The Categories of Grammar

French lui and le

Author
Alan Huffman | The City University of New York
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027230331 (Eur) | EUR 144.00
ISBN 9781556193828 (USA) | USD 216.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027281975 | EUR 144.00 | USD 216.00
 
Google Play logo
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
Table of Contents
Cited by

Cited by 22 other publications

Davis, Joseph
2009. Rule and Meaning in the Teaching of Grammar. Language and Linguistics Compass 3:1  pp. 199 ff. DOI logo
Davis, Joseph
2015. Rule, pattern, and meaning in the second-language teaching of grammar. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 47:1  pp. 53 ff. DOI logo
Davis, Joseph
2016. Latin nominatives with and without verbs. <i>WORD</i> 62:2  pp. 91 ff. DOI logo
Davis, Joseph
2016. Substance and structure in Columbia School linguistics. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 48:1  pp. 59 ff. DOI logo
Davis, Joseph
2018. Spooky grammatical effects. In Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 76],  pp. 133 ff. DOI logo
den Dikken, Marcel
2018. An incomplete disquisition against ‘incomplete acquisition’. In Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 76],  pp. 269 ff. DOI logo
Dreer, Igor
2013. The Use of the Future and Conditional in High Medieval Literature. In Research on Old French: The State of the Art [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 88],  pp. 221 ff. DOI logo
Hesseltine, Kelli & Joseph Davis
2020. The communicative function of adjective-noun order in English. <i>WORD</i> 66:3  pp. 166 ff. DOI logo
Lin, Lin
2020. The German Demonstratives. In The German Demonstratives [Peking University Linguistics Research, 2],  pp. 65 ff. DOI logo
Lin, Lin
2020. Introduction. In The German Demonstratives [Peking University Linguistics Research, 2],  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Otheguy, Ricardo & Naomi L. Shin
2022. A Columbia School Perspective on Explanation in Morphosyntactic Variation. In Explanations in Sociosyntactic Variation,  pp. 90 ff. DOI logo
Reid, Wallis
2011. The communicative function of English verb number. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 29:4  pp. 1087 ff. DOI logo
Reid, Wallis
2018. The justification of grammatical categories. In Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 76],  pp. 91 ff. DOI logo
Reid, Wallis
2019. The object of explanation for linguistics. In Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 77],  pp. 103 ff. DOI logo
Sabar, Nadav
2019. Using big data to support meaning hypotheses for some and any. In Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 77],  pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
Stern, Nancy
2018. Ditransitives and the English System of Degree of Control. In Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 76],  pp. 157 ff. DOI logo
Stern, Nancy
2019. Introduction. In Columbia School Linguistics in the 21st Century [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 77],  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Main BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  96047128 | Marc record