion of spoken French, the most reasonable procedure would probably
have been to use a corpus of spoken utterances, such as that given e.g.
in François (74), and to analyze the contexts in which these configura­
tions appear. If instead I have stuck with the method of quoting isola-
4
ted sentences or minimal discourse stretches , creating a context when­
ever necessary, the reason is partly inertia and a desire to avoid ex­
cessively long quotes, but partly also the difficulty in finding in a
given corpus the phenomena one wants to analyze for independent the­
oretical reasons. The result of my method is, I hope, greater concen­
tration and coherence in the linguistic argumentation, but also, I fear,
a measure of distortion of the actual facts of language. I hope that
the latter will not outweight the former.