The Categories of Grammar : French lui and le 9789027230331, 9789027281975

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR FRENCH LUI AND LE

S T U D I E S IN L A N G U A G E C O M P A N I O N S E R I E S (SLCS) The SLCS series has been established as a companion series to STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, International Journal, sponsored by the Foundation "Foundations of language". Series Editors Werner Abraham University of Groningen The Netherlands

Michael Noonan University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA Editorial Board

Joan Bybee (University of New Mexico) Ulrike Claudi (University of Cologne) Bernard Comrie (University of Southern California) William Croft (University of Manchester) Osten Dahl (University of Stockholm) Gerrit Dimmendaal (University of Leiden) Martin Haspelmath (Free University of Berlin) Ekkehard König (Free University of Berlin) Christian Lehmann (University of Bielefeld) Robert Longacre (University of Texas, Arlington) Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie-Mellon University) Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) Edith Moravcsik (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) Masayoshi Shibatani (Kobe University) Russell Tomlin (University of Oregon) John Verhaar (The Hague)

Volume 30

Alan Huffman The Categories of Grammar French lui and le

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR FRENCH LUI AND LE

ALAN HUFFMAN The City University of New York

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huffman, Alan, 1948The categories of grammar : French lui and le / Alan Huffman. p. cm. -- (Studies in language companion series, ISSN 0165-7763 ; v. 30) Includes bibliographical references. 1. French language-Pronoun. I. Title. II. Series. PC2261.H84 " 1996 445~dc21 96-47128 ISBN 90 272 3033 1 (Eur.) / 1-55619-382-3 (US) (alk. paper) CIP © Copyright 1997 - John Benjamins B.V. 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. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

In memory of William Diver 1921-1995 Scholar, Teacher Colleague, Friend

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

xi xiii

1. The Problem of lui and le 1. Traditional Grammatical Categories 2. The Problem to Be Solved 3. Language-specific Grammatical Categories 4. The Goal of this Study 5. The Framework of the New Analysis 5.1. The Theoretical Background 5.2. Linguistic Meaning 5.3. Syntax? Semantics? Pragmatics? 5.4. Signals 5.5. Substance and Value 6. Columbia School Contrasted with Other Meaning-based Schools of Analysis 7. Grammatical Categories as Hypotheses 8. Lui versus the à Phrase 9. Precursors to this Analysis

1 1 3 9 11 14 14 16 19 19 20

2. The System of Degree of Control 1. Participants and Events 2. Degree of Control 3. The Status of the Highest Controller 4. The Satellite Relationship and Degree of Control 5. The Assigning of Roles via Degree of Control

30 30 31 32 34 36

22 24 25 29

viii 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

CONTENTS

Where the Roles Come From Meaning Not in the Sentence Precision as a Factor in Choice of Meaning Strategies of Exploitation A Look Ahead Participants in the Event vs. Non-participants 11.1. Participants in Events vs. Circumstances of Events 11.2. Participants vs. Prepositional Phrases 11.2.1. Involvement vs. Non-involvement 11.2.2. Precise Information vs. Imprecise Information 11.2.3. Problems Due to the Satellite Relationship 11.3. Participants vs. Possessive Adjectives

38 40 41 42 43 44 44 51 55 60 63 64

3. Semantic Substance: Exploitations of Degree of Control 1. Types of Involvement Associated with the Mid Controller 1.1. Interactor 1.2. Expediter/Enabler 1.3. Causer 1.4. Motivator 2. Lui- with "Predicate" Nouns and Adjectives 3. Illusory Categories of Fractional Meaning: "Dative of Possession" and "Dative of the Disadvantaged" 3.1. The "Dative of Possession" 3.2. "Beneficiary" and "Maleficiary"

83 83 85 87 103 104 114

4. Linguistic Value: Lui versus Le 1. Substance and Value in Linguistic Analysis 2. Validating the Opposition between lui- and le3. The Superagent: A Striking Manifestation of Value 3.1. Harmer's Examples with faire 3.2. Other Instances of the Superagent 4. Three- versus Two-participant Messages 5. Animacy Skewing in Two-participant Messages 6. Low Level of Activity with le7. Wider Exploitation of the Control Opposition in Two-Participant Messages 8. Occurrences of lui- and le- with Semantically-Defined Verb Classes 9. The Network of Oppositions: Verbs of "Commanding"

124 124 138 160 160 162 164 167 178 180 182 183 185 188 199

CONTENTS

ix

5. Networks of Oppositions 1. The System of Participants 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 3. Interaction of the High- and Non-High Controller Strategies 4. Case Study: Verbs of "Asking" 5. The Pseudo-Phenomenon of "Government" Appendix A: Verbs Included in Counts of Tables 5.3 and 5.4 Appendix B: Additional Charts Showing Control Level in Relation to "Government"

206 206 207 208 208 209 210 211 212 215 219 230 254 255

6. The Theory of the Sentence and the Traditional Canon 1. Lui- and le- as a Linguistic Problem 2. The Theory of the Sentence 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 4. Direct and Indirect Object in the Grammar of French 5. Notional or Formal Categories? 6. A Morpho-syntactic Approach: Blinkenberg 7. The Notion of "Transitivity" 8. Transitivity as an Explanatory Construct 9. The Traditional Canon of Categories 10. A Functionalist View: Hopper & Thompson 11. Linguistic Resources vs. Linguistic Products

257 257 258 259 260 261 264 266 267 270 273 276 280 282 284

7. A New Perspective on the Notions "Pronominalization" and "Cliticity" 288 1. The "Pronoun" as a Grammatical Category 288 1.1. The Problem of Pronominalization 289 1.2. Taking the Morphemes Seriously 290 1.3. The Term "Dative" and the Problem of the Dative 292

CONTENTS

X

2. A Columbia-school approach to à phrases 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 3.1. Ordering among the Clitics 3.2. Combinatory Skewings among Clitics 3.3. Word Order in Imperative Messages

293 294 298 299 301 302 306 315 315 318 318 319

8. The Categories of Grammar 1. Grammar as Explanation 2. Language, Thought, and Communication 3. Functionalist Schools of Grammar 4. The Nature and Role of Linguistic Theory 5. The Acquisition and Use of Language 6. Observations and Hypotheses in Linguistics 7. The Human Factor in Language

321 321 324 328 333 334 337 339

Notes

342

Bibliography Abbreviations Abbreviations of Texts Cited

360 368 368

Index

371

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank members of the Linguistics section of the New York Academy of Sciences for presenting the 1985 Edward Sapir Award in Linguistics to an early version of this work. Thanks to Bob Kirsner and Michael Noonan for their support and advocacy of this book, and to the review and production staff of John Benjamins for useful criticism and support during its preparation for publication. My profoundest intellectual debt is to William Diver, for twenty-three years my teacher, mentor, and closest colleague, who is now sorely missed. It is impossible to measure the extent to which I have benefited from Diver's understanding and insight, his erudition, integrity and highly demanding standards, and the perseverance and confidence in what he was doing that enabled him to stay on the tail of even the most difficult problem until it was solved. The generosity with which Diver offered all this, as well as the personal role model he provided, endeared him to all who had the privilege of being among his students. May his memory and his teachings be a continuing inspiration and guide to all linguists. Studies like the present one would not be possible without a strong intellectual community. The Linguistics Seminar at Columbia University provided the necessary forum for criticism, encouragement, and working out of problems throughout the development of this study. Although its members are too numerous to list here, I wish to express thanks to all of them. Special mention must be made of Wallis Reid, a faithful reader and critic of my work for many years, whose own outstanding books have been a source of inspiration for me. His generous suggestions on the writing of the early sections of this book, as well as his perceptive comments throughout, and the concern and care he has shown for the study from its earliest versions right

xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

through the final manuscript, have served to make it much more presentable than it otherwise would have been. The final manuscript benefited greatly from a thorough critical reading by my colleague Joseph Davis, with extended discussion of relevant issues. Joseph is a master at ferreting out those minor misstatements that can give rise to major misunderstandings. Special thanks also to Ricardo Otheguy for his reading and critiquing of Chapters 1 and 2, which led to many substantive improvements in crucial presentational matters, and to Cornelia Reid for incisive editorial comments on Chapter 1. Finally, I wish to express appreciation to my wife Madeleine and our family for their patience and forbearance during many long years of research and writing. May the result be worthy of their sacrifice.

Introduction

This book is meant to appeal to two kinds of readers. First, to those interested in the workings of the French language. Such readers will appreciate an innovative analysis which offers a unified explanation of the many mysteries of usage of two common pronouns. This explanation draws on passages from twentieth-century French prose texts and is guided by what one finds in actual texts, not merely in grammar books or style manuals. It provides insights into the language-using skills of good authors. At the same time, the analysis has the advantage of being very simple. It does not demand of the reader extensive knowledge of any particular linguistic theory; it in fact questions the conceptual basis of existing theories which have failed to provide understanding of these two forms. Secondly, the book is addressed to those interested in linguistics as a discipline. It lays out and exemplifies a relatively unfamiliar approach to linguistic analysis which is not merely programmatic but which has actual worked-out results to show. It scrutinizes and challenges the common-sense but unproven assumptions of both traditional and generative grammar. Let readers not imagine that they must learn yet another linguistic "theory" before they will be able to understand the unique analysis offered here. This book starts from scratch, from brute facts of usage that anyone can appreciate. We take seriously what we see, that is, occurrences of the two forms in discourse. We start tabula rasa, clearing our minds of the unsuccessful traditional categories, and let the usage itself steer us to a hypothesis of what the function of these forms must be. We then use a large body of naturally-occurring data to test and validate that hypothesis. It turns out that, whereas the traditional claim has been that the function of these pronouns is primarily a syntactic one, it is in actuality an entirely semantic one. In order to appreciate the semantic nature of this function, though, it is

xiv

INTRODUCTION

necessary to adopt a novel view of what • constitutes linguistic meaning. That view is the main conceptual innovation of the book. It is well known that total communicative output, what we may call a message, is the result of input both from the linguistic code proper and from contextual information and extralinguistic knowledge. But it turns out that the contribution of the linguistic code is actually much less that has been previously suspected. We reserve the term meaning for this sparse linguistically-encoded element that stands in one-to-one correlation with a linguistic form. The analytical challenge is to get at this scant element contributed by language itself. We will see that message effects resulting from human inference, intelligence and creativity working both with meanings and with non-linguistically encoded information are what became the categories of both traditional and contemporary grammars, and that these grammars have thus failed to come to grips with the actual categories of structure of French. Chapter 1 lays out the problem to be solved. A discussion of the theoretical framework begins in section 5 of that chapter, followed by a brief comparison of this framework with some other contemporary approaches of similar orientation. The analysis itself is presented in Chapters 2 through 5. Readers who are less interested in issues of linguistic theory may wish to skim Chapter 1 from section 5 on, or return to that point after they have gotten some idea of the analysis proper from Chapter 2. In-depth discussion of the theoretical and philosophical implications of the analysis is held off until Chapter 6, when presentation of the analysis has been completed. Chapter 6 offers an unconventional assessment and critique of the foundations of sentence-based grammar and the grammatical tradition. The purpose of Chapter 7 is to address questions traditionally held to be part of the problem of the two forms but that are now seen to be separate problems. Chapter 8 returns to the theoretical framework and completes the comparison of it with other linguistic theories. This book will thus offer a way of uniting the two seemingly irreconcilable poles of interest in modern linguistics. It offers a way of looking at language as a self-contained system, but at same time it addresses issues of concern to those interested in discourse, actual language use, and the role of cognitive and behavioral characteristics of language users. You will be amazed at how much two small words from French can teach us about the nature of human language.

Chapter 1 The Problem of lui and le

1.

Traditional Grammatical Categories

The grammatical tradition has bequeathed to modern linguists no dearth of linguistic categories. Since the Greek philosophers, grammarians have drawn upon this inventory to describe particular languages and language in general. The roots of Western grammar lie in Aristotelian thought and reflect an attempt to understand the phenomenon of human language through a philosophical mode of inquiry. This tradition, elaborated in the Port Royal grammar and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grammars of the classical languages, is the source of many of the most fundamental and enduring categories of grammar: the parts of speech — noun, verb, adjective; the parts of the sentence — subject, predicate, direct and indirect object; and of course that most basic category of all, the Sentence itself. The original motivation for such categories was deductive and lay in a particular philosophical conception of the nature of language. Grammar has its roots in the study of logic and the quest for a means of evaluating the truth value of the proposition based on its logical form.1 From this inquiry into the structure of thought, it was an easy move to the view that since language is a vehicle for the expression of thought, the structure of language must in some fundamental way parallel the structure of the thoughts it is used to express.2 This led to the positing of a set of linguistic units which parallel units of logic. Thus, the basic unit of thought — the Complete Thought — has its linguistic counterpart in the basic unit of grammar — the Sentence. Since every thought contains a subject of the thought and a predication about that subject, so every complete Sentence contains a Subject and a Predicate, and so forth. Furthermore,

2

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

since the structure of thought is universal, it was taken for granted that these linguistic categories were likewise universal.3 Yet the traditional categories had an inductive side as well. Grammarians clearly recognized that the occurrence of linguistic forms in actual language use poses a legitimate empirical problem, and they employed these same logic-based categories to explain uses of forms in individual languages. For example, in languages like classical Greek and Latin in which nouns and pronouns have case morphology, grammars state that "the nominative is the case of the subject", "the accusative is the case of the direct object", and "the dative is the case of the indirect object". In this application of deductively motivated categories to the empirical problem of language, grammarians were attempting true theorybased explanation. The grammatical tradition evolved largely before the modern scientific era, and the status of this body of accumulated wisdom as a theory of language was never made explicit. Categories of a theory must be tested against data and rejected if they don't fit. In practice, though, traditional categories have always been used to explain occurrences of forms even when the fit is poor. Thus, in Greek and Latin, predicates occur in the nominative case, and direct objects in the dative. In response, new categories which do not reflect the deductive motivation of the original ones had to be added to the inventory: the "predicate nominative", "government of the dative". In spite of the difficulties they create, though, the original categories survived; and grammars grew by accretion, old categories being kept as new ones were added, with little regard for the internal consistency of the resulting mixture. Outright rejection of the logic-derived categories as simply inappropriate to an analysis of language seems never to have been considered an option. Because grammar was not regarded as being on a par with theories of other natural phenomena, the traditional categories acquired a degree of sanctity and a cloak of immunity from empirical scrutiny. They came to form a kind of canon, and concern for their correlation with linguistic forms took the shape of a struggle to define and redefine the categories so as to accommodate usage; but there was no attempt to achieve fit by devising completely new categories, starting from a new conceptual basis. As grammars focused on a search for manifestations of the supposedly universal categories in individual languages, language-specific distributions of forms received an ever-diminishing share of attention. Ultimately, these categories came to usurp the status of observations, that is, primary linguistic data or pretheoretical entities which are themselves the object, rather than the means, of explanation. In consequence, the empirical

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

3

problem of what motivates occurrences of linguistic forms in actual usage very often went unsolved. With the advent of generative grammar, the locus of explanation shifted to the relation between formal properties of the grammatical rules of a particular language and a general theory of universal grammar. This interest has in turn extended to the properties of the human mind that these linguistic universals are believed to reveal. It is assumed that the problems of fit between categories and forms can somehow be worked out, and they are largely glossed over. Analysis takes place in terms of underlying syntactic categories which bear only an indirect relation to language-specific distributions of morphology. This book will take up the still-unsolved empirical problem of the occurrence of linguistic forms. It will examine a particular group of morphemes from French and seek to explain why speakers and writers deploy these morphemes as they do. Traditional categories, in this case "direct object" and "indirect object", provide no satisfactory answer to this question. This study will offer new categories, completely different in form and spirit from the old ones, that explain occurrences of these forms in a unified way. Justifying these new categories, however, will require rejection of the logical-structure premise, and the adoption of a wholly different set of orienting principles, principles in which the communicative function of language and behavioral characteristics of language users play the dominant role. Admittedly, it takes an act of will power to refocus one's attention at this late date on the low-level phenomenon of language-specific distributions of grammatical forms. Yet one must wonder whether the high-level generalizing about language and mind that characterizes today's linguistics can proceed meaningfully without assurance that all is solid at the foundation. Whatever the achievements of modern linguistics, the fact remains that difficulties with some of its most basic assumptions have not been resolved. These still-open questions lie at the heart of the issue raised by this book: the justification for categories like direct and indirect object in the grammar of French, or indeed in the grammar of any language.

2.

The Problem to Be Solved

The forms to be studied here are known as clitic object pronouns of the third person, "clitic" meaning that they occur in a particular fixed word-order pattern with relation to a verb. The forms are: (a)

the singular lui, 'him, her, it', with its plural leur 'them', and

4

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

(b)

the singular masculine le, feminine la (both of these V before a vowel), and plural les, 'him, her, it, them'.

(French has only two genders, and neither set of pronouns makes a gender distinction in the plural.) For brevity, we may refer to set (a) simply as lui, and set (b) as le. No grammar has ever completely succeeded in explicating the choice between lui and le in French oral and written discourse. In the traditional scheme, lui is categorized as the "indirect object" or "dative" pronoun, and le as the "direct object" or "accusative" pronoun. Yet there are a great many types of examples where these categories provide little understanding, as in the following: (1)

a. Son fils le suit. 'His son follows him.' b. Son fils lui obéit. 'His son obeys him.'

(2)

a. Cet homme l'intéresse. 'This man interests her.' b. Cet homme lui plaît. 'This man pleases her.'

(3)

a. Un nouveau ministre de la défense l'a remplacé. 'A new defense minister replaced him.' b. Un nouveau premier ministre lui a succédé. 'A new prime minister succeeded him.'

(4)

a. Je le prie de venir tout de suite. T ask him to come right away.' b. Je lui demande de venir tout de suite. T ask him to come right away.'

(5)

a. Le général le charge de commander le front de combat. 'The general orders him to command the battle front.' b. Le général lui present de cesser le combat. 'The general orders him to stop the battle.'

All of these contain conceptually direct objects; in (4) and (5), in fact, the English translation gives no hint that a different verb and pronoun are selected in the French. It is therefore difficult to see why the "direct object" pronoun is selected in the first member of each of these pairs, but the "indirect object" pronoun in the second. Parallel cases in Latin and Greek grammars were treated under a heading

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

5

like "dative with special verbs". 4 Instead of a conceptually motivated differentiation, there is, in the presence of one of these verbs, an apparently arbitrary choice of the dative for a direct object, rather than the expected case, the accusative. In the grammatical tradition, this phenomenon has been known as "government" of the dative,5 the intent being to specifically deny that any semantic or indeed any rational factor can be invoked to account for the variation in case.6 More precisely, the verb is seen as determining, in an automatic fashion, the choice of case; the case is not freely chosen because of any contribution it might make in its own right: Nouns are governed, as it is called, by verbs and prepositions; that is to say, these latter sorts of words cause nouns to be in such or such a case; and there must be a concord or an agreement between the nouns and the other words, which along with the nouns compose a sentence. (Cobbett 1819:67)

Modern syntactic treatments handle this phenomenon of apparently automatic selection of pronoun by verb in an essentially equivalent way, assigning "selectional features" to individual verbs, thus specifying at the level of the lexicon — as a matter of arbitrary fact — what kind of pronoun a verb will occur with. Such "lexical subcategorization" is assumed, for example, in Kayne (1975).7 We may profitably invoke here a distinction made by Reid (1991:3) between freely chosen and formally determined (or governed) elements in language. In the two utterances: Give me an apple. Give me a banana. everyone would agree that 'apple' and 'banana' are freely chosen on the basis of the speaker's communicative intent; Reid (1991:8) calls this "goal-directed choice". Once this choice is made, however, the choice between a and an is not free; it is constrained by the phonological characteristics of the following word. The notions of "concord" and "government" similarly imply that a grammatical element is mechanically determined, like a and an, by the occurrence of another, purposefully chosen element — specifically, an element in the same sentence. Thus in examples (l)-(5), the verb of the sentence would be chosen for its meaning, and the case of the pronoun constrained by the choice of verb. The choice of lui or le would therefore fall in that part of the grammar of French dealing with choices that are not goal-directed. Collectively, those elements of grammar which are formally determined within the sentence make up that part of the grammar known as the "syntax". This component of grammar is viewed as autonomous, or arbitrary, with respect

6

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

to communicative function. As noted by Reid (1991:4), with reference to subject-verb agreement: While over the years views have vacillated about what phenomena do and do not fall within the scope of sentence grammar, 'verb agreement' has remained as proof that there is indeed a central core.

"Case government" is another prototypical element of this "central core". The positing of arbitrary, automatic "government" or "selection" of a particular case by a particular verb is a very different kind of accounting for the occurrence of morphology from the logical-structure premise, according to which a conceptually direct object will evoke the accusative case, and a conceptually indirect object, the dative case. From this viewpoint, the notion of "government" has the appearance of a kind of institutionalized escape clause, a deductively unmotivated construct called into being as a matter of necessity by brute facts of the language. Yet, for a number of reasons, this escape clause does not in fact resolve the difficulty. Firstly, one finds lellui alternation with the same verb under similar circumstances. Consider (6). All three examples contain the same verb, manquer, consequently no claim of "government" can be made. To be sure, the message changes markedly with the switch from accusative to dative; but it does so in a way that has no apparent connection to direct or indirect object. Rather, it is the nature of the activity that seems to be of importance. (6)

a. Elle a été rencontrer ses amies à la sortie des classes, 'She went to meet her friends when school let out, b. Après son départ en Amérique du Sud, 'After her departure for South America, c. Ses amies comptaient sur elle, mais 'Her friends were counting on her, but

mais elle les a manquées. but she missed them.' elle leur a manqué. they missed her.' elle leur a manqué. she disappointed them /she let them down.

One might, of course, claim that there are homonymous verbs manquer, and that these "govern". A modern syntax will most likely take a similar tack, since this requires no more than the simple expedient of having two different lexical entries, both spelled manquer, one selecting the dative, and one the accusative.

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

1

However, in light of the common semantic element of "failure" or "lacking" in all these examples, this seems an unjustified invocation of the notion of homonymy. At very least, it would have to be admitted that there is another possibility, which is in fact the prima facie case, judging solely from the forms chosen: that manquer makes a constant contribution, and that the differences in message come from the alternation between les and leur, the nature of whose contribution is not yet known. To invoke homonymy or distinct lexical entries, accordingly, is to misassign responsibility for this alternation. Moreover, elements other than the verb sometimes seem to affect the choice of case: (7)

a. Je le frappe sur le nez.

T hit him on the nose.'

b. Je lui frappe sur l'épaule.

T slap him on the shoulder.'

The shift of translation of this verb seems even more insignificant than in the examples with manquer, and an approach based on homonyms or "selection features" appears to be out of the question. The choice between le and lui here seems to vary with, of all things, the object of a preposition. Or consider (8): (8)

a. Son eczéma le démange.

'His eczema is itching him.'

b. Sa cicatrice lui démange. 'His scar is itching him.' — Grand Larousse (1972: 1194, art. démanger) Here, the verb is translated exactly the same way both times; there seems to be no difference in "directness" of the action; and the choice of type of object appears to be "governed" by the subject of the sentence. To an outsider's eye, it might appear that the choice of pronoun is absolutely capricious. Yet native speakers have no difficulty judging such choices right or wrong, and in written texts, one finds consistency in the way they are made. Such difficulties with lexical case government may seem to encourage an approach based on syntactic ("structural") government. Certain phenomena seem to lend themselves to statement by rules. There is, for example, a so-called "causative construction" involving the verb faire plus an infinitive. This is shown in the following pair: (9)

a. Je le fais lire.

'I make him read.'

b. Je lui fais lire le journal.

T make him read the newspaper.'

When the dependent infinitive has no object, its "agent" is designated by le. But when it has an object, the agent is lui. (This occasionally happens with

8

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

verbs other than faire, e.g. in examples meaning 'to let someone do something' or 'to hear/see someone do something'.) This phenomenon is grist for the formalist's mill, since it lends itself so nicely to statement by a rule. Yet the rule often does not work, as in the following: (10)

Le hasard le fit rencontrer deux jeunes sourdes-muettes. (Grand Larousse encyclopédique) 'Chance made him meet two young deaf-mute women.'

In that example le is used when the dependent infinitive does have an object. In (11), we see the reverse: lui used when the infinitive has no object. (11)

Surtout ne pas dresser les élèves en perroquets: leur faire comprendre, avant de leur faire apprendre. (A. Dauzat, Voyage à travers les mots) 'Above all, do not train the students like parrots: make them understand before making them learn.'

Such examples, ignored by most handbooks of French grammar, are common enough that one grammarian has devoted an entire treatise to cataloguing them (Harmer 1979). For their part, the conceptual categories direct and indirect object provide no apparent motivation either for the putative rule or for the exceptions to the rule. In fact, one could say that example (9b) actually works in exactly the opposite way, because if we compare the two objects, 'him' and 'newspaper', the one designated by lui seems to be the more direct recipient of the action. If in fact the contributions of lui and le have not been accurately identified, then it is premature to conclude that their appearance does not reflect goaldirected choice; either because it is "governed", lexically or syntactically, or, at the other extreme, because it is capricious. The real motivation might in fact be just the opposite of "case government": that the pronoun is chosen because of its own contribution, and that on the basis of this choice, the set of verbs which may be selected is constrained. Or, it might be that the choice of both pronoun and verb is goal-directed, and that the pairing comes out the way it does because the motivations for the two choices are closely interrelated; and that recognition of this interrelationship has been impeded by the availability of facile expedients like "government".

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

3.

9

Language-specific Grammatical Categories

Such difficulties with an approach based either on automaticity or on the logically-motivated categories direct and indirect object encourage exploration of the alternative possibility, that the deployment of lui and le is due to an as yet undefined contribution to communication made by these two forms. If this is so, then lui/le variation like that seen above strongly suggests that French speakers may make the choice for reasons that are not transparent to speakers of English. Certainly, there are times when French and English express what appears to be the same message by very different means: (12)

On ne lui connaissait pas ce vice. 'We didn't know him to have this vice.'

The English translation of this example must add a verb ('have') with no counterpart in the French. A number of other types of examples indicate that French speakers are sensitive to distinctions to which speakers of English or another language may not be. A case in point is the notion of "possession". (13) a. Je lui prends la main. 'I take his hand.' b. Je prends sa main. 'I take his hand.' Here, the alternative to lui is not le, but a possessive adjective. Grammars refer to type (a) as "lui to express possession", or "dative of possession". There is no apparent connection between this use and the indirect object function of lui. This then is another grammatical category that is not motivated deductively, but serves merely to cover stark empirical facts in an ad hoc fashion. Examples of the types represented by (13a) and (13b) are difficult to distinguish, particularly if no reference is made to context beyond the sentence. Blinkenberg (1960:59-60, 258-260) speaks of these types as being "equivalent" and as "having practically the same sense". These examples are used by Blinkenberg to support the notion of "constructional synonymy", part of a view according to which linguistic forms often have no meaning, but merely serve as "syntactic markers". If, in fact, French speakers make here a distinction that English speakers do not make, any hypothesis that aims to differentiate types (13a) and (13b), indistinguishable in translation, must posit constructs specific to French that clearly disambiguate the two types.

10

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Another type of example shows the opposite side of the coin: an instance where English makes a distinction not made by French. We find lui in both of the following: (14) a. On lui a envoyé 100 francs. 'Someone sent 100 francs to him.' b. On lui a volé 100 francs. 'Someone stole 100 francs from him.' Example (14a) contains a classic indirect object message. But (14b), using the same grammatical morpheme, yields a message which, from the English standpoint, is the polar opposite. English in fact uses two different morphemes, distinct prepositions, to communicate these two messages. Traditional handbooks of French will classify this as one of the miscellaneous uses of lui — the "dative of the disadvantaged" — which, like "dative of possession", are unrelated to lui's basic "indirect object" function. But as this list of miscellaneous uses grows — and grow it does — it soon begins to overtake the "indirect object" use; and one begins to ask: Which is to be believed, the grammar itself or the exceptions to the grammar? Moreover, if one holds, with Blinkenberg, that the two means of expressing possession in (13) are "equivalent", in spite of the two different forms, then it stretches credibility even farther to insist that there are two distinct categories — indirect object and dative of the disadvantaged — when there is identity of linguistic form. Clearly, if one wishes to understand why lui is chosen for these various purposes, a suspicion is justified that something fundamental about lui is being overlooked in this heterogeneous catalogue, in this "syntax of lui". Still, if one is seeking a semantic constant to associate with lui, what is one to make of its use to express apparently opposite messages — one of "beneficiary", the other which we may dub "maleficiary"?9 Rouveret & Vergnaud (1980:171) say that the dative pronoun essentially means "goal", but that "the pronoun can assume derivatively other functions than 'Goal'; this function is 'Source'...." These authors give no inkling of how it is possible to "derive" Source from Goal. The seemingly obvious route to a constant meaning is to collect all the uses of lui and try to abstract over them and find a common denominator; many grammarians (e.g. Barnes 1979) suggest a notion like "affected object". But it is very hard to find a level of abstraction that covers just as much as necessary and no more, one which doesn't apply just as well to things other than the dative. "Affected object", for instance, could apply also to the accusative. None of these approaches shed light on the problem of "government of the dative".10

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

11

At this point one might well be tempted to throw in the towel on the semantic approach in its turn, and despair of finding a constant value for lui. But one possibility has been overlooked. It may once again be that responsibility is being attributed to the wrong factor. It is undoubtedly true that example (14a) can be characterized as expressing a message of "beneficiary" and (14b) one of "maleficiary". But it may be that the contribution of lui itself has nothing to do with either of these notions; that lui contributes something completely different from both, something which, to repeat, has not yet been discovered. In fact, the element of benefit or disadvantage can quite clearly be attributed to something else in the two examples. In (14b), it is the verb. With voler 'steal', one will, due to the nature of 'stealing', naturally expect there to be a participant who is disadvantaged. In (14a) this factor is the "direct object", '100 francs', something which is normally inherently beneficial. Were this to be something inherently detrimental, for instance: (14) c. On lui a envoyé une bombe. 'Someone sent him a bomb.' the message might indeed be one of "maleficiary". Thus, the source of the benefiting or disadvantaging can be traced without lui being brought into the picture at all. At this point, then, the possibility of accounting for the deployment of lui on the basis of some as yet undetermined communicative constant remains viable. It seems clear, though, that an open mind must be maintained about what this constant might be, allowing for something quite unexpected, since other analysts have already tried the obvious possibilities. Moreover, it may indeed be necessary to rethink and redefine the very notion of semantic constant, since traditional conceptions of this function have not yielded a solution to the problem of lui.

4.

The Goal of this Study

To summarize the points made so far: we wish to solve a language-specific problem of distribution of forms, to understand why speakers and writers of French deploy lui and le the way they do. We want the solution to this problem to be in terms of categories which are deductively appropriate to an analysis of language and which achieve a good fit with the facts of French usage — actual appearances of lui and le in spoken and written texts. We seek motivation in these facts of usage, rather than conceding at the outset that they are arbitrary or

12

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

capricious; we will pursue the hypothesis that lui and le are chosen by speakers for communicative purposes rather than governed. We recognize the importance of identifying accurately the sources of particular communicative effects, and the undesirability of facile recourse to homonymy and related notions when in fact the analytical knot lies elsewhere. Furthermore, we recognize that failure to grasp the rationale of lui and le results both from the focusing of attention on a search for universal, rather than language-specific categories, and from a reluctance to undertake a search for understanding unfettered by allegiance to the logic-derived categories of the grammatical tradition. If, then, the meanings of lui and le are not something easily recognizable or attainable by abstraction over easily recognizable elements, how is one to get at these meanings? If we are confronted with motivating factors that are in some way covert, the analytical procedure will have to be extremely painstaking. An analysis that relies on vague assertions or impressionistic evidence will not be convincing. Indeed, solution of the problem of lui and le cannot come from isolated, single-sentence examples of the kind seen so far. This is a consequence of what we have undertaken to do. We wish to discover the respective meanings of lui and le, their contribution to the communicative act. Communication, of course, always takes place within some context. Looking only at decontextualized or invented sentences constitutes a refusal to recognize that lui and le contribute to actual acts of communication. This may lead to overlooking precisely the clues that allow successful identification of the function of lui or le. There will then be little recourse but to fall back on impressionistic assertions. In response to this problem, our analysis will employ fully contextualized examples of lui and le, and will argue that doing so is both necessary and fruitful. Yet another feature of our analytical procedure arises from the non-overt nature of the factors the analysis seeks to identify. Individual examples present an indeterminacy that forces us to seek security in large numbers. Consider again this example: On lui a envoyé 100 francs. 'Someone sent him 100 francs.' We have already seen two different ways in which grammars characterize the contribution of lui in this example: "goal", and "beneficiary". But why stop there? One can certainly find others which are equally true: "recipient", "addressee", "motivator", "interactor", "participant", and more. Moreover, no one of these characterizations really represents the same way of looking at lui's

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

13

contribution as any other. How does one choose among these perspectives? How can one ever be sure of having chosen the "right" one? If we look only at this one example, or even at a few, the problem is insoluble. However, with a large collection of examples, experience has shown that the case for some perspectives will be weakened and the case for one may be strengthened. At least as likely is that yet another perspective, one not considered at the outset, will emerge as the correct one. Linguistic data are full of surprises. This study will attempt to overcome the indeterminacy of the individual example by drawing on a data base of over forty complete 20th century French prose texts. The ultimate use of a large data collection is a count. Like any properly formulated scientific hypothesis, a linguistic-meaning hypothesis may lead to predictions that can be tested and confirmed or disconfirmed. If just one factor is tested for, potential competing factors may be overwhelmed in a large count. The present study will make extensive use of such tests. Here is one small example, drawn from the many to appear in the pages that follow, illustrating what can be gained from a large data collection. Consider again one of the examples of apparent "automatic selection" seen above: (3)

a. Un nouveau ministre de la défense l'a remplacé. 'A new defense minister replaced him.' b. Un nouveau premier ministre lui a succédé. 'A new prime minister succeeded him.'

From Charles De Gaulle's War Memoires, a three-volume account of military and political activities during World War II, a collection was made of all examples containing these two verbs denoting one person's replacing another in a post or job: remplacer, which takes an accusative object, and succéder, which "governs" the dative. Inspection of the whole set shows a clear difference with regard to a factor not necessarily suggested by inspection of any individual example: the office in which the person is replaced. With succéder, these posts or offices are almost all military posts; with remplacer, they are civilian posts. This in itself constitutes a discovery. It is a pragmatic fact about the usage of a French author, and this fact was discovered through analysis of a linguistic corpus. We will argue, however, that analysis must not stop here, that this fact must be made to fit into a larger explanatory picture. Fundamental questions still need answers. Why is it this particular parameter — the nature of the office — that differentiates these two verbs? Why couldn't it be the other way around: the lui verb for civilian posts and the le verb for military ones?

14

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Moreover, nothing yet explains how this discovery relates to the other facts we have seen: exclusive occurrences of lui or le with numerous other verbs; their occurrence in the "causative" construction; their variation with individual verbs, producing a greater or lesser difference of message; the paradoxical use of lui for "possession", and for both "beneficiary" and "maleficiary", and so forth. That is, we have not gotten at the inner workings of French by relating this discovery to any general understanding of lui and le. Achieving such understanding will require a more sophisticated pinpointing of the roles of lui and le themselves. This is the kind of understanding we aim to achieve. Meanings will be posited that unify all the uses of lui and le. These meanings will be validated by a rigorous testing process. This analysis will begin in the next chapter; impatient readers may wish to peek there right away. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to outlining the theoretical framework of this analysis, defining its most crucial concepts, and situating it in relation to some familiar schools of linguistic theory.

5.

The Framework of the New Analysis

5.1. The Theoretical Background The present work has been carried out in a framework for linguistic analysis established by William Diver and his students at Columbia University and known as the Columbia school. A number of Columbia-school works are listed in the Bibliography, and many contain statements of the theoretical foundations of the Columbia school.11 This framework is perhaps most comparable to various "structuralist" schools that are contenders to the heritage of Saussurean thought, while diverging from Saussure's view in certain fundamental ways. Every linguist knows that communication is a major function of language. However, one of the basic controversies of linguistics is whether the communicative function is a determining factor in the structure of language.12 In traditional Sentence grammar, we have seen, the structure of language is held to reflect the essential nature of language as a reflection of logical thought. The view that language contains an autonomous syntactic component implies that for at least one major component of language, communication is irrelevant. Saussure's notion of the linguistic sign composed of a signifiant and a signifié, by contrast, clearly implies a perspective in which communication plays a central role.13

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

15

An equally critical but less well known Saussurean insight was that "La langue ... est un tout en soi et un principe de classification" (Saussure 1971:25). 'Langue is a self-contained entirety and a principle of classification.' This implies that the lexical and grammatical signs of a language represent conceptual categories, categories that may be unique to that language. Analysis must determine the identity of those categories, that is, discover the principle or system by which users of a given language classify the things they talk about. Since the conceptual categories of languages reside in the mind, they are not directly observable. The principle of the sign, however, implies that every such category will be represented by a signifié, and thus have an identifiable physical manifestation in the stream of speech. It follows that one may attempt to discover the categories of a language by studying occurrences of linguistic forms. The Diverian innovation is reminiscent of work done in phonology by Zipf (1935, 1949) and Martinet (e.g. 1952, 1955), also in the Saussurean tradition, but now applied to grammar, with striking results. By invoking articulatory complexity and the principle of least effort, Zipf related language to other types of human behavior, thus introducing a human factor into thinking about language. Diver recognized that it is not enough to see in language a system of encoding ideas; that the communicative premise requires allowance for the fact that the communicative instrument is wielded and shaped by humans, and that this fact influences not only the utilization but the structure of the instrument as well. Specifically, Columbia-school work has found that the conceptual categories of languages, the signifiés, are considerably more sparse, less well-articulated, than the thoughts that people communicate. So much so that the view, formalized by Saussure and accepted at least tacitly by every school of linguistics since,14 of language as a fully articulated and precise encoding system must be abandoned in favor of the view that language merely provides hints or clues in the communicative act. The conceptual gap between linguistic categories and communicative results is bridged by the process of inference. People, in using language, do what we see them doing in many other aspects of everyday life: they jump to conclusions on the basis of a relatively small amount of information. This means that a purely logical analysis of thought is not likely to yield the actual conceptual categories of a language; more likely, it will yield components of thought derived inferentially from those categories. Thus, the nature and role of linguistic meaning in communication is very different in the Columbia-school view from what it has always been taken to be at least in the actual operating procedures of other schools of linguistics. It is primarily the admission of a human factor, in addition to the communicative factor, that sets the Columbia school apart from the Saussurean tradition.

16

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

5.2. Linguistic Meaning To solve the problem of lui and le, then, this analysis will appeal to an innovative, non-traditional view of linguistic meaning. This will be called an instrumental view of meaning. Perhaps the best way to clarify this view is to contrast it to two other, more familiar views: the abstractional view and the fractional view. The essential difference is that the instrumental view creates a sharp distinction between categories of structure and categories of use that the other views do not recognize. Abstractional Meaning. This view was alluded to above when it was suggested that a common semantic denominator might be found for all uses of lui. This, though, immediately poses the problem of finding a category that can accommodate opposites like "beneficiary" and "maleficiary", "source" and "goal", as well as notions like "possession" which bear no obvious resemblance to the others. To do this, one must rise to a level of abstraction so high that lui is no longer differentiated from any number of other grammatical or lexical items. The vagueness of hypotheses of this kind imparts to them a high degree of inherent subjectivity and makes them virtually untestable. Fractional Meaning. Most grammars, in practicality at least, adopt a fractional view of meaning.15 In this view, linguistic input equals communicative output. Each fraction of a communication is "mapped" to a linguistic form in the utterance. Thus, to take another example, in Je lui prends la main, glossed T take his hand', the T element of the message will be assigned to je, 'take' to prends, 'hand' to la main, and the 'his' fraction will be assigned to lui. Since the message of this fraction contains the notion of "possession", the notion itself will be assigned to lui, and the grammar will contain a rubric "lui/dative of possession". In like manner, the utterance Je lui vole cent francs will prompt a grammatical entry "dative of disadvantaging". The problem with this approach is that it yields a mere photocopy of the facts, not a means for understanding them. For each form — say, lui — we will have a list of uses: lui of the indirect object, lui of possession, lui of the disadvantaged, lui with special verbs, etc. This list, simply a summary of what has been found in the data, would then be the "meaning" of lui. The list is open-ended: if we should find a new use of lui tomorrow, we would simply add it to the list; it would make no difference whether it bore any resemblance to uses already on the list. Smyth's (1920) Greek Grammar, for example, lists ninety-nine uses of the dative, most of them clearly reflecting some element in the cited example other than the word in the dative. These include the dative of feeling, dative of the

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

17

agent, of instrument or means, of the price, of constituent parts, of standard of judgment, of external cause, of internal cause, of military accompaniment, as well as the dative with a great variety of verbs, including some meaning 'fill', 'help', 'injure', 'please', 'displease', 'threaten', 'envy', 'meet', 'approach', 'obey', 'pardon', 'advise', 'compare', 'befit', etc. It is clear that Smyth's goal is to uncover the greatest diversity possible, not to establish functional unity.16 In other words, the grammar will offer no central unifying factor to answer the fundamental question of why lui is chosen for all its disparate uses. Now, it might be the case that no such central factor exists; that the form lui does simply represent a disparate list of uses. Alternatively, lui might represent a network of interconnecting values, each one related at least indirectly to the others, and with one perhaps being "prototypical", but with no central factor directly uniting them all; this kind of relationship is often posited by analyses in Cognitive Grammar. However, if an analysis can demonstrate that there is a unifying factor on the basis of which the appearance of lui in all cases can be accounted for, then this analysis clearly presents the stronger case. Analyses that overlook such a unifying factor miss the point of what actually motivates speakers to use the form. This is the kind of explanation that will be proposed in the present analysis of lui and le. At the basis of this analysis will be an instrumental conception of linguistic meaning. Instrumental Meaning. Instrumental meaning is best thought of as a hint. Input from grammatical meaning — what is actually encoded by language — is far more sparse than communicative output. When processing utterances, hearers jump to conclusions as to speaker intent with only scanty information actually being signalled. The grammar that emerges from this view of meaning is analogous to a set of tools. Each meaning is a tool available for a speaker to use; the actual uses to which the tools are put depend on immediate need and the user's ingenuity. The nature of the tool must be carefully distinguished from the nature of the tasks it performs, the ingenuity not built into the grammar. The instrumental view of meaning is formalized in a distinction basic to Columbia-school theory: the meaning/message distinction. A meaning is an actual unit of a language, a unit of linguistic structure. It is an encoded portion of a semantic domain, associated with a signal. A message, on the other hand, is not part of language; it is merely a use of language. It is the product of the hearer's inferring, or jumping to a conclusion about what the speaker's intent is. The meanings signalled by the speaker are only part of what goes into the hearer's calculation. Other information, coming from context and the hearer's general knowledge, also contributes to the resulting message, and analysis must constantly allow for this.

18

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

This being so, features of messages — here, "beneficiary", "possession", "causative", etc. — cannot automatically be built into grammar; they do not attain the status of grammatical categories simply because they are part of communicative output. By the same token, messages are not what the linguist must analyze. The communicative instrument — its nature and structure — is the object of analysis. We are not concerned with why people say what they say. Our concern is: given that this is what they want to say, why do they deploy the resources of their language in the particular way they do, in order to achieve this goal? In everyday parlance, in Semantics, or in most theories of language, one speaks not only of the "meaning of a form", but of the "meaning of a sentence", or the "meaning of a text" as well. Meaning is studied in the abstract, without reference to characteristics of particular languages. The word "meaning", used this way, is closer to what a Columbia-school analyst would call "message". Columbia-school analysis reserves the term "meaning" for a very precise technical sense: a portion of semantic substance associated with an identifiable signal in a given language. A meaning is a theoretical construct which explains the occurrences of a particular linguistic form. Viewing a linguistic meaning as a tool leads to a unique conception of the relationship between language and language users. The non-identity of linguistic resource (meaning) with communicative product implies an element of creativity to mediate between the two. This creativity must be attributed to the human users of language. (In the following passage, Reid uses "meaning" in the everyday, not the technical, sense.) Language users participate actively in the communicative act. They are not passive decoders, but creators of meaning. Language merely acts as a guide. In this creative act people bring to bear their entire store of world knowledge and experience, together with a finely-honed sense of what constitutes a plausible communication. (Reid 1991:7) The creative aspect of language [must be] reassigned to its human users, rather than to formal characteristics of linguistic structure, (p. 40)

The immediate analytical task is to pinpoint the element contributed by the linguistic unit itself, to uncover the hint — the meaning. But the very sparsity of this hint makes analysis difficult. Meaning is not directly observable; it must be hypothesized. Like other tools, meanings are often not perfectly adapted to the jobs they are called upon to perform. Consequently, the element of human behavior — choosing the best tool for the job, wielding the tool so as to produce the best result — is pervasive and constantly shapes the outward appearance of language. This outward face is the primary evidence upon which hypotheses are based.

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

19

It is of course necessary to trace explicitly the creative link between linguistic resource and communicative output. But here, too, the hintlike nature of meanings exacts a high price from the analyst. Because of the gap between meaning and message, there is an inherent danger of fuzziness or subjectivity when the connection between the two is established. Analysis cannot rely on impressionistic judgments or black-box assertions, but rather must offer rigorous testing of hypotheses. The analyst must show that a posited meaning is appropriate for all the associated messages. To confront this problem, the present analysis will offer in-depth discussion of many naturally-occurring, contextualized examples, as well as quantitative tests of the meanings it hypothesizes. The data base described above will be fully exploited for this purpose. 5.3. Syntax ? Semantics ? Pragmatics ? Readers may wonder at this stage whether they are about to read a study in semantics, syntax, or pragmatics. Modern linguistics divides grammar into these three levels because it views three different types of explanation, three sets of analytical constructs, as necessary for complete coverage. We will show, however, that this distinction is not necessary because the same factors are operative at all levels. In one sense, the analysis will be purely semantic, because it is meaning-driven. However, because the view of grammatical meaning is an instrumental one, the result will be quite unlike a traditional semantic analysis. This analysis will not be syntactic, because it explicitly rejects the Sentence as a framework and starting point; yet it will deal with distributional peculiarities that have traditionally been tied to the Sentence and will conclude that these peculiarities are in fact pragmatic, not syntactic. This, however, does not motivate a distinct level of pragmatics, because the pragmatic factors uncovered are all accountable to a central semantic factor — the (instrumental) meaning. In other words, a solution to the entire problem will be offered using only one set of analytical constructs. The establishment of distinct levels is unnecessary. 5.4. Signals A meaning cannot be posited unless it can be associated with an identifiable signal. A signal is the means by which a speaker invokes a meaning. But signals, like meanings, are not given in advance; they too must be hypothesized. A search for signals begins with stretches of sound analyzable as morphemes; but there is no infallible correlation between morphemes and signals. In the case

20

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

of the French clitics, there are significant problems in signal identification. Traditional analyses posit homonyms for all the forms under study here. Lui, in addition to being "indirect object" pronoun, also appears as a non-clitic, caseless, masculine "disjunctive" pronoun. Leur, besides being the plural of clitic lui, is also a third person plural "possessive adjective". Le, la, and les, besides being clitic "direct object" pronouns, also appear as "definite articles". The question of homonymy, here as elsewhere, cannot be treated lightly. It must ultimately be decided on the basis of meaning: Can one hypothesized meaning account for all occurrences of a given morpheme, or not? Furthermore, word order, bearing only a secondary relation to phonology, can be a bearer of meaning and thus a signal. The positing of signals, then, and the positing of meanings must be performed simultaneously; both unknowns must be solved for at once. 5.5. Substance and Value In phonology, Martinet found confirmation of the Saussurean notion that speakers organize linguistic units into systems, and that the units are thereby defined by their oppositions within the system, with very practical consequences for phonological change. This idea was followed out by much work in structural semantics, especially in lexicon, and to a lesser extent in grammar. Traditional grammatical analyses often imply systemic organization, for example a system of Person that classifies referents as First, Second or Third Person. This idea is often carried farther than morphological facts warrant. Thus, regarding the notion of time as expressed by the verb, traditional grammars will regularly posit Past, Present and Future tenses as categories of grammar, even for languages where no form is dedicated to signalling one of these tenses (as for the "Future" in English; see Huffman 1989b). This lack of fit with morphology is the result of a purely logical analysis: it is assumed that since real time can be divided into past, present and future, the way it is divided by language must therefore correspond. Columbia-school analysis has found such value relations among linguistic units to be of great importance in the structure and functioning of language. However, it has also found that the way semantic areas are divided up in languages corresponds to communicative utility for speakers of the language, rather than to a logical analysis of reality. Moreover, it has been found that in order to achieve the crucial goal of fit between postulated meanings and actual distribution of morphology, the areas of meaning recognized by particular

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

21

languages, termed semantic domains or substances, must be defined in ways that are often very unlike traditional semantic categories. The analytical consequence of linguistic value is that the distribution of a grammatical form cannot be fully accounted for solely on the basis of its individual semantic content; analysis must also recognize the oppositions into which the unit enters, the set of available choices. When a particular form is encountered in a text, then, its occurrence must often be viewed as a consequence both of what it contributes in its own right and of the speaker's rejection of other options. The value-related side of grammar will play a large role in the analysis presented in this book. A number of puzzling distributional facts about lui and le suggest that there is some kind of systematic interaction between them. We will ask, for example, why the choice between lui and le is made differently in the following. (15)

J'écris une lettre à Jean. Je l'écris. Je lui écris.

T write John a letter.' 'I write it.' T write him.'

(16)

Je paye son salaire à Jean. Je le paye. Je le paye.

'I pay John his salary.' T pay it.' 'I pay him.'

The analysis will posit lui and le as opposing members in a grammatical system, because it becomes clear that the behavior of one of these forms cannot be fully understood without taking into account the behavior of the other. This value relationship will help illuminate important parts of the problem of lui and le, including their use in the "causative construction". It will ultimately provide the key to the enigma of "government", as a large-scale network of lexical semantic oppositions emerges.

6.

Columbia School Contrasted with Other Meaning-based Schools of Analysis

In spite of the attempt by generative grammar to divorce the study of linguistic form from that of linguistic meaning, interest in the semantic basis of grammar has remained alive. Recent years have seen strong statements of the case for meaning-based grammatical analysis by such authors as Bolinger (1977) and Wierzbicka (1988), as well as by Cognitive Grammarians like Langacker (1987, 1991), and Lakoff (1987). Such approaches are of great interest and

22

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

invite comparison with Columbia-school work. It is clear, however, that these analysts operate with conceptions of linguistic meaning fundamentally different from the instrumental view of the Columbia school. The problem on which Columbia school focuses attention — occurrences of morphemes — is not directly addressed by their work, and a major deterrent is the pervasive concern with the Sentence and its derivative categories. Both Bolinger and Wierzbicka, like Columbia school, believe that the communicative function of language is basic to its structure and function. To quote Bolinger: [A]ny word which a language permits to survive must make its semantic contribution ... The natural condition of a language is to preserve one form for one meaning, and one meaning for one form. (1977:ix-x)

Both these authors endeavor to support this view with analyses of grammatical problems in a variety of languages. But the analytical procedures they follow contrast with those of the Columbia school in a number of ways. Firstly, Bolinger's and Wierzbicka's data bases consist almost entirely of invented, uncontextualized, one-sentence-length examples. Relying exclusively on such data in fact contradicts their communicative premise. It has long been recognized that linguistic utterances are full of indeterminacy which speakers resolve by appealing to context. Linguists differ, however, on the place of this indeterminacy in linguistic theory and its influence on the structure of language. If a theory of language structure is built on the basis of its communicative function, then formal recognition must be given to the role of context in the interpretation of linguistic utterances, as is done by the Columbia-school meaning/message distinction. This distinction is an acknowledgement that what is encoded in the linguistic utterance is only a part of the communicative output. The actual analytical procedures of Bolinger and Wierzbicka, however, do not reflect the role of context in communication. Consequently, their analyses fail to pin down precisely what the language itself contributes, as distinguished from what the language user contributes through the process of inference. A further issue is that of the locus of linguistic meaning. Columbia school, as seen above, begins the search for meaning at the level of the morpheme. The position of Wierzbicka (1988) on linguistic meaning is less clear. She does discuss "the semantics of morphology", but elsewhere (e.g. p. 8) speaks of "the meaning of a sentence"; and the clear thrust of her analytical procedure is a search for meaning in "constructions", that is, parts of sentences whose boundaries are determined by the syntax of the sentence. She thus overlooks the question of the meanings of morphemes within those constructions, to which a

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

23

Columbia-school analysis would assign a meaning and therefore not recognize a "construction". Wierzbicka explicitly accepts "subject" and "direct object" as being a "central area of grammar" (p. 17). These categories, as well as categories of grammatical form, thus preexist analysis for Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka criticizes Garcia (1975), an early Columbia-school analysis, for paying too much attention to morphology, and failing to see behind the profusion of Spanish datives the discrete semantic categories which, I believe, are there, hiding behind the deceptive curtain of morphological uniformity and waiting to be uncovered, (p. 236)

Wierzbicka, however, has not fully appreciated García's position that the morphology constitutes precisely the problem to be solved; that meaning resides in forms, not in sentences or sentence parts, and is not the same thing as a message category (Wierzbicka's "semantic categories"). Instead, Wierzbicka and others like Van Valin (1993:503-504) pursue ever-more-complex systems of logical representation and mapping, in an attempt to account for every message nuance. Wierzbicka sets her goal "to specify the precise set of semantic formulae which can generate no more and no less than the entire range of dative sentences acceptable in a given language" (p. 427). By taking the sentence and its parts as the locus of meaning and by equating meaning with message category, such approaches in fact analyze the thoughts and messages people communicate, but not the structure of the communicative instrument. Even Wierzbicka's discussion of "the semantics of morphology" falls far short of attaining a one-to-one correlation between meaning and morphology (she lists, for instance, thirty one different datives for Polish and admits that she sees no connection between some of them),17 and she is very wary of the idea of semantic invariance. A comparison of Columbia school and Cognitive Grammar will be offered in the final chapter of this book. Our general position is that although these semantic grammarians are justified in protesting the principles and practices of generative grammar, the break needs to be far more radical than they have made it. The legacy of Sentence grammar is a fundamental impediment to analytical success.

7.

Grammatical Categories as Hypotheses

This book, then, will deal with the occurrence of the morphemes lui and le in oral and written discourse, a problem that has never been solved. Grammatical

24

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

categories — signals and meanings — will be posited to solve the problem. These categories have no other motivation than the solving of this particular problem; therefore, their fit with the observed distributions of lui and le will be the main concern. In traditional grammars, the list of grammatical categories exists in advance of any attempt to explain why grammatical forms occur where they do. Categories such as Direct Object and Indirect Object are pretheoretical entities which themselves define the problem. The goal of traditional analyses is to seek out the manifestations of these preexisting categories in individual languages, and to attempt to make data from individual languages fit into the preexisting categories. The present analysis, in contrast, seeks to discover the categories themselves by the process of devising and testing a hypothesis. It is thus a straightforward exercise in problem solving, of the kind seen regularly in the physical sciences. One can easily imagine that the larger picture of the nature and structure of language that emerges from a body of solved problems of this kind may well be very different from the one presupposed by traditional sentence grammar. A contemporary student of linguistics, however, may find this approach puzzling. Today's linguistics concentrates heavily on the universal in language and attempts to use conclusions about the structure of language to deduce the nature and structure of the human mind. Is not exploration of the mind a more worthy goal than the investigation of two lowly morphemes from one language? Is not time and effort better spent on uncovering that which languages have in common and what this reveals about mental and cognitive processes, than on language-specific topics of such limited scope? Our answer is as follows. Before all else, the nature of language itself needs to be spelled out. Once problems of language are solved, one may draw on the understanding thereby obtained to elucidate the mind, if one wishes. But, at present, the purely linguistic problems have not been solved. Without denying the interest held by problems of mind, there must be a discipline responsible for ensuring that our understanding of the structure of language is accurate; and this is the role of linguistics. At the present stage of knowledge, any attempt to construct a theory of mind on what is known about language is a castle build on sand. Universal grammar is founded upon categories that are assumed to be present in individual languages but whose actual existence has never been verified. Our conclusion will be that these initial assumptions are fundamentally wrong. Linguistic research thus finds itself at the beginning; and work at the lowest level, of the type undertaken here, must be done solidly and responsibly before the enterprise can be carried any further.

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

8.

25

Lui versus the à Phrase

The traditional treatment of lui and le offers a particularly good example of the difference between beginning analysis with preestablished categories, and seeking to discover categories by analysis. If one begins with the category 'Indirect Object', a definition of the problem is thereby imposed which predetermines a solution very different from the one that emerges by beginning with the problem of lui. In the former case, one is confronted with a much more complex morphological situation. The category 'Indirect Object' manifests itself in completely different ways depending on whether the "object" is a noun or a pronoun. A typical correspondence is as follows: (17)

Je parle à Jean. Je lui parle.

T talk to John.' T talk to him.

The traditional position is that the Indirect Object is represented in French by noun phrases introduced by the preposition à. For the clitic personal pronouns, there are special forms: lui/'leur for the third person, and me/nous, te/vous for the first and second persons; the first and second person pronouns are morphologically indistinct from the "direct object" pronouns of the same persons. Now, if the situation were one of simple allomorphy, the choice of à + noun or lui being made strictly on the basis of part of speech, there would be no particular problem. But the situation is not so simple. To begin with, clitic lui does not always correspond to a noun phrase with à. Here are several other possibilities: (18) a. Il lui court après. 'He's chasing her.' b. Il court après cette fille. 'He's chasing that girl.' (19) a. L'eau lui ruisselait le long des joues. 'The water trickled down his cheeks.' b. L'eau ruisselait le long des joues de Louis. 'The water trickled down Louis's cheeks.' (20) a. Je lui frappe sur l'épaule. T slap him on the shoulder.' b. Je frappe mon copain sur l'épaule. T slap my friend on the shoulder.'

26

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

(21) a. La fantaisie lui a pris de coucher à l'hôtel. 'The idea got into him to sleep in a hotel' b. La fantaisie a pris Michou de coucher à l'hôtel. 'The idea got into Michou to sleep in a hotel.' The noun correspondant of lui may be the object of various prepositions other than à, as in (18)—(19), or it may be treated as a direct object, as in (20)-(21). Conversely, à phrases do not always correspond to lui. They can, in fact, be "pronominalized" in at least three ways: (22) a. Il obéit à ses parents. 'He obeys his parents.' b. Il leur obéit. 'He obeys them.' (23) a. Il pense à ses parents. 'He thinks about his parents.' b. Il pense à eux. 'He thinks about them.' (24) a. Il pense à ses problèmes. 'He thinks about his problems.' b. Il y pense. 'He thinks about them.' In addition to lui, the pronominal version of an à phrase may be à plus a disjunctive pronoun (23),18 or the word y (24), which is usually glossed 'there' and may have a straight locative sense. The second option, where the word à itself appears with the pronoun, is particularly damning for the "allomorph" approach, since it shows that the à-phrase option in fact exists for pronouns as well as for nouns. The two kinds of indirect object, then, noun and pronoun, never quite align themselves. The indirect object is apparently something different for nouns from what it is for pronouns. Kayne (1975:145-152) suggests a number of possible ways of dealing with the cleavage between examples like (22) and (23). The first suggestion is to mark individual verbs for which construction they will take. Grevisse (1969: §476) and others adopt this approach by establishing two lists of verbs, but with no explanation as to why which verb appears on which list. Kayne rejects this approach for several reasons. Firstly, there are examples involving predicate adjectives where the pronominalization type depends not so

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

27

much on the verb as on the adjective. For example, clitic pronouns are used in (25) and (26): (25) a. Jean est fidèle à Marie-Claire.19 'Jean is faithful to Marie-Claire.' b. Jean lui est fidèle. 'Jean is faithful to her.' (26) a. Jean restera fidèle à Marie-Claire. 'Jean will remain faithful to Marie-Claire.' b. Jean lui restera fidèle. 'Jean will remain faithful to her.' However, pronominalization requires disjunctives in (27) and (28), which contain the same verbs as (25) and (26) respectively, but a different adjective: (27) a. Jean est pareil à Marie-Claire. 'Jean is just like Marie-Claire.' b. Jean est pareil à elle. 'Jean is just like her.' (28) a. Jean restera pareil à Marie-Claire. 'Jean will remain just like Marie-Claire.' b. Jean restera pareil à elle. 'Jean will remain just like her.' Secondly, there are verbs like courir 'run' which can occur with both types of pronominalization: (29)

Il a couru à elle. 'He ran to her.'

(30)

Il lui court après. 'He is running after her.'

(31)

Les insectes lui couraient sur les jambes. 'The insects were running around on her legs.'

Kayne's solution is to posit two homonymous prepositions à, one of which would pronominalize as in (22), and the other as in (23). He then goes further and speaks not of two à's, but of a "syntactic feature" ±dative. Yet, as Kayne himself recognizes, some semantic content must be found to associate with the parameter ±dative; otherwise, we will be left with a description of French that is merely a photocopy of the linguistic facts. However, Kayne offers no suggestion as to what this semantic element might be. Barnes (1979), and Rouveret &

28

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Vergnaud (1980) also grapple unsuccessfully with the problem.20 Starting afresh from the morphemes, one confronts a totally different situation. Since lui and the à-phrase are two different morphologies, the prima facie case is that they are not both manifestations of the same underlying category, but that they represent two different categories, two independent grammatical mechanisms. The non-parallelism between nouns and pronouns, plus the fact that the à option is available for both, in fact make it extremely unlikely that the two could represent the same category, as the traditional view asserts. While the two examples in (17) are, to be sure, parallel in truth value, the noun and pronoun versions nevertheless manifest different underlying categories of French. Furthermore, the fact that the à-phrase option exists for pronouns as well as for nouns suggests that lui represents, in some sense, an extra option available with pronouns, which nouns do not have. This conclusion will undoubtedly jar many readers. In sentence grammar, the fact that nouns and pronouns fill the same syntactic functions implies that they represent the same category at some level, and that one should be derivable from the other in a straightforward way. "Pronominalization" thus plays an important role in sentence-based schools like generative grammar. In Columbiaschool grammar, however, there is no such process. Both nouns and pronouns are chosen on the basis of their own independent information value. To be sure, pronouns may be said to have a reduced information value vis-à-vis nouns in that they are likely to denote a previously known referent; on the other hand, they signal certain types of information that nouns do not. There is no systematic grammatical relation between the two types of words. After the problem of lui has been solved, this study will briefly take up the question of à phrases (Ch. 7) and explain why the notion of pronominalization plays no role in the Columbia-school perspective. It will be suggested that there is actually a motivated relationship between the information status of lui and the fact of its representing an extra option over the noun phrase.

9.

Precursors to this Analysis

A number of previous studies in the Columbia-school framework helped pave the way for the analysis to be offered here. The first work along these lines was done by Diver for Latin. An early stage of this analysis is found in Diver (1982), and an updated version in Diver (1989). An extremely interesting analysis of the German dative and accusative can be found in Zubin (1972), a

THE PROBLEM OF LUI AND LE

29

work which gave the first inkling of an approach to the problems of "government" and "dative of possession". García's (1975) study of the Spanish pronoun system was the first major published study along these lines and will undoubtedly be known to many readers. That work provided inspiration and suggested many ways in which the French problem could be approached. Some of these ideas bore fruit when applied to French, others did not. There are fundamental differences between the structures of the two languages which preclude any kind of mechanical application of the Spanish analysis to French. The diagram of the system proposed here (p. 211) when compared to the Spanish system (García 1975:73), reveals clearly how fundamentally different the two languages are in this area. Garcia's study was a groundbreaker; it led to much subsequent thinking and refinement of analytical procedures, from which the present work has benefited greatly. But that study in no way obviates the need for the present one. To begin with, Garcia's study concentrated on Spanish se, with le and lo (comparable to French lui and le) brought in mainly to clarify certain aspects of the se problem. Although it offered unique solutions to a number of traditional problems in the grammar of Spanish (such as leísmo), it did not probe in any detail certain types of problems which are common to the traditional grammars of both languages, such as various types of "government"; and it of course said nothing about the numerous problems which are unique to French, such as "faire causatives". The present work will attempt to provide depth and completeness of coverage in one specific area of French grammar. It is hoped that it will make a contribution to the dissemination of an innovative theory of language as well. What it reveals about French may provide insight into similar problems in other languages, but this is not guaranteed. One of the most important lessons to be learned, perhaps, is the one taught by Saussure: Each language represents a unique classificatory principle.

Chapter 2 The System of Degree of Control

1.

Participants and Events

The goal of this study is to explain why the morphemes lui/leur and le/la/les/l' occur or fail to occur in particular combinations with other forms of French. Specifically, in regard to any given occurrence of lui or le we want to know: a) What motivates one of these being used at all? b) Why is one of these used rather than some other morpheme or combination of morphemes? and, ultimately, c) When one of these two is used, why isn't the other one used instead? The answer takes the form of a signal-meaning hypothesis. The hypothesized meanings are viewed as contributing to the communication of messages, and the attempt by speakers and writers of French to use these meanings to communicate messages is what imparts particular distributional characteristics to lui and le. In this hypothesis, lui and le form a grammatical system which is part of a larger system involving other clitic pronouns. This larger system deals with participants in events, and we refer to it for now as the System of Participants. By Event is meant a lexical center giving information about an event, occurrence, situation,1 etc. A Participant is a lexical center referring to an entity playing a role in an Event,2 in particular ways that will be defined as we proceed. (The traditional term "verb", rather than the more technically appropriate Event, will sometimes be used here as a practicality, to help orient the reader. But its semantic status as a center interpreted as giving information about an event must not be lost sight of because it plays a crucial role in the analysis.) The System of Participants gives basic information about the way Partici-

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

31

pants are involved in Events: How many Participants are there? How active is each one? How much attention should each one get? These types of information represent discrete semantic domains (or substances) of French; each domain is subdivided by actual meanings, each meaning being paired with a signal. A meaning is thus a subdivision of a semantic domain that is associated with a signal. The entire System of Participants will be laid out in Chapter 5; until then our discussion will concentrate on the portion occupied by lui and le.

2.

Degree of Control

Lui and le assign to their referent a particular degree of control over the event in which it is a participant, that is, a certain degree of responsibility for bringing about that event. The /-forms constitute a grammatical opposition, lui signalling a relatively greater degree of control over the event, and le a relatively lesser degree.3 Figure 2.1 represents this system: MORE

lui, leur Degree of Control LESS

le, la, les Figure 2.1. The System of Degree of Control4

Control itself may consist of actively initiating or precipitating the event, or of making a major contribution to setting it up. It may also consist of a more indirect form of responsibility, such as motivation. This contribution may take very subtle forms, ranging all the way down to an essentially passive type of involvement. Although perhaps no single word from the lexicon of English captures the notion perfectly, the word "control" seems to best characterize what lui and le are all about. The meanings MORE CONTROL and LESS CONTROL are different from traditional categories in an important way. These meanings may help the hearer figure out what role a participant plays in an event, but they do not directly designate roles. Direct and Indirect Object, as well as traditional characterizations of roles like Agent, Beneficiary, Patient, etc. designate substantively defined types of involvement, MORE CONTROL and LESS CONTROL, on the other hand, are relational; they are relative to each other. Lui simply means "more control than what would be indicated by le", le means "less control than what

32

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

would be indicated by lui" The hearer bears the burden of figuring out actual roles with the help of this and other information. By the same token, these meanings do not abstract over the various types of roles found in messages associated with lui and le, as is the intent of traditional notions like "directly/indirectly affected object", MORE and LESS CONTROL do not encode anything having directly to do with roles. Rather, they indicate a rank, and thereby nudge the hearer in a certain direction; this helps the hearer arrive at a conclusion regarding role. These meanings are clearly more imprecise than traditional categories like "agent", "patient", or "beneficiary". This imprecision has the advantage of making the Control meanings usable with a great variety of events; but in return it places on the hearer the burden of figuring out the specific type of involvement appropriate to each individual instance. A simple example will illustrate. (1)

Elle m'a dit: «Montrez-moi votre bague». Je la lui ai montrée. 'She said: "Show me your ring". I showed it to her.'

What is being signalled here is that there is an act of "showing", and that in this act, the referent of lui, 'her', is more in control of the "showing" than the referent of la 'it'. The reason for this ranking is transparent in light of information contained in the immediately preceding context: by demanding to see the ring, the referent of 'her' provides a strong motivation for the "showing", whereas 'it' (=the ring) exercises very little direct control over the "showing"; being an inanimate object, it has less inherent capacity for control than that of a person. The function of lui and la is to indicate this ranking. Some readers will object: "But lui could occur here even if she didn't ask to see the ring!" This study will show that utterances with lui are in fact skewed with respect to contexts', that they occur in natural discourse only when there is some attribution of control to lui's referent. When this is not the case, there are numerous alternative ways of mentioning that referent without attributing control to it, and one of these will be chosen. This is why the problem of lui cannot be solved if inquiry is limited to the framework of the Sentence.

3.

The Status of the Highest Controller

At this point one may ask why the traditional "(logical) subject" is not added to the top of the Degree of Control scale, giving a three-member scale with the meanings HIGH, MID, LOW, rather than a two-member scale with the

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

33

meanings MORE, LESS. Example (1) seems to justify doing this: In this act of "showing", the participant referred to by je T exercises the greatest degree of control, because this one bears the greatest immediate responsibility for the "showing". If T decided not to show her the ring, then it would not happen; T exercises the ultimate control. This characterization of the pragmatic control relation among the three participants in (1) is consistent with the spirit of the Degree of Control analysis. The contribution of je can accurately be characterized as a relative rather than a substantive one. For practical purposes this reasoning will be adopted for the examples to be analyzed here. There are, however, technicalities which seem to prevent the actual postulation of a three-member system. A brief indication will be given here of the considerations leading to this decision, pending fuller discussion of these issues in later chapters. The pronouns je 'I' and tu 'you' are not on the same scale as lui and le because, even if they do signal a Degree of Control (and analysis may show that they do not), they do not share the same Person as lui and le. In the third person, the pronouns which suggest themselves as candidates for inclusion at the top of the scale of Degree of Control are il and elle. Yet, each of these has distributional peculiarities which suggest that something other than Degree of Control is involved.5 Since there are analytical questions in regard to il and elle which must be dealt with in a more comprehensive analysis of the System of Participants, we here adopt the conservative position and do not include them with lui and le. French has another system of Degree of Control, for nouns and non-clitic pronouns, using a word-order signal: (2)

a. Jean porte Marie. 'John carries Mary.' b. Marie porte Jean. 'Mary carries John.' The meaning LOW Degree of Control applies to the participant after the verb and is substantively equivalent to the meaning of le. The meaning HIGH Degree of Control applies to the participant before the verb and is substantively equivalent to degrees of control higher than that of lui. The reason for not including in this system a degree of control equivalent to that of lui (i.e. Mid) is that there is no signal for this meaning; this point is discussed in Chapter 7. This "noun" Control system, however, is distinct from the "pronoun" Control system: 1) because the two use different signals for the lowest degree of control, 2) because of the lack of a signal and meaning Mid in the noun system and a signal and

34

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

meaning for High in the pronoun system, and 3) because lui and le simultaneously signal meanings from other semantic domains not signalled by the noun system, as explained below in Chapter 5.6 For informal purposes, since the High Controller in the noun Control system regularly interacts with lui and le in ways characteristic of a scalar relationship, and since the lowest members of the two scales are substantively equivalent, we may collapse the two systems into one de facto system and think of a single, three-member system which covers the range from High to Low. HIGH

Preverbal noun, "subject" pronouns, etc. Degree of Control (de facto)

MID

lui, leur LOW

le, la, V, les; postverbal nouns, etc. Figure 2.2. De Facto Degrees of Control

4.

The Satellite Relationship and Degree of Control

There is a close relationship between luille and the word denoting an event (the "verb"). The information given by lui and le responds to a communicative problem that arises when an event is mentioned: that of specifying the nature of the involvement of these participants in the event. We formulate this special relationship by saying that the members of the Control system are in satellite relationship with the event. The term "satellite relationship" refers basically to the relationship of a grammatical form to a lexical item. This is a familiar phenomenon: for instance in travaillait 'worked', the signal represented by the suffix -ait stands in satellite relationship to the lexical stem travaill- and indicates, among other things, past time. In chevaux 'horses', the signal represented by the letters -aux (or their phonetic correlate in speech) stands in satellite relationship to the lexical stem chev-, and indicates some number of horses other than one. Even though the clitics are written as separate words, this same type of relationship holds between them and the verb in French. The rules of elision7

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

35

and liaison do apply, a step in the direction of affixhood which reflects this close connection. The satellite relationship is, moreover, reflected in the clitic word order itself. A fixed order of grammatical signals with relation to lexical items is a typical feature of satellite relationships. The verb form cited above, for instance, can not be ait-travaill rather than travaill-ait. Likewise, the members of the French Control system, whose meanings complement that of the verb, exhibit a particular word order in relation to the verb. No word(s) (adverb, prepositional phrase, conjunction, etc.) may intervene between a clitic object pronoun and the verb, much as no word may intervene between e.g. a noun stem and a plural ending in English or French, or between stem and ending in travaillait. Furthermore, when more than one clitic pronoun is used at a time, a particular word order also obtains among the pronouns themselves. The following familiar chart summarizes this word order: me te se nous vous

le la les

leur

y

en

VERB

Figure 2.3. Clitic Word Order The reason for both constraints is the close relationship between the grammatical form and the lexical center, and the consequent need for them to be processed together. The detailed motivations for the word order configuration of Figure 2.3 will be discussed in Chapter 7. Here let it be simply stated that this order helps distinguish the signals of the Degree of Control system from potential homonyms: the "definite article" le, la, les, "disjunctive" lui, and "possessive adjective" leur. To make it clear that the distinct signals of the Control system are being referred to, they will henceforth be hyphenated to indicate the clitic word order, when cited out of context: lui-, leur-, le-, la-, V-, les-. The satellite relation applies to the meanings as well as to the signals of the Control system. It is important to keep in mind that the system of Control indicates the degree of Control of things which are Participants in a designated Event, but is not used for things which are not Participants in that Event. This is why these forms are not used when there is no Event (no "verb").

36

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

(3)

a. Son mari lui est fidèle. 'Her husband is faithful to her.' b. un mari fidèle à elle 'a husband faithful to her'

In (3a), 'to her' is expressed by clitic lui-. In (3b), where there is no verb and thus no lexical satellite center, 'to her' is expressed by a disjunctive.

5.

The Assigning of Roles via Degree of Control

Let us examine further how the meanings of the Control system reflect the satellite relationship. The Control meanings complement the verb in that they help the hearer fill in important details associated with the event. Events typically have entities associated with them. Given an event and one or more associated entities, the communicative problem that naturally poses itself is: What role is played by each entity in this particular event? The system of Degree of Control helps solve this problem, not directly by indicating specific roles, but indirectly, by ranking the entities according to the relative degree to which each controls the event. Given this information, together with knowledge from other sources as to how this type of event usually takes place and how this particular event is taking place, the hearer can draw conclusions as to the specific role played by each entity in the event. The contribution of lui- and lethemselves to this process, though, is actually quite minor. An example will illustrate the interaction of these contributing factors. (4)

La fille de Marie a vu une jolie robe, et Marie la lui a achetée. 'Mary's daughter saw a pretty dress, and Mary bought it for her.'

In the second half of this example, there is an Event, a achetée 'bought'. Marie, by its preverbal position and lexical meaning, is taken to be High Controller. The forms la- and lui- say: "Include two more Participants in this Event, one with more Control and one with less Control." The hearer has two tasks to perform: (a) to determine the referents of la- and lui-, and (b) to determine the specific roles played by the participants in this event. With regard to (a), the two candidates for reference in this example are "daughter" and "dress". Number and gender often help in determining the referent of a pronoun; here, however, since both candidates are singular and feminine, these provide no help. The system of Degree of Control, however, does help. One candidate is a human being, and the other candidate is an inanimate object. Since humans generally have greater potential to exert, and typically do exert more control over events

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

37

than inanimate objects, the referent of lui- MORE CONTROL is taken to be "daughter", and the referent of la- LESS CONTROL is taken to be "dress". Concerning (b), what the three roles are likely to be, this will depend on the context. The three participants have been ranked by degree of Control: 'Mary'—High, 'her'—Mid, 'it'—Low. Given three participants with this event, the hearer expects three distinct roles, since the three participants are associated with three different levels of Control. In an act of "buying", there will most likely be a "buyer" and a "purchase". The role of "buyer", who initiates the event and bears prime responsibility for it, will be associated with that entity indicated to be the High Controller. The role of "purchase", a mere pawn in the event, will be associated with the Low Controller. The remaining participant, the Mid Controller, is Mary's daughter. What is taking place here is "buying a dress", and daughters are very often motivators or beneficiaries of buying things, particularly dresses. Perhaps the daughter asks for the dress, or perhaps it is simply Mary's desire to do something nice for her daughter, or the like. We have indeed been told that the daughter "saw a pretty dress". Given all this, it is a very plausible inference that the daughter is here the motivator or beneficiary of the "buying", a type of involvement very commonly associated with the Mid degree of Control. A motivator or beneficiary is not as immediately responsible for the "buying" as the actual buyer, but is certainly more so than the thing bought. Furthermore, when a dress is bought, the beneficiary is typically the one who receives the dress, as is often a motivator. We thus have a chain of associations which runs as follows: "daughter" is taken to be the referent of lui-, whose meaning is MORE CONTROL; due to the nature of this participant and of this event, that referent is likely to be a motivator or beneficiary; and again, due to the nature of this event, the motivator or beneficiary may also be taken as a "recipient". A role is thus inferred for the Mid Controller. Whether we state this role to be "motivator" or "beneficiary" or "recipient" is immaterial. All are true; but, from an analytical standpoint, none of these categorizations is significant, because none is signalled by lui-. Lui- merely allows the message to be pushed in the direction of these roles, in light of the prevailing circumstances. The meaning MORE CONTROL itself is not directly observable in the message; it in fact bears no direct resemblance to any of the possible messages. As a consequence of the satellite relationship, the participation indicated by a member of the Control system is specifically limited to the event with which the pronoun is in satellite relationship. So, for instance, in (4), the daughter might actually be more active overall than Mary; she might be pleading for the dress, or demanding it, or even have her mother "wrapped around her finger",

38

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

literally being in control of her! But the lui- that refers to the daughter is in satellite relationship with a achetée 'bought', and the Control meaning chosen is a response only to the relative level of Control of the daughter specifically in this act of "buying". Other activities happening on the same scene are not the decisive factor.

6.

Where the Roles Come from

Not only are roles in an event not signalled by lui- or le-\ they are not encoded by the verb either, although the nature of the event will suggest certain types of involvement as plausible, or more likely than others. Taking the same combination of forms as in (4), including the same verb, we can change the context so that a different type of involvement is suggested for the Mid Controller. (5)

Marie a vu une jolie robe chez sa couturière, et une semaine après, elle la lui a achetée. 'Mary saw a pretty dress at her dressmaker's, and a week later, she bought it from her.'

The second half, of this example again presents an instance of "buying" with three roles. Here, however, lui- refers to the 'dressmaker', whose role is quite different from any of those in example (4). The dressmaker, although not as directly responsible for the "buying" as Mary, nevertheless does exercise a considerable degree of control over it. By being in the business of selling dresses and providing the actual dress which is sold, and by interacting with Mary to complete the sale, she sets up and expedites the "buying". Without her, the dress would not be sold (nor even exist). On the other hand, she clearly exerts more control than the dress. It is therefore appropriate for the speaker to rank her a Mid Controller. From the hearer's point of view, everything proceeds as in (4), except the inferring of a role for the referent of lui-; and this is where the other knowledge referred to above makes a crucial difference. Knowing that lui- refers to 'dressmaker', the hearer is not likely to infer her to be a "beneficiary"; while conceivable, it is unlikely that one would buy a dress for one's dressmaker. It is possible that the dressmaker was begging Mary to buy the dress, thus motivating the "buying"; in this case the message might be pushed in the direction of "She bought it at her urging". But in the absence of any indication to this effect, the hearer will most likely take lui- as suggesting an "expediter/enabler",

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

39

an association appropriate to the specific participant in this example. Since, in an occurrence of "buying a dress", the one who sets up or expedites the "buying" is typically the seller, and since here this participant is also a dressmaker, one may also very naturally associate the role of "source" with this participant. Again, however, neither "expediter" nor "seller" nor "source" is encoded by lui-. "Source" is an inference related to "expediter" by the particular characteristics of this scene; "seller" is likewise an inference related to "expediter" mainly by the nature of the activity of "selling"; "expediter" is merely a generalization over a large number of messages which exploit the meaning, MORE CONTROL, in one particular way. The roles, then, are encoded neither by lui- and le-, nor by the verb, nor by anything else in the utterance; they are a product of inference.10 If, however, one attempts to trace carefully the source of roles attributed to participants in various messages, one must certainly conclude that lui- and lebear much less responsibility than what is suggested by the verb. The range of such roles is great:11 (6)

Si je défonce le crâne à un ou deux seulement — et je le leur dois — les autres referont leurs comptes. GHT 105 'If I smash the skull of just one or two of them — and I owe it (le-) to them (leur-) —"the others will rethink the matter.' [Roles: debtor, creditor, debt]

(7)

(8)

Savez-vous ce qu'il faut faire? Je le leur répète à chaque instant. GHT 186 'Do you know what has to be done? I repeat it (le-) to them (leur-) constantly.' [Roles: speaker, addressee, message] La lampe tremblait si fort entre ses doigts qu'elle la lui arracha. BCR 24

'The lamp was trembling so hard between his fingers that she snatched it (la-) away from him (lui-).9 [Roles: snatcher, loser, thing snatched] Traditional analyses have attempted to build this diversity into the functions of lui- and le- themselves. But in fact it is clear that the roles associated with the above examples are suggested mainly by the verbs. All that lui- and le- do is clarify which participant goes with which role; and this ranking function is a direct consequence of the Degree of Control meanings.

40 7.

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Meaning Not in the Sentence

Our discussion so far may seem to allow a direct mapping from meaning to message: when the referent of lui- is 'daughter', lui- is "beneficiary"; when it is 'dressmaker', lui- is "expediter". If things really worked this way, then it could still be argued that the sentence provides an adequate framework for semantic interpretation. But things do not work this way. Take again example (4). (4) La fille de Marie a vu une jolie robe, et Marie la lui a achetée. Suppose Mary's daughter had bought the dress upon seeing it and was now its owner. The interpretation 'Mary bought it for her' would now make no sense. What would make sense, in fact, is the interpretation given to (5): 'Mary bought it from her.' The information leading to this interpretation is not encoded in this sentence. It can only be derived from general context; it might even not be explicitly stated at all. The hearer, for instance, might know that Mary's daughter is a professional dress buyer. The reverse also holds true. Take again example (5). (5)

Marie a vu une jolie robe chez sa couturière, et une semaine après, elle la lui a achetée.

Suppose we knew from general context that Mary's dressmaker was extremely poor, so poor that she couldn't afford to buy dresses for herself as nice as the ones she sold. Mary had pity on her and made her a gift of one. Now the interpretation of this sentence is in fact the one originally given to example (4): 'She bought it for her.' The point is that the sentence, as a formal entity, has no special significance for semantic interpretation. "Sentence meaning" (in our terms a "message") is not the sum of the lower-level meanings contained within the sentence; sentence meaning is not compositional.12 The fact that sentences do not encode all information necessary for their own interpretation must be explicitly recognized in the analytical process. One cannot algorithmically map from MORE CONTROL to messages like "beneficiary" or "source"; one can formulate no semantic rules. Nor are there "markers" (such as "daughter" or "dressmaker") to trigger particular interpretations. The very fact that the attribution of a specific type of involvement to the referent of lui- cannot take place before the hearer weighs other elements of context demonstrates that none of the various potential types is encoded by lui-. Since roles cannot emerge until after interpretation of an utterance has begun, they clearly cannot be part of that which is encoded in the utterance.

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41

This is the essential difference between traditional grammar and Columbiaschool analysis. Sentence-based grammar actually presents an analysis of thought, that is, an analysis of a message derived from the processing of a linguistic utterance. But it offers no explanation of how the message is arrived at in the first place. Its categories cannot offer this explanation because they are themselves a product of the object of explanation. A Columbia-school analysis, by contrast, attempts to establish what language itself contributes to the deriving of a message, recognizing that much goes into this process that is not contributed by language. Consequently, there is no basis for expecting the contribution of a given grammatical form to be directly observable in a message. The message is the resultant of this factor interacting with many other factors, the dominant one being human intelligence. Thus, across all the possible interpretations of examples (4) and (5), what remains constant is the contribution of lui-: It ranks its referent higher than 'the dress' and lower than 'Mary'. The functioning of this instrumental meaning requires the intervention of human judgment, and such judgments are affected by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors. The relation between meaning and message, between input and output, although it can be traced and understood, is not formalizable with rules.

8.

Precision as a Factor in Choice of Meaning

The Degree of Control meanings, then, are imprecise compared to the actual roles inferred with their help. Since these meanings give so little information, the roles must be ones that are easily inferable, i.e. , readily associable with the event in question. In an act of "buying", for example, the roles "buyer", "seller", and "purchase" are easily inferable. But other types of involvement only loosely or occasionally associated with "buying" may have to be indicated by other, more precise, means; and this usually requires using additional lexical items. For example: (9)

Marie n'aimait pas la robe, mais sa fille l'a achetée malgré elle. 'Marie didn't like the dress, but her daughter bought it in spite of her.' Here Mary is, in a broad sense, concerned with the buying of the dress; but her role is not a type of involvement readily associable with "buying". An imprecise Control meaning, unless the context is heavily loaded, will probably not enable the hearer to divine Mary's role. A more specialized lexical item is

42

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

required: malgré 'in spite of'. Therefore 'her' is not made a satellite of the verb a achetée 'bought'; rather, the non-clitic elle 'her' is used together with malgré to communicate this message.13 In spite of the limitations it imposes, the imprecision of the Control meanings makes them highly versatile and useful linguistic devices. The meanings MORE and LESS CONTROL are purely relative to each other. Since they in no way characterize actual roles in events, they can be used with any number of different verbs (see again examples (6)-(8) above); the hearer is relied upon to connect these hints with the roles appropriate to a particular event. The Control meanings only serve to nudge the hearer in one general direction or another. The gap between meaning and message is bridged by means of an inferential leap. It is this point, we would suggest, which more than any other factor has led to the failure of attempts to define the contribution of lui- and le-. Notional and semantic analyses have attempted to assign too much to these forms. If one looks only at the multitude of messages with which they can be associated, luiand le- appear to be very powerful devices indeed. However, the problem of defining their contribution coherently and consistently proves insoluble. The present analysis suggests that, on the contrary, lui- and le- are very weak instruments. Most of the work is done on the spot by the language user. Luiand le- provide only a nudge, a hint. The analyst must retreat from the message in order to uncover this hint.

9.

Strategies of Exploitation

Although the Degree of Control meanings can rarely be seen directly in messages, it is analytically very important that their contribution be made explicit. In connecting meaning to message, the analyst typically passes through one or more links or stages. These links, the strategies of exploitation, are the analyst's attempt to spell out speakers' motivations for deployment of a meaning. This analysis will thus have a very different appearance from a traditional analysis, and this is because of the acknowledgement of the presence and active involvement of language users in the "encoding" and "decoding" processes. Strategies will not always be mechanical and predictable applications of meanings. One must allow for the fact that humans are using a weak and sparse instrument, exploiting it in whatever ways they can think of, to achieve a tremendous variety of communicative ends, some of them very subtle. This,

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43

then, is the frame of mind within which 'we must proceed: we are looking at the intelligent exploitation of a weak tool to do a complex job. 14

10. A Look Ahead Our next task, and the major task of this book, will be to validate the Degree of Control hypothesis. In doing this, we will answer the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter. 1 ) When lui- or le- is used, why is it used at all, and why is it chosen instead of some other form or combination of forms? This is the question of semantic substance, to be dealt with in this chapter. We will show on what basis the choice is made between lui- and y, a prepositional phrase, or a possessive adjective. Chapter 3 will bring the great variety of roles associated with lui- under the roof of the single meaning MORE CONTROL and show what is behind the troublesome category of "maleficiary". 2) How is the choice between lui- and le- a reflection of their indication of relative degrees of Control ? This is the question of linguistic value and will be the topic of Chapters 4 and 5. The enigma of "government" will be resolved, and the use of lui- and lewith "faire causatives" will be shown to be a semantic, not a syntactic phenomenon. Many other puzzling aspects of the distribution of lui- and le- will fall into place along the way. Chapter 6 will return to an examination of the philosophical basis of traditional categories of grammar. It will be argued that the most fundamental categories on which analyses of lui- and le- have hitherto always been based — beginning with the Sentence and its parts — are unsatisfactory both deductively and inductively as a basis for analysis of language. Chapter 7 discusses à-phrases and the notion of "cliticity". An approach to these topics along Columbia-school lines and an alternative to the traditional view that lui- represents a "pronominalization" of an à-phrase will be offered. The final chapter will attempt to draw some broader conclusions regarding linguistic theory, based on the completed analysis of lui- and le-. It will complete the comparison of Columbia-school linguistics to other schools of linguistics begun in Chapter 1. The Degree of Control hypothesis will be validated by systematic confrontation with data and by testing predictions to which it gives rise. The analytical operation to be performed is essentially the reverse of that performed by the

44

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

speaker or writer of French. Speakers create skewings in the distributions of luiand le- in attempting use these forms to communicate certain messages. As analysts, we will use these skewings, against the background of the interpreted message, to demonstrate that the signal-meaning hypotheses are correct. This will be done at two levels: the individual example, and the complete text. In the latter, quantitative procedures are used to demonstrate the existence of a skewing predicted by the hypothesis, thus providing support for the hypothesis. The data base of this study consists of twentieth-century French prose texts. Invented examples are used as little as possible. Sometimes such examples are useful for preliminary illustration of a point, but the bulk of the validation rests on contextualized data. Constructed examples, as well as all translations, are supplied by the present author, unless otherwise indicated.

11. Participants in the Event vs. Non-participants The system of Degree of Control is part of the System of Participants. Luiand le- indicate relative degree of control over the Event by Participants in the Event. This fact makes lui- and le- either more or less appropriate for particular messages than other forms of French which associate an entity with an event without indicating this entity to be technically a participant in the event. We will examine the implications of Controlling Participant status by comparison of examples containing lui- or le- to similar examples containing three such alternatives: 1) place expressions, 2) prepositional phrases, and 3) possessive adjectives. 11.1.

Participants in Events vs. Circumstances of Events

An important factor in determining whether an entity associated with an event will be interpreted as a participant in the event is the nature of the entity itself. One principle which generally holds true is that places and times tend not to be good candidates for participant status. We may illustrate this first with a pair of examples from English. English has a Degree of Control system based on a word-order signal (see Reid 1991:174-178). This system can signal up to three degrees of Control: (10)

John sent Mary candy.

The relative ranking in degree of control is indicated by the word order: HIGH Controller: 'John'; MID Controller: 'Mary'; LOW Controller: 'candy'. If we

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

45

substitute for one of these participants a word indicating a place or a time, this relationship changes radically: (11)

John sent Mary home.

(12)

John sent Mary yesterday.

Mary is not the recipient of 'home' or 'yesterday'; rather, Mary now plays the role played by 'candy' in (10): that which is sent. It is apparently the placelike nature of 'home' and the temporal nature of 'yesterday' which discourage their consideration as participants. In the resulting two-participant message, 'Mary' is Low Controller.15 Similarly for French, as in the following pair: (13)

La soupe a brûlé ma langue. 'The soup burned my tongue.'

Here we have two participants, soupe and langue, whose roles are clearly differentiated: the soup is the agent, and the tongue is that which gets burned. This changes when we substitute a place expression: (14)

La soupe a brûlé là-bas. 'The soup burned over there.'

Là-bas 'over there', referring to a place, is not taken as a participant, that is, it is not assigned to one of the roles in the "burning", as 'tongue' is in (13). Consequently, the role attributed to soupe is not the same as in (13). Here, soupe is the thing that gets burned, and the agent of the burning is left unspecified. Likewise: (15)

La soupe a brûlé hier. 'The soup burned yesterday.'

Places and times are prototypical instances of circumstances of an event. Both English and French speakers appear to recognize a dichotomy whereby that which is regarded as a circumstance of an event is not simultaneously considered a participant in the event, and vice versa. The above examples show how varying the number of participants with an event affects the portion of the scale of participancy that each can exploit. As elements like là-bas and hier disqualify themselves as participants, the remaining participant can cover roles from which it is excluded when there is a second participant. In Chapter 1 we noted the problem posed for the category Indirect Object by the fact that prepositional phrases with à can be pronominalized at least three different ways: (a) with clitic lui-; (b) with à plus a disjunctive pronoun; (c) with

46

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

y. The observation that words which are interpreted as referring to circumstances will not be assigned participant status is a first step in illuminating the question of when the lui- option is chosen. In some instances, pronominalization with lui- is inappropriate because the message is clearly one of place: (16) a. Je cours à la maison. b. J'y cours.

T run home.' T run there.'

(17) a. Je cours à ma sœur. b. Je cours à elle.

T run to my sister.' T run to her.'

The words à 'to, at', and y 'there' are indicators par excellence of circumstance. On this basis, we may hypothesize the role of the à and y options vis-à-vis the lui-/le- option, even for cases less obvious than examples (16) and (17). The existence of a participant/circumstance dichotomy suggests the following: Speakers may use à or y as a convenient way of indicating that an entity is not to be regarded as a participant in the event, in effect withholding Participant status. Let us consider various motivations for doing this. Examples (16) and (17) show one such motivation: if the intention is to communicate a message of place, the device indicating place is obviously the more appropriate one. Another motivation was noted above: the nature of an entity affects its eligibility for participant status. Persons, for instance, who are usually capable of exerting some control over events, are better candidates for participant status than inanimate objects. Indeed, there is a clear tendency for lui- to refer to persons and y to refer to things, as seen in pairs such as the following: (18) a. Il leur a bien répondu, à ces professeurs. 'He answered them well, these professors.' b. Il y a bien répondu, à ces questions. 'He answered them well, these questions.' (19) a. Je lui ai consacré une bonne partie de ma vie, à ce professeur. T have devoted a good part of my life to this professor.' b. J'y ai consacré une bonne partie de ma vie, à cette thèse. 'I have devoted a good part of my life to this dissertation.'

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47

(20) a. Je lui ai mis une veste blanche, à mon fils. T put a white jacket on my son.' b. J'y ai mis de la peinture blanche, à ma porte. 'I put some white paint on my door.' (21) a. Le chapeau est bien, mais la veste ne lui va pas. 'The hat is all right, but the jacket doesn't fit him.' b. Je n'arrive pas à ouvrir la serrure; cette clé n'y va pas. T can't get the lock open; this key doesn't fit it.' This, however, is merely a tendency, not a rule. A speaker may want to adopt now one point of view toward an entity, now another. Example (22) shows how the same type of entity (here an inanimate object) can be referred to as either a participant or a locus, depending on which is more appropriate at a given moment. This passage is from a legal code, describing restrictions on homeowners whose houses share a common courtyard; these restrictions are designed to protect the privacy of the individual homeowners. (22)

On n'a pas le droit d'ouvrir ses fenêtres sur la cour commune. Si un individu acquiert une maison qui donne sur une autre cour, il n'a pas le droit d'y ménager une ouverture dans la cour commune. S'il a construit un étage sur sa maison, il n'a pas le droit de lui ménager un accès dans la cour commune, mais s'il veut, il peut construire une pièce à l'intérieur de sa maison, ou construire un étage sur sa maison et lui ménager un accès à l'intérieur de sa maison. WMI 22 (boldface mine AH)

'One may not open up windows onto the common courtyard. If an individual acquires a house that overlooks another courtyard [and which has one wall in the common courtyard], he may not construct for it (y) an opening into the common courtyard [the goings and comings of the residents would disturb the privacy of the courtyard]. If he has built a story onto his house [in order to house more tenants], he may not construct for it Qui-) an entrance in the common courtyard [the additional tenants would diminish the privacy of the courtyard], but, if he wishes he may construct a room inside his house [to house more tenants], or build a story onto his house and construct for it (lui-) an entrance inside his house.' (explanations in brackets mine AH) Three times the passage talks about making modifications in the house, using the verb ménager. The first time it talks about constructing an opening in the

48

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

house, and the house is referred to with y. The second and third times it talks about constructing an entrance into the story, and the story is referred to by lui-. Both of these entities, the house and the story, could appropriately be referred to either as a locus or as a participant. What pushes the choice in one direction or the other? The answer becomes clear when we consider the difference between the relationship of the opening to the house on the one hand, and the entrance to the story on the other hand. The house, with one wall on the common courtyard, already has another entrance someplace else. The story, however, does not; it is, in fact, next to useless without this entrance, since there would be no way to get to it. In other words, the story is considerably more enhanced by the addition of an entrance than is the house. The story itself, by virtue of this potential enhancement, motivates the addition of the entrance. The house, by contrast, provides no such strong motivation, and since it is the locus of the opening, the general tendency to use y for inanimates in such cases prevails. This choice between y and lui-, furthermore, correlates with the choice of words used to describe the opening: ouverture simply means an 'opening' and carries no specification of what the opening is to be used for; accès 'entrance' implies a particular usefulness: people can make use of it to go in and out. The word accès thus provides a further indication of the motivating aspect of the story, and is coherent with the choice of lui-. Just as inanimate objects, relatively poor candidates for participancy, can be participants under appropriate circumstances, so humans, normally good candidates, can be denied participant status. A human occupies space, and is thus strictly speaking a locus. In some circumstances, as when there is motion toward an end point, it may be desired to highlight the locative aspect of a person. Example (23) tells how the Pope was given a personal circus performance because he was sick in bed. (23)

Ne pouvant aller au cirque, le cirque est venu à lui. (— Paris Match) 'Not being able to go to the circus, the circus came to him [à + disjunctive lui].' The issue here is where the circus is to be held. The sentence sets up a contrast between two possible locuses. This contrast is better served by presenting the Pope as a place rather than as a participant. But here again no rules exist. Members of the System of Participants can be and frequently are used with verbs of motion; all depends on what view of the entity is most appropriate. Let us compare to (23) some examples showing

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49

lui- with venir. Example (24) is from a discussion of obstacles encountered by the campaign to save the endangered African elephant, not the least of which is the desire of natives to hunt the animal for food. (24)

Mais pour l'homme africain, l'éléphant n'avait d'autre beauté que le poids de sa viande et, quant à sa dignité humaine, elle était avant tout un ventre plein. C'est là en tout cas qu'elle commence. Peutêtre, lorsque l'homme africain aura le ventre plein, peut-être alors s'intéressera-t-il lui aussi au côté esthétique de l'éléphant, et, en général, se livrera-t-il à une méditation agréable sur les beautés de la nature. Pour l'instant, la nature lui parlait d'ouvrir le ventre de l'éléphant et de plonger dedans les dents en avant, et de manger, manger jusqu'à la stupeur, parce qu'il ne savait pas d'où le prochain morceau allait lui venir. GRC 316 'But for the African man, the elephant had no other beauty than the weight of its meat and, as for his human dignity, this was above all a full stomach. That, at any rate, is where it begins. Perhaps, when African man will have a full stomach, perhaps then he too will interest himself in the esthetic side of the elephant, and, in general, will indulge in a pleasant meditation on the beauties of nature. For the moment, nature was telling him to open the elephant's belly and plunge in teeth first, and to eat, eat himself into a stupor, because he didn't know where his next piece was going to come from [lit.: was going to come him (lui-)].'

End-point of motion is not the issue here. True, the meat will have to undergo motion and arrive at the African man, but that is irrelevant. The point is the high degree of interaction between man and meat, the man's passionate desire for meat and his involvement in getting the meat. African man is bringing on, controlling, the meat's coming to him, and that is the central point of the discussion. Example (25) is from a story about three brothers from a rural family. One brother is a successful veterinarian. The other two are failures; one, who has failed despite an honest effort, receives financial help from the veterinarian. But the third brother brought failure upon himself. (25) ... il se soûlait au bon vin, fumait pour trente sous de cigares par jour, et tenait table garnie d'un bout à l'autre de l'année. Et non seulement il faisait des orgies à domicile, mais il s'en allait à la ville où il demeurait quelquefois plusieurs jours, traînant dans tous les mauvais lieux de l'endroit, en compagnie des voyous et des

50

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

peaux. Son capital écorné de moitié, il épousa une fille de belle jambe et de peu de principes qui acheva de dévorer le meuble et l'immeuble. Justement indigné, le vétérinaire ne fit rien pour lui venir en aide. AJV 29 '... he got drunk on good wine, smoked thirty cents worth of cigars every day, and offered a well-trimmed table all year long. And not only did he hold orgies at home, but he went off to the city where he stayed sometimes several days, hanging out in all the evil spots, in the company of scoundrels and sluts. His capital half squandered, he married a shapely girl of no scruples who finished eating up the property and belongings. Rightfully indignant, the veterinarian did nothing to come to his aid [lit.: come him {lui-) in help].' Even if the veterinarian had helped his brother, whether he physically came to him with this help is not the point. The point is that such aid is motivated by the brother and his need; thus, if there were help, the brother would be causing, and thereby controlling, its being given. Taking this one step further, when lui- is used with a verb of motion, the Controlling status of its referent may be of such importance that physical motion is not present on the scene at all. (26)

Raymond ... songea que son père avait dû déjà quitter l'hôtel. Le désir lui vint d'embrasser une fois encore le vieillard: simple désir de fils; mais entre eux se noue un autre lien du sang, plus secret: ils sont parents par Maria Cross. MDA 241 'Raymond ... imagined that his father must have already left the hotel. The desire came to him (lui-) to kiss the old man once more: a simple filial desire; but between them was being formed another blood relationship, a more secret one: they were related through Maria Cross.'

Raymond's state of mind is being described; and the "coming" does not involve motion and a physical locus. Rather, the "desire" is a feeling originating within him, and the "coming" is precipitated by his own characteristics: his present state of mind and his filial relationship. Thus, the important thing is Raymond's role in bringing about — and hence his control over — the desire to kiss his father. Lui- is used with aller 'go', as in (27). Two men are discussing a third man, a political rival of both; one asserts that he really dislikes this rival, but the speaker says he suspects this dislike is only skin deep.

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL (27)

51

"C'est des manières de dire. Ton père était déjà comme ça: gueulard contre le monde qui ne lui allait pas, mais toujours fin prêt à leur baiser ce que tu me disais, quand il y trouvait à gagner." AJV 73 ' "That's just talk. Your father was like that too: liked to shoot off his mouth against people who didn't suit him [lit.: go him (lui-)], but, in the end, always ready to kiss their you-know-what when he thought there was some profit in it." '

Once again, there is no motion in relation to a locus. Rather, the referent of luiis in some sense passing judgment on the "people" (High Controller of aller) and deciding whether he likes them; what is at issue is his compatibility with these people. It is thus his characteristics that set up the "going'V'suiting" and thus exert control over the event. When, however, the function of a person is to serve as a reference point for motion, clitic lui- will be avoided. In (28), a man has just arrived by airplane in a foreign city. He is expecting to be met by someone, but since he knows nobody in this city, he walks over to a stranger: (28)

Des yeux il cherche ... un homme qui paraisse attendre quelqu'un. Il y en a un près de la barrière. Il va à lui, le questionne: — Délégation commerciale? — Non. Je regrette. VCH I-7

'With his eyes he looks for ... a man who looks like he is waiting for someone. There is one near the railing. He goes to him [à + disjunctive luí], questions him: "Commercial delegation?" "No. Sorry." ' Here it is only a question of his walking over to the man; this man manifests none of the motivation or other interaction associated with lui-, and non-clitic lui is used. Thus, a speaker may wish to deemphasize the participant aspect even of an entity that is a good candidate for participancy, and this is one important motivation for choosing à with a non-clitic over clitic lui-. 11.2.

Participants vs. Prepositional Phrases

This analysis has taken the position that clitic lui-, on the one hand, and à plus a noun or disjunctive pronoun on the other hand, represent two distinct and independent grammatical mechanisms of French, not merely a relationship of

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

"pronominalization". We have begun to show that the à option may represent a withholding of the Participant status accorded by lui-. In fact, any preposition may serve this function. To clarify the choice between lui- and the prepositional option, let us first demonstrate a basic point: that an entity referred to by a clitic must be involved in the event in a sense that is not true of an entity referred to by a disjunctive. (29)

Je leur ai pris une photo. 'I took them {leur-) a photo.' (ambiguous)

(30)

J'ai pris une photo d'eux. T took a photo of them {eux).'

Considering first (29), we recall that the meaning of leur-, MORE CONTROL, indicates a referent involved as a participant in the "taking", whose contribution to bringing about the "taking" is greater than that of the Low Controller (the 'photo'); beyond this, no particular type of involvement is specified. Thus, (29) could apply to a number of different situations, its translation varying with the particular scene. (The overly-literal translations given above is intended to be neutral among the various possibilities.) a) 'I took a photo of them', i.e. I was the photographer and they posed for the photo; b) T took a photo for them', i.e. they wanted a photo of something, and I took the photo at their behest; c) T took a photo away from them', e.g. they did something which displeased me, and to punish or take revenge on them, I took away a photo that was in their possession. In all these cases, the referent of leur- is personally involved and interacting in the "taking"; it either enables the "taking" to take place, or motivates it in some way. Example (30), with disjunctive eux, could apply to the following situations: a) I was the photographer and they were the subject of the photo; this message is similar to translation (a) of example (29);16 b) I took into my possession a photo of which they were the subject (i.e. in which they appeared), but not necessarily which they had in their possession. This latter message, not possible with (29), does not require any kind of participation in the "taking" for the referent of eux; not only were 'they' not necessarily in possession of the photo, but they may not have been aware of the "taking", or even of the photo's existence. Example (30), then, is susceptible to two interpretations, one in which the referent of eux participates in the "taking", and one in which it does not. Eux is thus neutral to participancy: it makes no commitment one way or the other. Comparing interpretation (b) of (30) to the various interpretations of (29) shows clearly the effect of leur-', it insists upon some type of involvement or participation in the "taking" for its referent. By contrast, the non-clitic does not

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carry this implication, and may thus appropriately be employed when the intention is to deny Participant status. A pair of examples from our collection illustrates this point well. John is a young married man who works for the firm of Philips and Butcher in England. His employers have sent him to a German language course for business purposes; John is seduced by the teacher, Frida, and nearly runs away with her to Germany. His wife remains uncomplaining throughout the affair, confident that it will end one day. She even finds a positive side to it: (31)

Il apportait même, maintenant, dans leurs rapports, un soin, un manque d'égoïsme auxquels elle n'avait pas été habituée. Si elle devait cela à Frida elle avait gagné dans l'affaire, à condition que John lui demeurât, bien entendu. VCH-I 42 'Now he even brought to their relations a caring and a lack of selfishness which she had not been accustomed to. If she owed that to Frida, she had come out ahead in the matter, provided, of course, that John remained with her (lui-).'

A few lines later John, contemplating running away with Frida, mulls over his current relations with his employers and their satisfaction at his progress in learning German: (32)

Ses progrès, à lui, avaient été grands et Philips and Butcher pouvaient être contents. Contents à la condition que John demeurât chez eux. VCH-I 43 'His own progress had been great, and Philips and Butcher could be happy. Happy on condition that John remained with them (eux).'

The more intimate nature of the husband-wife relationship entails the higher degree of interaction characteristic of the Control relationship; whereas the employer-employee relationship engenders a concern that John remain at their (place of) business, rather than any personal interaction. The following pair shows this contrast with another motion verb: courir 'run', and a different preposition: après 'after'. Example (33), with leur-, takes place in a prison cell during the Spanish revolution. A prison commander comes to the cell looking for three Basques he thought would be in that cell, but who are not. He is annoyed. (33)

"On m'a dit qu'il y avait trois Basques. Je ne vais pas perdre mon temps à leur courir après." SMU 13 ' "I was told there were three Basques. I'm not going to waste my time running after them (leur-)." '

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

In example (34), with non-clitic lui, a scatterbrained old man has just had a meeting with his lawyer and has left the office, forgetting a bundle of papers he had brought with him. The lawyer runs out after him with the papers. (34)

A peine eut-il pris congé que Bourdillon courait après lui, avec un sourire demi-moqueur, demi-pitoyable, et lui tendait sa liasse de papiers, qu'il avait oubliée. Toutes les fois qu'il sortait de chez le principal, il y oubliait quelque chose. MCE 89 'Hardly had he taken leave when Bourdillon ran after him, with a half-derisive, half-pitying smile, and handed him his bundle of papers, which he had forgotten. Every time he left the senior partner's office he forgot something there.'

In (33) there is an element of strong motivation that is missing in (34): the referent of leur- is itself the objective, the reason for the "running". In (34), by contrast, the objective is the bundle of papers, which the lawyer wants to get rid of. The referent of the pronoun — the old man — is simply the place he must run to in order to do this. These examples bring out another point: the interpretation of the event itself is affected by the nature of the involvement of the entities in it. In (34), where the referent of the pronoun serves as a physical end-point, there is physical "running". In (33), where the interaction between participants is at issue, there is not. What the commandant means is "track them down", which could be done by walking, running, telephoning, etc. Although either type of "running" is possible with either pronoun, this pair brings out the fact that lui- highlights the interaction between participants and the control that its referent exerts over the "running", with the consequence that the exact form of the "running" itself becomes immaterial. The second factor differentiating the lui- option from the prepositional option is the contribution of the preposition itself. When the specific role played by an entity is not easily inferable from the relatively imprecise meaning of lui-, the greater precision of a lexical item will be required. An instance of this was seen above in examples (4)-(9). With acheter 'buy', lui- could be used for the beneficiary of the "buying", as well as for the seller; but the role of buying something "in spite of somebody else's wishes" is too difficult to infer without the help of a more precise lexical item, in that case malgré. There are, however, cases where the messages communicated by lui- and by a preposition plus a non-clitic seem so close that grammarians have adjudged the two actually identical and posited "constructional synonymy".17 The differences may be hard to see from the standpoint of English, which uses its

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word-order signal for MID CONTROL (example (10) above) less than French uses lui-, and often translates lui- with a prepositional phrase. The problematic examples involve prepositions such as à, pour, en, de, and sur. Our task will thus be to uncover the often subtle message differences between such pairs, and to explain how the choice of linguistic device is made. Without undertaking full analyses of the prepositions listed above, let us investigate the contribution of lui- by asking: When is lui- avoided and when is it not avoided? The Control hypothesis predicts the following: A) Lui- explicitly introduces the element of Control, and thereby of Participancy into the message, as in the three sets of examples above. This may or may not be desirable for a particular message. When a speaker wishes to avoid the Control/Participancy element, he will avoid using lui-. B) The preposition is more precise than lui-. This has the following consequences: 1) The speaker will be less precise (and use lui-) when he can get away with it. Doing so means he can avoid the extra work of finding just the right word for what he wants to say and can put the burden on the hearer to figure out what he means, provided it is reasonable to expect the hearer to be able to do so. 2) When, however, lui-'s imprecision is a disadvantage, that is, when the wrong message might be inferred, then the more precise preposition will be used. C) The preposition will also be used when the satellite relationship (lui-'s attachment to the verb) is a disadvantage. For instance, it may be desired to place special emphasis on the pronoun, which is not possible within the strictly delimited satellite situation.18 Examples will illustrate each of these principles. 11.2.1.

Involvement vs. Non-involvement

The prepositional option may be chosen to emphasize the non-involvement of an entity in an event. The following pair involves the verb chercher Took for, seek'. Example (35) has lui-. A young boy has gone to work rather than continuing his education because his widowed mother needs the income. He is enthusiastic about working together with grown men in an industrial firm. He is given a menial job but apparently does it well, and when he reaches the age of eighteen his employers seek to upgrade his job. (35)

Chez Philips and Butcher on s'ingénia à lui chercher un emploi un peu différent de celui de coursier ou de saute-ruisseau. VCH-I 21 'At Philips and Butcher they used their ingenuity to seek for him (lui-) a job a little different from that of errand-boy.'

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Since this boy does his job well, he provides motivation for his employers to find him a better job. Just the opposite is true in (36), where a preposition is used, twice, with non-clitic lui. Mr. de Coantré is a fifty-plus-year-old bachelor who has never worked for a living; he depended on his mother, and when she died, lived off her estate until it ran out. Now he must look for a job but doesn't know how to go about it. His secret hope and expectation is that his rich uncle ("the baron") will bail him out. The baron, however, besides having a fair measure of antipathy for de Coantré, is being bled by other members of the family who also don't want to work for a living. Mr. de Coantré makes a pretense of looking for a job, but quickly gives up. The baron also makes a few feeble attempts at finding a job for his nephew, but soon discovers how difficult it is to find work for a person with no qualifications or experience. He tells himself that he has done his duty toward his nephew and resolves to do no more. (36)

M. de Coantré aurait pu très bien trouver une place d'aideemballeur, ou quelque chose d'analogue. Mais il eût fallu que ceux à qui il s'adressait prissent ses goûts et son désir au sérieux, au lieu de chercher pour lui dans l'ordre, où, eux, ils eussent cherché s'ils avaient été à sa place. Il eût fallu surtout que, lui, il sût à quelle porte frapper ... C'était exactement, comme à la guerre, des essais de percée qui ne réussissaient pas. Alors il ne tenta plus rien, convaincu de l'inutilité de ses efforts, et tenant d'ailleurs qu'il avait fait ce qu'il devait, qu'il était en règle avec lui-même, que des efforts aussi considérables lui avaient acquis le droit de s'abandonner. De son côté, le baron s'était installé dans le fait de ne chercher plus pour lui. MCE 127-128 'Mr. de Coantré could very well have found a job as assistant packer, or something of the sort. But it would have been necessary for those to whom he turned to take his tastes and desire seriously, instead of looking for him in the order that they would have looked had they been in his place. Above all, he would have had to know what door to knock on ... It was exactly, like in a war, attempts to make a breach which didn't succeed. So, he attempted nothing more, convinced of the uselessness of his efforts, and maintaining, moreover, that he had done what he ought, that he was in order with himself, that such considerable efforts had procured him the right to abandon himself. For his part, the baron had made up his mind to look for him no more.'

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The whole point is de Coantré's lack of participation in the looking, his halfhearted, futile efforts, his reliance on other people instead of doing the job for himself. In contrast to (35), where the boy's good work motivates others to look for a job for him, it is de Coantré's non-involvement that is highlighted here. One could almost translate chercher pour lui as Took instead of him'. The next pair contains the verb tirer, here glossed 'shoot'. Example (37) has clitic leur-. (37)

Ils l'ont trouvé dans la cabane des fossoyeurs. Il leur a tiré dessus, et ils l'ont descendu. SMU 35 'They found him in the gravediggers' cabin. He shot at them (leur-) and they killed him.'

This refers to a revolutionary leader, hunted by the police, who hid out in a graveyard. When the police finally found him, this gun battle ensued. Leurindicates a straightforward motivator: they were out to get him, he knew it, and he shot at them. By contrast, (38) shows an interesting and subtle use of non-clitic lui with tirer. In this detective story a ship's captain who has been missing is found, ambulatory, but in a near vegetable-like state, unable to speak or react to questions or statements addressed to him. On his head is a bullet wound, which has been repaired by very expert surgery. Two detectives are discussing the mystery, and one remarks to the other: (38)

On a tiré sur lui, c'est un fait! Mais aussi on l'a soigné d'une façon remarquable! SPB 10 'Someone shot at him, that's a fact! But he was also taken care of in an extraordinary way!'

Use of the non-clitic pronoun here with tirer seems to betray a hypothesis the detective has in mind, which turns out to be correct, namely: The shooting was a mistake. Whoever fired the bullet did not mean to shoot this man, and tried to fix him up afterwards. Avoidance of the Control pronoun therefore serves to portray the captain as not being the motivator of the shooting. A pair with jaillir 'spurt forth' further illustrates the use or avoidance of lui- to indicate greater or lesser involvement. In (39) we have a cruel, egotistical man who courts women for his own pleasure then abandons them when they become attached to him. The most he can feel for these women is pity. The passage, which extends for two pages up to this point, shows him in a long train of thought, reflecting on his current mistress:

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE (39)

II, eut pitié de cette petite vivante qui était à son côté, le visage dans le creux de son épaule gauche, où tant de visages s'étaient posés ... Pitié d'elle, de la voir s'aventurer ainsi dans des mains telles que les siennes ... Pitié d'elle, de ne l'aimer pas davantage, de ne trouver pas davantage de raisons de l'aimer, — et qu'elle ne fût pour lui qu'une parmi d'autres, alors qu'il était le seul pour elle, — et de ce qu'elle croyait qu'il lui donnait, quand il ne pouvait pas le lui donner ... Un de ses bras était passé sous la tête de Solange, mais son visage et son corps étaient détournés d'elle ... Elle se tourna et, sans mot dire, le baisa sur la joue: malgré ce qui s'était passé, c'étaient toujours ses mêmes baisers d'enfant; elle était sortie de son immobilité pour le faire, comme une vague solitaire se soulève au-dessus d'une mer plane. Un cri lui jaillit du cœur: "Elle peut souffrir de moi, et moi je ne le peux pas d'elle. Je l'aime, mais elle n'a pas le pouvoir de me faire souffrir. Il faut cesser ce jeu, cette inégalité abominable, et au détriment du plus faible!" MPF 138-139 'He had pity on this little living thing that was at his side, her face in the hollow of his left shoulder, where so many faces had lain ... Pity on her, seeing her venture thus into hands like his ... Pity on her, because he didn't love her more, because he didn't find more reasons to love her, — and because she was for him only one among others, whereas he was the only one for her, — and because of what she thought he was giving her, when he couldn't give it to her ... One of his arms lay under Solange's head, but his face and his body were turned away from her ... She turned and, without a word, kissed him on the cheek: in spite of what had happened, they were still her same childlike kisses; she had come out of her motionlessness to do it, like a solitary wave rises up above a flat sea. A cry burst forth from his heart [lit.: A cry burst him (lui-) forth from the heart]: "She can suffer from me, and I can't suffer from her. I love her, but she doesn't have the power to make me suffer. This game must be stopped, this abominable inequality, to the detriment of the weaker one!'"

This exclamation is not spontaneous; there is a tremendous buildup to it (the passage is here abridged considerably). The man is highly involved in the bursting forth of the cry; it is the culmination of his whole long train of thought. Hence the use of lui-. Example (40), with the same verb but a preposition and

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a non-clitic, has the opposite kind of outburst. The characters are the same as in (36) above. The baron (Mr. Octave) has finally gotten rid of his penniless nephew (Léon) by sending him to live in a desolate cabin in the wilderness near a small town. Léon has dropped out of sight for a couple of days, and the townspeople, apprehensive, write to his uncle. (40)

Quand M. Octave reçut la lettre de Chandelier, il eut l'intuition, vraiment extraordinaire, que Léon était mort. Et dans la même seconde jaillit de lui, avec la force d'une fusée, le voeu qu'il le fût. MCE 238 'When Mr. Octave received the letter from Chandelier, he had the intuition, really extraordinary, that Léon was dead. And in the same second there burst forth from him, with the force of a rocket, the wish that he was.'

This outburst was really spontaneous. Mr. Octave knew, of course, that this was an improper feeling, but the wish had "the force of a rocket"; it overwhelmed him. Consistent with the message that this outburst was beyond his control, the author has avoided lui-. Finally, a set with the verb peser 'weigh'. In the first example, with clitic lui-, a young lady, coming to the big city from a distant region, volunteered, in a burst of enthusiasm, to become involved in a workers' movement and a major strike. However, she had no past experience in these matters, and really did not know what she was getting herself into. (41)

Peut-être en se proposant à Victor pour aider les grévistes, Catherine s'était fait une idée à elle de la grève, et de sa durée possible: tout au moins la question ne s'était-elle pas posée. Mais au bout de quinze jours, le voyage matinal à Levallois, les heures de bureau, commencèrent de lui peser singulièrement. ACB 328 'Perhaps in offering herself to Victor to help the strikers Catherine had had her own idea about the strike and its possible duration: at the very least, the question had not arisen. But at the end of two weeks, the morning trip to Levallois, the office hours, began to weigh on her [lit.: weigh her (lui-)] unusually.'

The situation "weighing on" the Mid Controller is one she is actually involved in and living through, and moreover has actually brought upon herself. Compare this to two examples also with peser, but with non-clitics. In (42), a German woman living among Europeans in Chad is undergoing an interrogation due to suspicions that she has engaged in illegal arms trafficking; she protests her innocence.

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(42) Elle tenait absolument à dire tout ce qu'elle savait, insista-t-elle, elle n'avait vraiment rien à se reprocher et elle ne voulait pas qu'un soupçon continuât à peser sur elle. Elle comprenait très bien qu'on pût la soupçonner. On pouvait bien se demander, en effet, comment elle avait pu échouer au Tchad, elle, une Allemande, avec des papiers qui n'étaient même pas en règle ... Mais de là à l'accuser d'avoir aidé des trafiquants ... GRC 23 'She was absolutely determined to tell everything she knew, she insisted, she had really nothing to blame herself for and she didn't want suspicion to continue to weigh on her. She understood very well that she could be suspected. One could, indeed, wonder how she could have ended up in Chad, she, a German, with papers that weren't even in order ... But from there to accusing her of having helped smugglers ...' The "weighing (of suspicion)" comes from outside the woman; she does not engage in the act herself, others suspect her. If one wanted to say "a suspicion was weighing on her", meaning she had a suspicion in her mind about somebody else, then one would use clitic lui-: un soupçon lui pesait. This latter would emphasize her involvement; the non-clitic used here emphasizes her noninvolvement. Example (43) takes place on the eve of World War II. The Munich accords have been signed and the Germans have just annexed part of Czechoslovakia. The character is an ordinary English working man, obviously not responsible for the war and not yet even living through it. (43)

C'était une défaite mais comment, avec ses préoccupations, John y eût-il attaché une autre importance que de voir reculer — et comme beaucoup de gens il pensait: «pour longtemps», peut-être pour toujours — la menace qui pesait sur lui. VCH-I 88 Tt was a defeat, but how, with his preoccupations, could John have attached any other significance to it than to see rolled back — and like many people he thought "for a long time", maybe even forever — the threat that weighed on him.'

The 'threat that weighed on him' is clearly external. 11.2.2.

Precise Information vs. Imprecise Information

The relative imprecision of lui- is an advantage when the role to be inferred is readily associable with the event in question. In this case, the speaker doesn't have to search for another lexical item, such as a preposition, to specify exactly

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the nature of the involvement. The hearer can be counted on to infer the intended message. Lui-'s imprecision may be a disadvantage, though, when more than one type of involvement can plausibly be inferred. In this case, it may not be clear to the hearer what message is intended unless the speaker provides other information to help clarify. For instance: (44) or:

Elle lui a joué un tour. 'She played a trick for him.' 'She played a trick on him.'

In the absence of any context, this example could communicate either message. She might be a magician trying to amuse him, or an enemy trying to fool him. (He is lui- in either case, because, in either case, he motivates the playing of the trick.) If we add a little more information, the inference becomes easier: (45)

Elle lui a joué un mauvais tour. 'She played him (lui-) a bad trick.'

Here, the "enemy" interpretation is more likely, since it fits better with the information that the trick is "bad"; the "magician" interpretation is thus less likely, because magicians who play their tricks badly are usually not motivated by other people to play them at all. Now if we change the example in another way, by changing one of the participants, the inference is again quite clear: (46)

Elle lui a joué de la musique. 'She played him some music.'

Since we usually don't associate anything bad with playing music, the "enemy" interpretation is not a likely candidate here, and she is either a musician or the operator of a phonograph etc. trying to entertain him, relax him, etc. The amount of information supplied by other things in the context, such as other participants, is a very important factor in the choice between lui- and a prepositional phrase. The correlation, other factors being equal, is as follows: When other- elements supply relatively more information, lui- is used. When other elements supply relatively less information, the prepositional option is chosen. This is seen in the following set of examples all using the verb, faire 'do', 'make'. The first two have lui-. (47)

Il lui arrivait de l'appeler ainsi, lorsqu'une dame, venant demander à Germaine de lui faire son ménage, hésitait à gravir sept étages pour se fourrer dans quelque taudis. APM 182 'She sometimes called her this way, when a lady coming to ask Germaine to do her housecleaning for her (lui-) was hesitant to climb seven flights to poke herself into some hovel.'

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(48)

Durant le trajet de l'hôpital à la maison, qu'il fit avec son père, il ne posa pas de questions, ne voulant point, par délicatesse gâter à ses parents le plaisir de lui faire la surprise. APM 197 'During the trip home from the hospital, which he made with his father, he asked no questions, not wanting, out of consideration, to spoil for his parents the pleasure of giving him (lui-) the surprise.'

The remainder have preposition + disjunctive. (49)

Tout le temps qu'il est là, elle lui trace à haute voix tout ce qu'elle aimerait qu'il fasse pour elle après-midi. GGC 195 'The whole time that he is there, she spells out aloud to him everything that she would like him to do for her in the afternoon.'

(50)

"Tu crois peut-être que Riri t'est reconnaissant de ce que tu fais pour lui?" SMU 175 ' "Do you think perhaps that Riri is grateful to you for what you are doing for him?" '

(51)

"Et Dieu sait pourtant que nous avons fait pour lui tout ce que nous avons pu!" MCE 239 ' "And yet God knows that we did for him everything we could!" '

(52)

"A la veille d'être sur le pavé, songeait-il, avec tant de soucis, et n'avoir pas seulement la consolation d'un enfant raisonnable qui comprenne tout ce qu'on fait pour lui." AMS 148 ' "On the eve of being out on the sidewalk", he thought, "with so many worries, and not even to have the consolation of a reasonable child who understands everything one is doing for him." '

(53)

Buq, chemin faisant, donnait de grands coups de coude à Antoine qui semblait ne pas bien saisir tout ce que la fortune faisait pour lui en le mettant d'un seul coup en face du souterrain et dans le logis de deux filles de mauvaises moeurs. AMS 190 'Buq, on the way, was poking hard with his elbow Antoine, who seemed not to grasp well all that Fortune was doing for him by putting him at one stroke in front of the underground cavern and in the dwelling of two women of bad morals.'

This set includes all the examples in our collection (and thus presumably a random sample) of faire with three entities and a "beneficiary"-type message. Looking at the Low Controller in each of these examples, we see something

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very striking. In the first two, with lui-, the Low Controller is a precise noun: ménage 'housework' and surprise 'surprise'. The Low Controller in the examples without lui- is in every case the vague ce que 'that which'. This set of examples thus illustrates well the precision principle: when the context (here, the Low Controller) gives more precise information, the less precise lui- can be used; when the context gives less precise information, a more precise lexical item (the preposition) occurs, to the exclusion of the less precise lui-. 11.2.3.

Problems Due to the Satellite Relationship

The close relation between the clitics and the verb was characterized above as a "satellite relationship". The event denoted by the verb is clearly the central information in this relationship. The clitics are attached to the verb in much the same way as is information about tense, person, number, mood, etc. The primacy of the verb in this cluster of information is demonstrated by the fact that one can use a verb alone without a clitic (e.g. an imperative, or participants indicated by nouns), but one cannot use a clitic pronoun without a verb, any more than one can use a tense or mood signal (e.g. -ait, -iez, -âmes) without a verb stem. This means that when it is desired to draw special attention to the participant denoted by a pronoun, the primacy of the verb is thereby diminished, and the satellite relationship must consequently be departed from. The clitic pronouns can be used only in simple, uncomplicated, nondistracting cases. Let us see how this factor can lead to the choice of preposition + disjunctive over lui-. In example (54), Léon de Coantré, the character met above in examples (36) and (40), asks his uncle, the baron de Coëtquidan, to find a job for him. The baron is, at best, lukewarm on the idea of helping his nephew, and the latter is not unaware of this. (54) — Oui, dit M. de Coantré, je vous serais très, très reconnaissant si vous pouviez parler de moi à quelques personnes. Faites-le en souvenir de maman, ajouta-t-il, bien convaincu que M. de Coëtquidan ne le ferait pas pour lui, et n'étant pas fâché de lui faire sentir qu'il s'en rendait compte. MCE 59 ' "Yes", said Mr. de Coantré, "I would be very, very grateful if you could mention me to a few people. Do it in memory of Mama," he added, thoroughly convinced that Mr. de Coëtquidan would not do it for him, and not minding letting him feel that he realized it.' The entity referred to by non-clitic lui, Mr. de Coantré, has to be brought into prominence because he is being explicitly contrasted with another entity,

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"Mama". The actual role played by this entity is one that might well be indicated by clitic lui- with this verb, faire; precisely this happened in examples (47) and (48) above. Here, however, due to the special degree of attention allocated to this entity (by virtue of the contrast), lui- can not be used, and the "prepositional phrase" option is chosen. Another reason for choosing the prepositional option over lui- having to do with the signalling mechanism (and thus with the satellite relationship), is that in certain cases the signalling mechanism may give rise to ambiguity. Here is an example: (55)

Il tourna la tête et vit fumer une dizaine de petits flocons blancs près des saules où les soldats avaient leurs faisceaux. Le capitaine faisait tirer sur lui. GHT 60 'He turned his head and saw ten or so little white flakes smoking near the willows where the soldiers had their bundles. The captain was having him shot at [lit.: was making shoot at him (non-clitic lui)].'

If the author had said Le capitaine lui faisait tirer dessus, with lui-, the message might be 'The captain was making him shoot at it/them', that is, lui- might represent the agent of the shooting, rather than its object.19 The ambiguity is avoided by using the prepositional phrase instead of lui-. 11.3.

Participants vs. Possessive Adjectives

French has yet another way of associating an entity with an event without making this entity a participant. The forms traditionally known as "possessive adjectives" provide a reference to an entity and have in common with personal pronouns that they do not communicate the relatively precise lexical information of nouns. However, possessive adjectives are not members of the System of Participants, as lui- and le- are. Comparison of the two devices is especially tempting because lui- is often used in messages for which the English translation is identical to those in which the possessive adjective is used: (56)

Je lui ai pris les mains. 'I took his hands.' [lit.: I took him {lui-) the hands.]

(57)

J'ai pris ses mains. T took his [POSS. ADJ.] hands.'

Traditional grammars set up a separate function of lui- for these examples, the "dative of possession", unrelated to lui-'s function as "indirect object".

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One must, however, entertain an alternative possibility: that French has greater expressive capacity than English in this instance, and a spurious association between lui- and "possession" is set up by the fractional view of meaning and the non-equivalence of the two languages. English includes an element of possession ('his') that can not easily be attributed to any other form in the French example; it is thus pinned on lui-. The failure of English to distinguish this message from the one in which the French possessive adjective is used encourages this association. If this is so, then it makes sense to seek the true function of lui- here in terms of the same constant that illuminates its use elsewhere: the meaning MORE CONTROL. French grammars often restrict the dative of possession to "inalienable" possession; that is, the thing possessed will be a body part, an article of clothing, or something which is in some sense "inalienably" associated with the possessor. In fact, though, the possessive adjective is also used for such "inalienable" possession: (58)

Pierre avait lâché sa main. 'Pierre had released her hand.'

SMU 65

The reality may in fact be just the opposite: Since the relation of possession, when inalienable, is so strong and thus easy to infer, French speakers do not bother to encode it at all. Lui- is used for some entirely different purpose; and that purpose, we will suggest, is the same as in all other occurrences of lui-. Other analysts have attempted to distinguish lui- and the possessive adjective functionally, notably Hatcher (1944).20 However, in spite of some success in finding semantic-pragmatic parameters associated with the choice, Hatcher was not able to identify actual semantic constants. She and others suggest that lui- is used when a speaker wishes to insist on the involvement of the person-as-a-whole; when there is physical contact, or when there is no physical contact if the person as a whole is affected, for instance where there is producing of a sensation or some other physiological process; or for an ensemble effect, when it is desired to present a particular picture of a whole figure. However, no explanation is given of how this use of lui- relates to its other uses. Hatcher also offers an essentially negative account of the possessive adjective, saying that it is merely a default invoked when the above reasons for using luido not apply. The Degree of Control hypothesis, which says that lui- presents its referent as a participant in an event, concurs with the notion of involvement of the person-as-a-whole. However, it goes further and identifies these uses of lui- with others where there is no hint of "possession". Moreover, it can be shown that

66

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

the possessive adjective does indeed have a positive function. As with the place and prepositional options, here too the choice of lui- depends on the appropriateness of the semantic substance of Degree of Control. The fact that the referent of lui- may also be the possessor of another entity associated with the event, is essentially incidental. The Control hypothesis suggests that le- must be brought into the picture for the uses of lui- to be fully understood, something other analyses have not done. Le- is also found in examples comparable to those with a possessive adjective, giving three types to compare: A. B. C.

Je lui prends la main. Je le prends par la main. Je regarde sa main.

T take his hand.' T take him by the hand.' T look at his hand.'

The Control hypothesis implies the referent of an /- form will be crucially involved in its event in some way not necessarily true of a possessive adjective. This leads to a prediction by means of which the hypothesis can be tested and the unity of type A examples with other instances of lui- established. We could presumably detect "crucial involvement" by directly comparing examples containing the two types of forms. However, this could entail a certain amount of subjectivity. Moreover, there might be competing factors obscuring the "crucial involvement" factor in individual examples. These difficulties can be overcome by a quantitative test. Some objective correlate of crucial involvement can be identified and a count made on a large corpus. The involvement factor should produce a skewing that fits the hypothesis, even if other variables keep the skewing from being absolute. The count can thereby validate the hypothesis independently of individual examples. How is one to measure "crucial involvement"? What counts as crucial will, of course, vary from example to example. In order to be quantified, it must be approached somewhat indirectly. The Control hypothesis suggests that types A, B, and C will exhibit a distributional peculiarity with relation to verbs having certain kinds of lexical content. We have drawn up two lists of French verbs, including the verbs which occur in our data collection with mention of body parts or clothing. Group I verbs denote physical contact, observable physical change, displacement, or the like. Group II verbs denote an absence of direct physical involvement of this kind. Whether or not a participant is physically involved in an activity is one measure of "crucial involvement". It is thus predicted that examples of types A and B, with an /- form, will skew towards verbs of Group I, and that examples of type C, with a possessive adjective, will skew towards verbs of Group II. Data for this count consist of all examples of

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

67

types A, B and C, containing any of the verbs on the lists, from seven French novels.21 Here, first, are the two lists of verbs. GROUP I allonger 'lengthen' arracher 'snatch' attraper 'catch' baiser 'kiss' battre 'hit' blanchir 'bleach' bousculer 'jostle' briser 'break' broyer 'crush, grind' brûler 'burn' caresser 'caress' chatouiller 'tickle' cogner 'beat' contracter 'contract' couper 'cut' creuser 'hollow out' cribler 'riddle' déchirer 'tear' dilater 'dilate' écorcher 'skin' écraser 'crush' embrasser 'kiss' empoigner 'grasp'

empourprer 'make purple' fendre 'split' fouetter 'whip' frapper 'hit' frictionner 'rub' frotter 'rub' gifler 'slap' gonfler 'swell' gratter 'scratch' heurter 'bump' laver 'wash' lier 'tie' marquer 'mark' meurtrir 'bruise' mouiller 'wet' nettoyer 'clean' ouvrir 'open' percer 'pierce' picorer 'peck' pincer 'pinch' piquer 'sting' plisser 'crease' pousser 'push'

prendre 'take' presser 'squeeze' relever 'raise' retrousser 'turn up' ronger 'gnaw' rougir 'redden' saisir 'seize' salir 'dirty' secouer 'shake' serrer 'squeeze' souffleter 'slap' soulever 'raise' sucer 'suck' tailler 'carve' tapoter 'tap' tater 'touch' tenir 'hold' tirer 'pull' tordre 'twist' toucher 'touch' tourner 'turn' traîner 'drag' trouer 'make a hole'

GROUP II aimer 'love' entendre 'hear' contempler 'comtemplate' fixer 'stare at' dépasser 'go beyond' fuir 'flee' distinguer 'distinguish' montrer 'show' encadrer 'frame' observer 'observe' The results of the count are given in Table 2.1.

regarder 'look at' remarquer 'notice' respirer 'smell' sentir 'smell' surveiller 'watch' voir 'see'

68

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Table 2.1. Physical Involvement Related to L-form vs. Possessive

Adjective

Types A & B (Control)

Type C (Possessive adjective)

Group I verbs

182 +

29

Group II verbs

5

54 +

d = ±35.9 Odds Ratio (OR) = 67.8 N = 270 + and - indicate favorings and disfavorings. d = difference between calculated and observed frequencies in each cell, showing strength of skewing.22

The prediction is borne out very strongly. Since the division of verbs into Groups I and II is inspired by their representation of physical involvement and has nothing to do with possession, body parts, etc., we conclude that the distribution of lui- and le- vis-à-vis the possessive adjective is motivated by the same kinds of factors seen in examples not involving possession, and that "inalienable possession" is thus not a relevant parameter in explaining that distribution. Here are a few examples illustrating this trend with lui- and le-. (59)

Et elle était dans un tel état qu'elle lui saisit l'avant-bras et le secoua avec fièvre. SPB 30 'And she was in such a state that she seized his forearm and shook it feverishly.' [Direct and forcible physical contact, displacement.]

(60)

Le soleil était si violent qu'il leur blanchissait les plumes. GHT 174 'The sun was so violent that it bleached their feathers.' (referring to birds) [Observable physical change produced in body part.]

(61)

Un soir ... je lui ai marché sur le pied comme par mégarde, et le cri qu'elle a laissé passer et sa grimace de douleur, j'en ai animé les créatures de mes veilles et de mes sommeils. AMS 39 'One evening ... I stepped on her foot as if by accident, and with the scream she let out and her painful expression I animated the creatures of my waking and sleeping.' [Direct, painfully provocative, physical contact producing sharp reaction.]

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL (62)

69

Il se défendit en moulinant des bras, mais plusieurs becs le piquèrent durement sur les mains et même sur la tête. GHT 119 (Man being attacked by a flock of birds.) 'He defended himself by making a windmill motion with his arms, but many beaks pecked him hard on the hands and even on the head.' [Direct physical contact, producing of painful effect.]

Here are examples with the possessive adjective for comparison, showing the comparative remoteness or detachment of the referent from the activity. (63)

Lavinia chantait souvent à voix très basse de minuscules chansons GHT 217 vives ... La chanson dépassait à peine ses dents ... 'Lavinia often sang, very softly, lively little songs ... The song hardly went past her teeth ...'

(64)

II ... entend l'eau bouillonner sous ses pieds. SPB 17 'He ... hears the water churning under his feet.'

Now one might ask what the effect would be if a Control form were used together with a Group II verb. This would represent one of the disfavored types of Table 2.1. Example (65) contains lui- and regarder Took at'. (65)

Le garçon d'hôtel rigolait quand ils sont montés, c'est un Algérien, elle déteste ces types-là, elle en a peur, il lui a regardé les SMU 136 (adapted) jambes ... 'The bellboy was smirking when they went upstairs, he's an Algerian, she hates those guys, she's afraid of them, he looked at her legs ...' [lit.: he looked at her (lui-) the legs]24

A woman is going to her room in a hotel, with a male companion. The message is not simply that the bellboy looked at her in the ordinary way. Lui- says that the woman's involvement in the look must be taken into consideration. This is a lecherous look, a look that involves her much more than she cares to be involved. Her privacy is invaded, she is embarrassed, and the look evokes feelings of hatred and fear on her part. Ordinary looks do not produce such a marked effect. Lui- introduces this element into the message by indicating that the totality of her, not just the legs, is crucially involved in the "looking". The other disfavored type is a possessive adjective with a Group I verb. Example (66) is a scene with a husband and wife. The husband is demented, living in a make-believe world; the wife (whose name is Eve, although he calls her Agatha) attempts to humor and avoid irritating him.

70 (66)

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Soudain, elle sentit la main de Pierre sur la sienne. "Agathe", dit Pierre avec tendresse. Il lui sourit mais il lui tenait la main du bout des doigts avec une espèce de répulsion, comme s'il avait pris un crabe par le dos et qu'il eût voulu éviter ses pinces. "Agathe, dit-il, je voudrais tant avoir confiance en toi." Eve fermait les yeux, et sa poitrine se souleva: "Il ne faut rien répondre, sans cela il va se défier, il ne dira plus rien." Pierre avait lâché sa main. SMU 65 'Suddenly, she felt Pierre's hand on her own. "Agatha", Pierre said tenderly. He was smiling at her but he held her hand by the tips of his fingers with a kind of repulsion, as though he had picked up a crab by the back and was trying to avoid its claws. "Agatha", he said, "I would so much like to have confidence in you." Eve closed her eyes, and her chest rose. "I mustn't answer anything, otherwise he'll become mistrustful, he won't say anything more." Pierre had released her hand ...'

In the last line: 'Pierre had released her hand', the possessive adjective appears. Since lâcher 'release' implies physical contact and displacement, one might anticipate lui-. Lui- would indeed be used if, for instance, she were struggling to get away, thus motivating the "releasing". But the lack of such interaction between the husband and wife is precisely the point here. She carefully avoids resisting him in order not to break the thin thread of communication between them. She closes her eyes, heaves a sigh, and resigns herself to saying nothing and suppressing all reaction. She distances herself from the act, and by using the possessive adjective rather than lui-, the author plays down her involvement. Thus, a general pattern holds: entities referred to by /- forms are relatively more immediately involved in and directly affected by the event than those associated with a possessive adjective. This does not mean, however, that the function of the possessive adjective can be characterized only negatively. Examples of type C are found when there is particular interest in the body part itself. In example (67), a young man, Angélo, is travelling over the French countryside during a cholera epedemic, in which people die suddenly and violently. A woman comes out of a house and urgently begs Angélo to enter. The sheer number of mentions of body parts in this passage, here boldfaced, confirms their intrinsic interest at this point in the

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

71

story. Whenever the owner of a body part is mentioned pronominally here, it is with the possessive adjective, not with lui-. (67)

Surpris par l'obscurité, il distingua seulement une sorte de forme blanchâtre qui s'agitait avec une violence agressive. Il s'élança vers elle en même temps que la femme avant de s'être rendu compte que c'était un homme qui se débattait sur un lit dont draps et couvertures avaient volé à travers la chambre. Il essaya de maintenir le corps mais il fut repoussé comme par la détente irrésistible d'un ressort d'acier. Il est vrai qu'en même temps son pied avait glissé dans des liquides visqueux répandus au pied du lit. Il s'assura sur un endroit du parquet un peu plus sec et il commença à lutter sérieusement, aidé par la femme qui était passée dans la ruelle et se cramponnait de toutes ses forces aux épaules du malade en l'appelant Joseph. Enfin, sous leurs efforts conjugués le corps retomba sur le lit avec un craquement de bois sec. Angélo qui s'appuyait à pleines mains sur les bras du malheureux sentit dans ses paumes le grouillement désordonné des muscles et même des os agités dans une fureur folle. Mais le visage qui était d'une maigreur excessive au point de n'être qu'un crâne recouvert de peau se mit à blêmir pendant que les grosses lèvres couvertes de poils durs se retiraient autour des dents noirâtres et gâtées qui, dans ce bleu paraissaient presque blanches. Au fond des orbites très profondes les yeux, dans de la peau plissée, papillotaient comme l'écaillé de petites têtes de tortues. Machinalement, Angélo se mit à frictionner les cuisses et les hanches de ce corps qui avait la peau très rêche. Une convulsion plus violente encore que les autres arracha le malade aux mains de la femme et le jeta contre Angélo. Il sentit les dents frapper sa joue. Il venait de s'apercevoir que la peau qu'il frottait êtait encroûtée de très vieille crasse. L'homme mourut; c'est-à-dire que le papillonnement de ses yeux s'éteignit. Ses membres continuaient à être parcourus en tous sens par le tumulte des muscles et des os qui semblaient en révolte et vouloir sortir de la peau comme des rats d'un sac. GHT 93 'Taken aback by the darkness, he made out only a sort of whitish form that was tossing with an agressive violence. He bounded toward it together with the woman before he realized that it was a man struggling on a bed whose sheets and blankets had flown about the room. He tried to hold down the body but he was repulsed as

72

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

though by the irresistible trigger of a steel spring. To be sure, at the same time his foot had slipped in some viscous liquids spread out at the foot of the bed. He steadied himself on a slightly drier spot on the floor and began to struggle seriously, helped by the woman who had moved between the bed and the wall and was clinging with all her might to the sick man's shoulders, calling him Joseph. Finally, under their combined efforts, the body fell back on the bed with a crack of dry wood. Angélo, who was leaning with his full hands on the victim's arms, felt in his palms the unruly crawling of muscles and even of bones stirred up in a mad frenzy. But the face, which was excessively thin to the point of being only a skull covered with skin, started to pale while the great lips covered with stiff whiskers drew back around blackish and rotted teeth which, against this blue background appeared almost white. At the bottom of very deep sockets, the eyes, in folds of skin, fluttered like the scales of little tortoise heads. Mechanically, Angélo began to rub the thighs and hips of this body which had very rough skin. A convulsion even more violent than the others tore the sick man from the woman's hands and threw him against Angélo. He felt the teeth strike his cheek. He had just noticed that the skin he was rubbing was encrusted with very old filth. The man died; that is, the fluttering of his eyes died out. His limbs continued to be crossed in all directions by the turbulence of the muscles and bones that seemed to be in revolt and to want to jump out of the skin like rats out of a sack.' Note that Angélo initially does not even perceive a whole person; he perceives only "a whitish form". The attention to details of the body strengthens the impression of horror the author wishes to create. The struggle itself is not so much with a person as with individual body parts that behave erratically. Even the body parts of Angélo and the woman come into focus as they struggle in whatever way they can to control the convulsed victim. Whereas lui- and le- present an entity as a controlling participant in an event, the possessive adjective presents its referent as a differentiator; that entity's association with the noun modified by the possessive adjective serves to differentiate the actual referent of the noun from other possible referents. Thus, when lui- is used, its referent is centrally involved in the event. With the possessive adjective, the referent is of only minor importance in relation to something else, such as the body part. Example (67) confirms that the possessive adjective is used when attention is concentrated on body part(s) per se. This fits

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the above rationale, since here the center of attention shifts away from the participant as a whole and its role in the event. Other factors beside number of mentions may indicate a concentration of interest on body parts. One is the occurrence of an adjective with a body part. A speaker's choice to give additional information about a body part reflects a relatively greater interest in it. In each of the following pairs, the second member has an adjective: (68) a. Mais quoi qu'il fît, la sueur lui coulait entre les épaules et sur la poitrine. CPE 226 'But no matter what he did, the sweat ran between his (lui-) shoulders and on his chest.' b. D'énormes larmes coulaient silencieusement sur son visage ruiné. CER 184 'Enormous tears flowed silently on his ruined face.' (69) a. Il en souffrit au point de sentir des larmes lui monter aux yeux ... AMS 226 'He suffered from this to the point of feeling tears rise to his (lui-) eyes ...' b. A l'instant, les larmes montèrent à ses propres yeux ... 'Immediately, tears rose to his own eyes ...'

MCE 22

In (70) the adjective consists of a phrase of several words. (70)

— Un moment! fit le petit juge qui sentait monter de ses reins, tout à l'heure glacés, un feu sombre ... BCR 176-177

' "Just a moment!" said the little judge, who felt coming up from his (ses) kidneys, ice-cold a minute ago, a dark fire ...' The count in Table 2.2 tests the prediction that when the body part has an adjective, the possessive adjective will be favored and lui- disfavored. Table 2.2. Does Body Part Have Adjective? Possessive adjective

lui-

Yes adjective

38 +

1 -

No adjective

71 -

105 +

Text: SAR d = ±18.2

OR = 56.2

N = 215

74

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

The count confirms that, in one complete text, the presence of an adjective disfavors lui-26 Table 2.2 includes only examples containing either lui- or a possessive adjective, not both. It is, however, possible for the strategies of both to be appropriate simultaneously, and thus an example can include both lui- and the possessive adjective, as in the following: (71)

Cependant la petite fille commençait à s'ennuyer d'être serrée ainsi, et comme Augustin, la tête penchée de côté pour cacher et arrêter ses larmes continuait à ne pas la regarder, elle lui flanqua une grande tape de sa petite main sur sa bouche barbue et mouillée. AGM 246 'However, the little girl began to get tired of being squeezed so, and since Augustin, his head bent to the side to hide and stop his tears, still didn't look at her, she gave him (lui-) a big slap with her little hand on his (sa) wet and bearded mouth.'

The little girl is trying to evoke a reaction from Augustin, to establish an interaction, and thus lui- is called for. When his mouth is mentioned, it is with two adjectives: 'wet' and 'bearded', and thus the possessive adjective sa is in order. Result: both forms occur. Such examples undermine the idea that luiindicates possession: If the possessive adjective is contributing "possession" to the message, why should lui- be here to do the same thing? Another piece of evidence supports this line of analysis. Our collection contains a number of examples in which a body part is the "subject", followed by être 'to be' or another "linking" verb, and a predicate adjective, as in the following: (72)

Ses doigts étaient froids ... 'His (ses) fingers were cold ...'

MCE 210

An utterance like this has as its primary purpose to relate the information contained in the predicate adjective to the body part, the body part being made the center of attention. We thus would not expect lui- under these circumstances. Of the many such examples in our collection, there is in fact not a single one with lui-; that is, we do not get ?Les doigts lui étaient froids. Here is a fine example of a syntactic non-occurrence explained by a semantic hypothesis, of the line between syntax and semantics being pushed back in favor of semantics. We may also predict a skewing involving adverbs, similar to the adjective skewing represented in Table 2.2.

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL (73)

a.

75

Une nuée de trouble passa sur le visage de M. de Coantré, ses paupières battirent rapidement, et il dit: ... MCE 18 'A shadow of worry passed across Mr. de Coantré's face, his (ses) eyelids beat rapidly, and he said: ...'

b. Son cœur battait des coups rapides, qui le faisaient souffrir. SVN 36 'His (son) heart beat with rapid beats, which gave him pain.' Drawing attention to how the eyelids/heart are beating suggests that what is of interest with regard to this activity is the manner of activity, rather than the roles in the event. This would then be a reason for avoiding lui-, with a consequent favoring of the possessive adjective. Table 2.3 tests this prediction. All examples in two texts having a body part with either lui- or the possessive adjective were examined for the presence of an adverb or adverbial phrase stating how the action takes place. Table 2.3. Does Event Include Adverb of Manner? Possessive adjective

lui-

Yes adverb

37 +

21 -

No adverb

123 -

151 +

Text: GHT and SAR d = ±9.05 OR = 2.2

N = 332

The prediction is confirmed. In example (39) we saw a lui- participant's high degree of involvement result from a long buildup that resulted in an outburst. Other examples of a participant working himself up into a particular emotional or mental state that is the direct cause of an occurrence contrast to examples with a possessive adjective where this theme is absent. In (74), Léon is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor (Gibout). The wait is long, and Léon grows impatient. He believes, to begin with, that the doctor does not take his complaints seriously enough; moreover, he is disdainful of this country doctor and the half-dozen other patients who are also waiting (and who were there ahead of him), considering them socially inferior to himself. The two pages preceding this example describe in detail the thoughts going through Léon's mind and his growing impatience. After forty minutes, the doctor opens the door and calls the first patient, giving Léon no more than a brief smile. Léon is miffed; fifteen minutes more go by.

76

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE (74)

Quand Gibout ouvrit de nouveau la porte, Léon le fixa dans les yeux; Gibout lui fit un signe d'amitié et lui dit: "Vous avez bien un petit instant?" il dit: "Oui, oui", avec bonne grâce, et son humeur était tombée; un sourire de Gibout l'avait fondue. Mais, la visite n'en finissant pas, la colère recommença de se former et de se gonfler en lui, une chaleur lui montait aux joues. Une idée folle le traversa, dont il ne fut le siège que le temps de la repousser: celle de partir avec éclat. MCE 228 'When Gibout opened the door again, Léon stared him in the eye; Gibout made a friendly sign to him and said: "Do you have just a moment?" He said: "Yes, yes" gracefully, and his ill-humor subsided; a smile from Gibout had melted it. But, when the consultation went on and on, his anger began to take shape and swell up in him again; a glow rose up to his (lui-) cheeks. A crazy idea crossed his mind, and remained there only long enough for him to reject it: to leave in a huff.'

It is the emotional state into which he has worked himself up during all this time which causes Léon's cheeks to glow, and he is consequently presented as involved and responsible. For comparison purposes, we may look at a similar example with the possessive adjective. In the following passage, a doctor is surveying the state of a sick patient. (75)

«Son pouls est calme; elle dort comme un enfant dont le souffle est si léger que tu te lèves pour t'assurer qu'il est vivant. Le sang monte à ses joues et les éclaire. Ce n'est plus un corps qui MDA 201 souffre ...» ' "Her pulse is calm; she is sleeping like a child whose breath is so light you get up to be sure he is alive. The blood is rising to her cheeks and giving them light. She is no longer a suffering body ... " '

The theme of "working oneself up" is totally absent in the case of this sleeping patient. The possessive adjective is used here, as it often is, to show a clinical interest in a body part, to talk about a doctor performing an examination, where attention is focused on an individual body part in an impersonal, or clinical way, that is, in a way which does not involve the owner in his entirety. The doctor is examining the patient part by part; each part is in turn the center of interest. We may further compare these two examples to another example with the

THE SYSTEM OF DEGREE OF CONTROL

77

same verb, monter, and the same High Controller, chaleur, as in (74). Again, the lui- option is rejected because the "working oneself up" strategy is not applicable; this time, the alternative chosen is the prepositional phrase with a non-clitic. (76)

John avait fait cette réponse à Florrie spontanément, et voilà que, au même moment une chaleur montait en lui. VCH-I 91 'John had given Florrie this response spontaneously, and, lo and behold, at the same moment a glow rose up in him.'

A young Englishman who has been working hard to establish himself in a modest middle-class life and career, has just learned that his country is going to war (World War II). The news comes as a surprise. His wife says, in the preceding lines, "But, John, we are going to have to go to war!", and John, looking her straight in the eye, says: "You said it, Florrie; and since we have to go, we will go." The salient characteristic of this determined, patriotic reaction is that it is spontaneous; it comes as a surprise ('To and behold") to John himself. It is not premeditated; this "rising of a glow" is not a result of a character's gradually working himself up to a state of mind, as it is in (74). In addition to "crucial involvement", another factor expected with lui- but not with the possessive adjective is a high degree of interaction among participants. The theme of "interaction" associated with lui- will be developed more fully in Chapter 3. Here we will examine two sets of examples containing the same activity, the same number of entities, and the same body parts, in some of which lui- is used, and in some the possessive adjective. Besides revealing the contribution of the Control meaning of lui-, these sets also demonstrate the irrelevance of the "possession" factor. The first set contains examples in all of which one person puts his hands on another person's shoulders. In the first two examples, lui- is used, and in the last three, the possessive adjective. (Discussion will follow presentation of the entire set.) In example (77), Angélo has been travelling around the countryside looking for an old friend of his. He comes upon a family who knows the friend and tells Angélo how to find him. They receive Angélo warmly and give him lodging. (77) Angélo fut soigné comme un coq en pâte. Les filles semblaient même gênées de ne pas lui donner sa part des caresses familiales. En faisant circuler la marmite de ragoût, elles lui posèrent deux ou trois fois la main sur l'épaule. GHT 187

78

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE 'Angélo was treated like a king. The daughters even seemed embarrassed not to give him his share of the family caresses. While passing around the stew-pot, they laid their hands on his (lui-) shoulder once or twice.'

In example (78), two old friends are saying goodbye after a brief chance meeting. One remarks to the other that he looks as though he were having some kind of problem. He tries to comfort him. (78)

"Tu as une sale gueule, dit-il doucement. Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas?" Mathieu s'était levé aussi. "Je ... j'ai des emmerdements. C'est sans importance." Brunet lui posa la main sur l'épaule. Il le regardait en hésitant. "C'est idiot. On est tout le temps à courir, à droite et à gauche, on n'a plus le temps de s'occuper des vieux copains ..." SAR 62

' "You look like hell," he said gently. "What's the matter?" Matthew had also gotten up. "I ... I've got some problems. It's nothing, really." Brunet put his hand on his (lui-, i.e. Matthew's) shoulder. He looked at him hesitatingly. "It's stupid. We're always running around, all over the place, we don't have any time to take care of our old friends ... " ' Now the examples with a possessive adjective. In (79) a country priest has awakened his housekeeper in the middle of the night to tell her he has heard screams and gunshots somewhere outside in the darkness. He is new to the place, and he interrogates the housekeeper about the details of the terrain and whether she heard the same noises. She is confused and upset, but he does not try to reassure her. He puts his hand on her shoulder and tells her she must come outside with him to guide him. (79) Elle essayait de réfléchir, la tête dans ses mains ... elle n'osait plus desserrer les doigts qu'elle tenait pressés contre ses paupières. Son cœur frappait dans sa poitrine à grands coups sourds: elle aurait juré qu'au premier effort pour se mettre debout ses jambes allaient se dérober sous elle, et pourtant lorsque le jeune prêtre posa la main sur son épaule, nulle puissance au monde ne l'eût retenue à sa chaise. BCR 27 'She tried to think, with her head in her hands ... she no longer dared to loosen her fingers which she was holding tightly against her eyelids. Her heart beat in her chest with great dull beats: she would have sworn that with the first effort to stand up, her legs

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would give way under her, and yet when the young priest put his hand on her (son) shoulder, no power in the world could have held her in her chair.' In (80) the same priest is with another one of his subordinates. This is a choirboy who has accompanied the priest on a clandestine trip and whom the priest now wants to send home. The choir-boy feels abandoned and resentful. (80)

— Vous partirez demain, fit le prêtre d'une voix saccadée. Je le veux. Ecoutez-moi, André. Posant les deux mains sur ses épaules, il le fit reculer lentement jusqu'au mur où il le maintint une seconde. Mais dès que l'enfant sentit se relâcher l'étreinte, il glissa hors des bras du prêtre, fut d'un bond à l'autre extrémité de la pièce où il attendit, ramassé sur lui-même, tête basse, ainsi qu'un animal traqué. — Assez de sottises! fit le curé de Mégère. Vous m'obéirez, sinon ... Voulez-vous que je vous fasse reconduire chez vous par la police? BCR 221 ' "You will leave tomorrow," said the priest in a broken voice. "I want you to. Listen to me, André." Putting his two hands on his (ses) shoulders, he pushed him slowly back to the wall, where he held him a second. But as soon as the child felt the grip relaxed, he slipped out of the priest's arms, and in one bound was at the other extremity of the room where he waited, huddled up, his head down, like a trapped animal. "Enough nonsense!" said the priest of Mégère. "You will obey me, or else ... Do you want me to have you taken back home by the police?" '

In (81) the same choir-boy is with a public prosecutor who is investigating a crime of which he thinks the boy has some knowledge. The boy, however, is uncooperative and reticent. The magistrate thinks how to get from the boy the information he needs. (81) Il mit les mains derrière son dos, et commença d'arpenter la chambre. L'enfant s'était écarté de lui, sournoisement, pas à pas, et réfugié maintenant à l'angle de la pièce, il observait son adversaire, tête basse, d'un regard coulé entre ses longs cils. — Ne guette donc pas la porte, dit tranquillement le petit juge. A quoi bon? Je n'ai pas l'intention de te mettre en cage, tu me seras plus utile dehors que dedans. Il revint brusquement vers le clergeon, posa paternellement les deux mains sur ses épaules. BCR 145

80

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE 'He put his hands behind his back, and began to pace across the room. The boy had distanced himself from him, stealthily, step by step; and now, taking refuge in the corner of the room, he watched his adversary, with his head lowered, stealing a look through his long eyelashes. "Stop watching the door," the little magistrate said calmly. "What good is it? I'm not going to put you in a cage; you'll be more useful to me outside than inside." He abruptly walked back toward the choir-boy and placed his two hands paternally on his (ses) shoulders.'

In all five of these examples we have the same act: one person puts his hand(s) on another person's shoulder(s). The relationship of ownership between the second person and his shoulders is the same in all five; therefore, the choice between lui- and the possessive adjective has nothing to do with possession. The first striking difference is that in the lui- set, the two persons are equals, whereas in the possessive adjective set, one is subordinate to the other. Moreover, in the lui- examples there is interaction between the two participants; in the possessive adjective examples, one tries to impose his will on the other, who is reluctant or uncooperative to some degree. In (77), the daughters try to be friendly to their guest and bring him into the circle of family interaction. In (78), Brunet tries to comfort his friend and express sympathy; he implies that he experiences Matthew's anxiety with him. The last three examples, by contrast, show relationships of subordination: the housekeeper to the priest, and the choir-boy to the priest and the magistrate. Any implication of interaction between equals is avoided. In (79), the priest forces the housekeeper to guide him outdoors, in spite of her reluctance. He maintains the distance between them by not attempting to reassure her in a moment of anxiety. This passage also shows the focusing on body parts associated with the possessive adjective: there are nine mentions of body parts in just the few lines quoted here. In (80), the priest attempts to compel the child to do something he doesn't want to do; the priest has to insist on obedience and even resort to threats in the face of the child's failure to cooperate. In (81), the magistrate is explicitly presented as an "adversary", and the distance between them is emphasized by characterizing the placing of the hands as "paternal". In one last set we have fights or attacks in which one participant's legs are immobilized. In (82), with lui-, two school-boys are attacked by an enemy band of boys who want a paper that one of the two, Meaulnes, has in his pocket. But

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Meaulnes is bigger and stronger than any of the attackers; he puts up a terrific fight and manages, temporarily, to shake them off. Not for long, though. (82)

C'est à ce moment que je criai à Meaulnes: "Prends garde par derrière! Il y en a un autre." Il n'eut pas le temps de se retourner que, de la barrière à laquelle il tournait le dos, un grand diable avait surgi, et, passant habilement son cache-nez autour du cou de mon ami, le renversait en arrière. Aussitôt les quatre adversaires de Meaulnes qui avaient piqué le nez dans la neige revenaient à la charge pour lui immobiliser bras et jambes, lui liaient les bras avec une corde, les jambes avec un cache-nez, et le jeune personnage à la tête bandée fouillait dans ses poches ... AGM 96-97 'It was at that moment that I shouted to Meaulnes: "Watch out behind! There's another one." He didn't have time to turn around before, from the barrier to which his back was turned, a big devil had come forth, and, skillfully bringing his muffler around my friend's neck, pulled him over backwards. Immediately Meaulnes's four opponents who had nosedived into the snow, returned to the attack to immobilize his (lui-) arms and legs, tied up his arms with a rope, his legs with a muffler, and the young person with the bandaged head searched his pockets ...'

In (83), a young man is travelling around during a cholera epidemic. He arrives in a strange town and goes to the public fountain in the center of town to wash his face. The people of the town are in a paranoid frenzy, since they believe that the epidemic is due to someone's poisoning the public water supply. They immediately grab the young man (who is of course innocent) and nearly kill him. (83) Il avait à peine plongé les mains dans l'eau du bassin qu'il se sentit brutalement saisi aux épaules, tiré en arrière, pendant que des bras très forts le ceinturaient sans ménagement. — En voilà encore un, cria une voix près de son oreille, pendant qu'il se débattait, essayant de donner des coups de bottes, et qu'il recevait dans la figure et sur le corps beaucoup de coups de poings. On immobilisa ses jambes, il fut couché par terre et solidement maintenu. GHT 97

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'He had scarcely dipped his hands in the water of the basin when he felt himself brutally seized by the shoulders, pulled back, while very strong arms embraced him unsparingly. "Here's another one", shouted a voice near his ear, while he struggled, trying to kick with his boots, and while he received many blows in his face and on his body. They immobilized his (ses) legs, he was laid out on the ground and held solidly.' In (82), Meaulnes is attacked by his enemies; this attack is part of an ongoing interaction. He has something they want; this motivates their attack on him. In (83), the victim and his attackers are complete strangers, and the victim is ignorant of the threat. In (82), Meaulnes fights back, and actually has the upper hand part of the time. In (83) the victim is taken by surprise and has no real chance to fight back. He poses only one problem for his captors: he is kicking. Their attention thus focuses on the one part causing the difficulty: his legs. The high degree of interaction with the participant as a whole of (82) is thus lacking in (83). In this chapter we have defined the notion of Participancy in an Event, shared by the meanings of lui-, le-, and other clitic pronouns. We have posited a grammatical system in the semantic domain of Degree of Control over an Event, with two members: lui-, signalling MORE CONTROL, and le-, signalling LESS CONTROL. These meanings act as hints, which speakers of French use to infer specific roles in events; but lui- and le- do not themselves encode substantive information about roles. The contribution of Degree of Control has been demonstrated by comparison of examples with lui- or le- to examples with other means of mentioning an entity that do not signal this semantic domain: circumstantial expressions, prepositional phrases, and possessive adjectives. Chapter 3 will take a systematic look at exploitations of lui-. The technique of comparing examples with lui- to similar examples containing one of these non-participant devices, especially prepositional phrases, will be employed as appropriate to help elucidate the contribution of Degree of Control.

Chapter 3 Semantic Substance: Exploitations of Degree of Control

1.

Types of Involvement Associated with the Mid Controller

Our discussion thus far has focused more on lui- than on le-. Indeed, luiseems to pose the greater problem. The apparent diversity of roles and functions associated with lui- has stymied previous attempts to define it. The present analysis has posited relational constants — the meanings MORE and LESS CONTROL — rather than specific roles. The reason for any occurrence of lui- is, in a general sense, always that its referent exerts more control than that of le-. Since lui- and le- are in a closed opposition, one cannot ultimately understand lui-'s uses without systematically considering those of le-. Before we do this, however, it will be useful to concentrate on lui- and examine how its invariant, instrumental meaning MORE CONTROL contributes to all messages associated with its occurrence. It is possible to group many individual examples of lui- under broad rubrics that reflect Degree of Control. Figure 3.1 shows different types of involvement characterized broadly and ranked loosely opposite the Control scale to provide an idea of the range of messages at each level of the scale. These designations can serve as heuristic devices to facilitate discussion.1

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Figure 3.1. Role Types Correlated to Degrees of Control

The rubrics on the right in Figure 3.1 are simply particular manifestations of greater or lesser Control over an event. They specify reasons for using lui-, le-, or another signal of Degree of Control in terms sufficiently general to apply to large groups of examples. We may call them strategies of exploitation of the meanings MORE and LESS CONTROL.2 The set of grammatical meanings available to speakers is finite and fixed, yet the messages to be conveyed are unlimited and vary constantly. In a familiar communicative situation, people are likely to exploit linguistic resources in ways they and other speakers have done previously and found successful; this makes it possible to establish rubrics like those above. In a new situation, speakers must use ingenuity to apply linguistic resources to the immediate communicative need; this is why Figure 3.1 is not an exhaustive listing of strategies of lui- and le-. It is important to remember that strategies, being merely particular implementations of meanings, are not structural units in their own right; they are not ecoded categories in French. The Degree of Control meanings motivate these strategies, and analysis is ultimately responsible to the meanings. At the Mid Control level, the ranking of Figure 3.1 is somewhat subjective. These strategies do in fact overlap and it is entirely possible for more than one to be applicable to a given example. The "interactor" strategy, for example, can often be cited as the reason for the choice of lui-. However, lui- as "expediter"

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or "motivator" often also exhibits a high degree of interaction with the High Controller. Such overlapping is to be expected, because all that is actually signalled by lui- is that its referent in some way exerts a relatively high degree of control over the event, higher than what would be indicated by le-. We will now examine types of involvement associated with the Mid level of Control, exemplifying each with passages from French texts. As we look at the exploitations of lui-, we will continue to validate the Control hypothesis by comparing examples with lui- to similar examples in which not lui- appears, but one of the other linguistic devices discussed in Chapter 2. 1.1.

Interactor

The theme of a highly interacting participant is illustrated by the following pair. Example (1) is a description of an old apartment house. The text has described the building itself, the types of people that live in it, the odors that permeate it. The description is given in such a way that the building seems to become a living organism. The building is located next to the railroad tracks, and that is the subject of this paragraph. (1)

Un étrange tremblement a saisi la bâtisse. Cela commence par les moellons enfouis sous les caves, dans les entrailles de la terre. Cela gagne, petit à petit, tout le squelette du monstre et ça se propage, ça monte. Des bouteilles grelottent contre le mur d'une cuisine. Des vitres se prennent à chanter. Ici, là, d'autres voix s'éveillent, entrent dans le choeur, une à une. Présent! Présent! Présent! voilà ce que répondent, à droite, à gauche, en haut, en bas, tous les objets inquiets dont la nature est de frémir. Le grondement s'enfle, s'exaspère. Avec une terreur jubilante, la maison tout entière salue le train hurleur qui lui passe contre le flanc, dans le lacis des rails, au nord. DNH 51-52 'A strange trembling has seized the structure. It begins with the stones buried in the foundation, in the bowels of the earth. Little by little, it reaches the whole skeleton of the monster and it spreads, it rises. Bottles tinkle against the wall of a kitchen. Window-panes begin to sing. Here and there other voices awaken and enter the chorus, one by one. Present! Present! Present! is the answer given right, left, upstairs, downstairs, by all the uneasy objects whose nature it is to tremble. The rumbling swells, grows more intense. With a jubilant terror, the entire house greets the howling train that passes by its flank [lit.: passes it (lui-) against the flank], in the network of rails, on the north.'

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This passage is laden with fantasy and personification. The house has "bowels", a "skeleton", a "flank", "voices" that "sing", and "uneasy objects" that "tremble". The message is one of interaction between the train and the house, as though the train wanted to impress the house by passing by in all its violent glory; and the house, which thereby provides a motivation for the "passing by", responds from head to toe. The word "greet" also indicates interaction: one "greets" someone with whom one wishes to initiate an interaction. This word thus suggests personification of the train as well as the house, reinforcing the imagery of the train wanting to obtain this reaction from the house. In contrast, example (2) shows denial of interaction, with Control forms avoided in favor of a possessive adjective. This story is about efforts to save the elephants of central Africa from extinction due to overhunting. Strict laws limiting elephant hunting are oppressive to the natives, who are passionate elephant hunters, and many of whose traditions and rituals involve elephant hunting. But their pleas to relax the laws fall on deaf ears. (2)

A chaque tournée le gouverneur recevait des pétitions rédigées dans un langage solennel et touchant, réclamant de la poudre et des armes de chasse, l'autorisation de se procurer librement la viande d'éléphant qui passait sous leur nez, et des protestations contre les confiscations d'ivoire ... GRC 202 'On every visit, the governor received petitions drawn up in a solemn and touching language, demanding gunpowder and hunting weapons, the authorization to obtain freely the elephant meat that was passing under their noses, and protests against the confiscations of ivory ...'

This shows a lack of interaction between natives and elephants. The phrase 'passing under their noses' emphasizes the natives' helplessness. The author has chosen possessive adjective leur rather than clitic leur- (leur passait sous le nez), avoiding an implication of interaction. In the following pair with cogner 'hit, beat', the motif of non-interaction appears strongly in the example with non-clitic lui. A group of children are riding in a donkey-drawn cart. (3)

Mais à ce moment, l'âne ne voulant plus marcher, les enfants descendirent pour le piquer, le tirer, cogner sur lui tant qu'ils purent ... Ils descendirent enfin vers la pelouse, les uns tirant l'ânon par la bride, les autres poussant derrière la voiture. AGM 176

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'But at that moment, the donkey not wanting to walk any more, the children got out to prod it, pull it, beat on it as much as they could ... Finally they went down toward the lawn, some of them pulling the little donkey by the bridle, others pushing behind the cart.' The donkey remains uncooperative and fails to react to the beating. The fact that the entity is a donkey, the non-cooperating animal par excellence, fits well with the choice of non-clitic lui. For comparison, (4) has cogner with clitic lui-. Daniel and Ralph have a strange kind of cordial love-hate relationship. Their hatred has boiled over into an impromptu wrestling match, which Daniel has won by sitting on Ralph. After they get up, each compliments the other on his fighting abilities. (4)

Ils ricanèrent tous deux, d'un air gêné. Daniel avait envie de prendre Ralph à la gorge et de lui cogner dans la figure de toutes ses forces. SAR 389 They both snickered, in an embarrassed way. Daniel felt like taking Ralph by the throat and pounding him (lui-) in the face with all his might.'

Here is a strong interaction between participants: the hatred Ralph inspires in Daniel motivates a desire in Daniel to perform a violent act against Ralph. As in other examples with fighting, this lui- can also be said to indicate a motivator: it is the nature of a fight that each participant's actions motivate counteractions by the other. Note that (1) and (4) have mentions of body parts; however, no appeal need be made to this fact or to a "dative of possession" to explain the occurrence of lui- in them. Degree of Control is entirely adequate to account for the choice of lui- over the possessive adjective. 1.2. Expediter/Enabler This rubric covers examples in which the Mid Controller, while not actually initiating the event, still makes a major, even crucial contribution by setting up the circumstances necessary for it to take place. Careful attention must be paid to the lexical content of the verb, and one must always ask: What does it take to set up this kind of event? Lui- here refers to a participant who makes it possible for the event to occur altogether. The expediter/enabler may make its contribution more or less overtly, with an overt act by which the stage is set for the event, or by a less overt contribution, perhaps a mental decision or even a mere predisposition or trait of character that paves the way for the event. We begin with examples showing more

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overt acts, and move down the scale, giving a representative sample. Example (5) illustrates emprunter 'borrow' with lui-. A detective is questioning a man he suspects of a crime. This man was formerly wealthy, but has lost his money; and now it is said that he has not only been unable to pay his servants, but has even had to borrow money from them. (5)

— Je me demande s'il vous en veut de ne pas lui payer ses gages et de lui avoir emprunté de l'argent. SMP 176 ' 'T wonder if he resents your not paying him his wages and your borrowing money from him {lui-)." '

In an act of borrowing, the 'Tender" is a Mid Controller in French, since the lender, by both providing the borrowed item and consenting to the transaction, enables the borrowing to take place and thereby exercises a considerable degree of control. The "borrower", who bears the prime responsibility for and directly initiates the borrowing, is High Controller; the "thing borrowed", a mere pawn in the transaction, ranks lowest. "Enabler" best characterizes the Mid Controller's contribution here, since the servant does not directly cause the man to borrow money, nor, since he apparently resents the loan, does he offer it or motivate it in any way. His availability and his providing the money enable the "borrowing" to take place. It must of course be remembered that we are concerned with the involvement of participants specifically in the action of "borrowing", not in more general features of the scene, such as the fact that a lender may exert more overall control over a situation than a borrower. Lui- is satellite to emprunter here, and this relationship motivates its exploitation. Example (6) is a short biographical sketch of a prominent citizen of a certain town: (6)

Léonard Ragondin, né à Nangicourt en 1807, poète délicat, auteur de Feuillages enamourés et de Odes à cousine Lucie, maire de la ville pendant la guerre de 1870-1871. On lui doit la création du musée de peinture. APM 149 'Léonard Ragondin, born in Nangicourt in 1807, a sensitive poet, author of Enamored Foliages and Odes to Cousin Lucy, mayor of the town during the war of 1870-1871. He is responsible for [lit.: one owes him (lui-)] the creation of the art museum.'

This verb, devoir 'owe', denotes the existence of a debt (here, a debt of gratitude or recognition). Ragondin set up this debt by an overt act: the creation of the art museum.

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In (7), a famous painter has been nationalized by the French government and assigned an escort. (7)

... lorsqu'il allait au café ou chez des amis, une escorte de quatre pompiers et de quatre mobiles lui emboîtait le pas. AVP 235 ' ... when he went to a café or to visit friends, an escort of four firemen and four national guardsmen followed in his footsteps [lit.: encased him (lui-) the step].'

The painter, referent of lui-, sets up the specific steps of the escort by his own steps; whatever movement he makes, they make the same movement. In (8), a man who is intoxicated watches two other men who are having a knock-down fight. (8)

Pelu ne comprenait rien à cette scène de violence et balançait sa montre au bout de sa chaîne avec des clins d'oeil égrillards. Un coup de pied la lui ôta des mains et la projeta sur une bouteille où elle se brisa. AVP 207 'Pelu didn't comprehend this violent scene and was swinging his watch on the end of its chain, winking his eye a little too merrily. A kick knocked it out of his hands [lit.: removed it him Qui-) from the hands] and hurled it against a bottle, where it smashed.'

Pelu is responsible for the kick taking the watch out of his hands: he was drunk, he got too close to the fight, he swung his watch about in a careless way. He provided the circumstances necessary for this mishap to take place. The following passage from Proust describes the reaction of Swann's ladyfriend, Odette, upon seeing him wearing a monocle. (9)

Comme la vue de Swann était un peu basse, il dut se résigner à se servir de lunettes pour travailler chez lui, et à adopter, pour aller dans le monde, le monocle qui le défigurait moins. La première fois qu'elle lui en vit un dans l'oeil, elle ne put contenir sa joie ... PAS 81 'As Swann's vision was somewhat weak, he had to resign himself to using glasses for working at home, and to adopting, when he went out in company, the monocle, which disfigured him less. The first time that she saw him wearing one [lit.: saw him Qui-) one] in his eye, she couldn't contain her joy ...'

In addition to lui- here, we have: "The first time that (a) she (b) saw (c) one" as (a) High Controller, (b) event, and (c) Low Controller, respectively. However,

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(9) is obviously not saying that this was the first time Odette had seen a monocle. Nor did she see a monocle in Swann's eye the way she might see a speck of dust there; a possessive adjective used instead of lui- would in fact communicate something like this: "Elle en vit un dans son oeil", but would draw attention to the eye and ignore Swann's involvement too much for this context. Rather, the message is that this was a special occasion, an unusual instance of "seeing", set up by Swann. This "seeing" made a special impression on Odette. Swann brought it about by wearing the monocle in Odette's presence. He is therefore assigned a relatively high level of Control in the "seeing", with lui-. Note the English translation: 'she saw him wearing one'. There is no word for 'wear' in the French text. Lui- merely indicates that Swann did something to exercise a relatively high level of Control in the "seeing". The reader infers that what he did was wear the monocle, since monocles are made to be worn and this one was in Swann's eye, the appropriate place for wearing it. English, which does not exploit its Mid level of Control as extensively as French, must spell out explicitly what Swann was doing.3 The choice of lui- for Swann here corresponds to a high degree of interest in the whole character, rather than in just the monocle or the eye. The point is the overall impression Swann made. Chapter 2 discussed interest in participantas-a-whole as a factor in the choice of lui- vs. possessive adjective, a factor that emerges clearly in (10). (10)

Honoré regardait le facteur et lui voyait bonne face, large et pleine, une face d'homme tranquille qui ne voit pas plus loin que son nez, AJV 249 mais qui voit son nez, et qui le voit bien ... 'Honoré looked at the mailman and saw him (lui-) to have a good face [i.e. countenance], broad and full, the face of a calm man who sees no farther than his nose, but who sees his nose, and sees it well ...'

The remark turns, by a kind of play on the word face, from the man's facial expression to an evaluation of the whole man and his character. The use of luicorrelates with this interest in the whole man. The "enabler" strategy applies here in that one cannot see a good countenance all by itself, like the smile on Alice's Cheshire cat; there has to be somebody exhibiting it. The mailman's characteristics, as revealed by the look on his face, are what enable Honoré to see a "good face". Example (11) actually refers to a smile. A man and a woman have worked together in a bank for years, never having much to do with each other. Suddenly one day, he asks her to join an underground resistance movement.

SEMANTIC SUBSTANCE: DEGREE OF CONTROL

(11)

91

— Voilà, dit-il, je vais vous demander de m'aider. — A quoi? Pour la caisse? — Mais non, mais non, fit-il avec ce même sourire qu'il avait eu tout à l'heure et qu'elle lui voyait pour la seconde fois, de m'aider dans ce que je fais ... à l'extérieur. — Et ... et que faites-vous, monsieur Doublebief? — J'appartiens à une organisation qui aide à foutre les Allemands dehors. VCH-II 141 ' "So there," he said, "I'm going to ask you to help me." "With what? With the cashier's window?" "No, no!" he said, with that same smile that he had had earlier and that she was seeing on him (lui-) for the second time, "to help me with what I do ... outside." "And ... and what do you do, Mr. Doublebief?" "I belong to an organization that is helping to kick the Germans out." '

This man had always been a colorless figure, and the woman had no idea of what his activities were outside the bank. This smile is symptomatic of the fact that she is learning something new about the whole man; she is finding out about his character, not just about his smile. Compare the effect with the same verb, voir, when a non-clitic is used. A group of people are standing in a dimly-lit house when they hear noises upstairs. As they watch, a stranger appears. (12) Nous étions debout tous les trois, le cœur battant, lorsque la porte des greniers qui donnait sur l'escalier de la cuisine s'ouvrit; quelqu'un descendit les marches, traversa la cuisine, et se présenta dans l'entrée obscure de la salle à manger. «C'est toi, Augustin?» dit la dame. C'était un grand garçon de dix-sept ans environ. Je ne vis d'abord de lui, dans la nuit tombante, que son chapeau de feutre paysan coiffé en arrière et sa blouse noire sanglée d'une ceinture comme en portent les écoliers. Je pus distinguer aussi qu'il souriait ... AGM 12 'We were all three standing, our hearts beating, when the attic door that overlooked the kitchen stairway opened; someone came down the stairs, crossed the kitchen, and presented himself in the dark entrance of the dining room. "Is it you, Augustin?" said the lady. It was a big boy about seventeen years old. I only saw of him, at

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first, in the nightfall, his felt peasant's hat, set back on his head, and his black smock girded with a belt like schoolboys wear. I could also make out that he was smiling ...' Here, in contrast to the total impression made by Swann's monocle, and the interest in the whole character seen in (10) and (11), the character emerges piece by piece. Only individual details are distinguished; there is no overall impression. The author chooses non-clitic lui to avoid the message of a totally involved participant. Through this strategy, an author can use lui- to make a statement or even a subtle comment about an individual's character, lui- suggesting that some particularity is characteristic of the individual as a whole. It provides a concise way of saying: "This event reflects some inherent, essential quality of the individual". In (13), a Mr. de Coantré is at the law firm of Lebeau speaking to the chief clerk, who has always handled his affairs. De Coantré has never met the senior partner Lebeau but has always imagined him to be a very distinguished person. As they are talking, a young dandy walks into the office, a man with the demeanor of a playboy. It is Lebeau. The clerk says to his astonished client: (13)

— Mais ... vous ne connaissez pas M. de Coantré? M. de Coantré. Maître Lebeau. Lebeau! Ce jeune crevé, hâve, voûté, avec sa coiffure de rhétoricien — ces deux bandeaux lui retombant sur les tempes, — son air de vice et de facilité! Jamais M. de Coantré n'avait vu le notaire, qui ne recevait en personne que les clients huppés. MCE 84 ' "But ... you don't know Mr. de Coantré? Mr. de Coantré. Master Lebeau." Lebeau! This young fop, pale and hunchbacked, with his rhetorician's hairdo — these two bands hanging down over his (lui-) temples, — his air of vice and facileness! Mr. de Coantré had never seen the attorney, who received in person only the fanciest clients.'

This example is not just a simple description of Lebeau's hair. This hairdo reflects his personality and everything about him of which de Coantré disapproves. Lui- makes Lebeau responsible for the hanging hair, the broader implication being that he is responsible for giving himself this appearance and is therefore a contemptible person. For comparison, here is an example with a possessive adjective. A man meets a female friend in a café.

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Elle avait son visage le plus habillé: elle avait ramené ses boucles blondes jusqu'à son nez et sa frange descendait jusqu'à ses yeux ... Les jeunes voisins de Mathieu se tournèrent vers elle: visiblement ils pensaient: la belle fille. SAR 76 'She was wearing her dressiest face: she had brought her blonde curls up to her nose and her bangs came down to her eyes ... Mathieu's young neighbors turned to her: they were visibly thinking, "what a pretty girl." '

In this description of her face and the details that lead to a pleasing effect, there is no implication that the bangs reflect in some special way on the girl's character. In particular, we note the absence of any critical implication, the commentary found in (13) with lui-. In (9) we find a similar theme with an article of clothing. When lui- is used for the wearer, the effect is more than a simple, neutral description, as it might be with the possessive adjective. The message often is that this article of clothing in some significant way characterizes its wearer. As in (9), lui- reminds the hearer that this person is responsible for its effect on his appearance, and that the effects of this article involve the whole person, including his character. Lui- may be used when the article of clothing is a particularly outlandish one and the author wants this outlandishness to be part of the reader's impression of the character as a whole. Example (15) is taken from the very beginning of a novel. (15)

Ce froid soir de février 1924, sur les sept heures, un homme paraissant la soixante bien sonnée, avec une barbe inculte et d'un gris douteux, était planté sur une patte devant une boutique de la rue de la Glacière, non loin du boulevard Arago, et lisait le journal à la lumière de la devanture, en s'aidant d'une grande loupe rectangulaire de philatéliste. Il était vêtu d'une houppelande noire usagée, qui lui descendait jusqu'à mi-jambes, et coiffé d'une casquette sombre, du modèle des casquettes mises en vente vers 1885: avec une sous-mentonnière à deux ailes, actuellement relevées de chaque côté sur le dessus. Quelqu'un qui l'aurait examiné de près aurait vu que chaque détail de son accoutrement était "comme de personne"; MCE 7 'On this cold evening in February 1924, about seven o'clock, a man who appeared to be well over sixty, with an unkempt beard of a dubious gray color, was planted on one foot in front of a shop on the rue de la Glacière, not far from Arago boulevard, and was

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reading the newspaper by the light of the store front, using a large rectangular philatelist's magnifying glass. He was dressed in a worn black cloak which went down to the middle of his {lui-) legs, and had on his head a dark cap, of the kind of caps sold around 1885: with two flaps for under the chin, now folded up against the top on each side. Anyone who would have examined him closely would have seen that each detail of his getup was "like nobody else's".' The man is a very eccentric old bachelor — this is the theme of the story — and the author starts making this point right from the beginning with a description of the man's outlandish clothing. The description goes on for another page and a half and becomes even more eccentric: things held together by safety-pin chains; fabrics worn through; baggy pants; pieces of string painted black for shoe laces; ancient bits of food and filth in his pockets, etc. The garment mentioned here is an old-fashioned cloak which was undoubtedly a little ridiculous even in 1924, and whose length probably made the man look even more ridiculous. This passage clearly goes beyond a simple descriptive statement of a man's clothing. By using lui-, the author imputes responsibility to the man for his clothing being this way, makes him a participant in the outlandishness, thereby implying that the man is himself outlandish. Several of these examples have shown that what makes a participant an enabler or expediter is not necessarily a single, overt act. Example (16), with connaître, carries this even further. A detective is questioning someone in connection with a murder. The detective asks: "Who could have wanted to kill this man?" The other person answers: "Nobody. " Then the detective asks: (16)

— Vous lui connaissiez des ennemis? — Je ne lui connais que des amis.

SMV 146

' "Did you know him to have any enemies?" "I know him to have only friends." ' [lit.: " 'Did you know him {lui-) any enemies?' T know him {lui-) only friends.' "] If lui- were left out of these examples {"Vous connaissiez ses ennemis?" "Je ne connais que ses amis. ") the message would be very different: * "Did you know his enemies?" "I know only his friends." ' In the passage, it is clearly not a question of whether the person interrogated actually knew the victim's friends and enemies. Rather, the issue is the nature of the victim's involvement with other people. "Enemy" and "friend" imply particular relationships between two parties. This person is being asked if he knows of the existence of such a relationship with respect to the victim. The victim himself, Mid Controller,

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makes possible the "knowing" by participating in one of these relationships, that is, by having friends or enemies. It is this contribution that lui- highlights. Going one step further, we have examples in which a Mid Controller enables an event to take place by a mental activity. Example (17) comes from a humorous story in which a taxpayer (Mr. Rebuffaud) is informed that he must turn over his wife in payment of his taxes. At first he is dumbfounded; but, after being told that others, including the tax-collector himself, have received the same penalty, he thinks the idea over and finds it not so unreasonable. (17)

M. Rebuffaud hocha la tête et resta songeur. L'affaire lui paraissait déjà moins extravagante. L'exemple du percepteur, l'assurance donnée que d'autres contribuables connaissaient la même épreuve, lui rendaient presque acceptable l'idée d'abandonner sa femme au fisc. APM 164 'Mr. Rebuffaud shook his head pensively. The matter began to seem less insane to him. The example set by the tax-collector, the assurance given him that other taxpayers were undergoing the same ordeal, made almost acceptable to him (lui-) the idea of giving up his wife to the internal revenue service.'

"Acceptable" is a subjective quality: a thing cannot be "made acceptable" except in relation to someone who judges the thing and finds it acceptable. It is this judging on the part of the Mid Controller, Rebuffaud — his thinking the matter over, weighing the example of others, the state of his own relations with his wife, and any number of other factors — that enables there to be a "making acceptable". Lui- occurs with numerous adjectives, as here with acceptable, to suggest an expediter, causer, or motivator. These examples will receive a special discussion in section 2. Example (18) also shows a mental attitude that enables an event to take place. This is a story of a farm woman who doesn't like her daughter-in-law. Everything about the daughter-in-law displeases her, right down to her physical appearance. (18) Sa croupe et son corsage abondants, qui sont ordinairement un objet de fierté dans les familles campagnardes, lui offensaient la vue. AVO 23 'Her abundant croup and bust, which are normally an object of pride in country families, offended her sight [lit.: offended her (lui-) the sight].'

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"Offending" depends on a reaction from a person who judges a thing to be offensive. It is this woman's predisposition against her daughter-in-law that makes it possible for there to be an "offending" of her sight. Leaving out luiand saying offensaient sa vue would leave the woman, as a participant, and her contribution — the negative reaction — out of the picture too much for this context. To understand better why the "reactor" in examples like (18) merits a relatively high Control ranking, let us look at examples that more directly denote the producing of a reaction. In (19), two friends are smoking hashish, observed by a third friend who has declined to partake. One of the smokers leaves the room, and the other one says to the non-smoker: (19)

— Tu ne sais pas ce qu'il fait en ce moment? — Je m'en fous, dit Lucien. — Eh bien, sache tout de même qu'il vomit, dit tranquillement Bergère. C'est le seul effet que le haschich lui ait jamais produit. SMU 198

' "Don't you know what he's doing right now?" "I don't give a damn", said Lucien. "Well, still, you ought to know that he's vomiting," said Bergère calmly. "That's the only effect that hashish has ever had on him." [lit.: produced him (lui-)]' The use of lui- reflects the fact that this smoker is interacting critically in the "producing of the effect"; the effect consists of his reacting in a particular way as a result of the stimulus. This point is confirmed by the following set. Lui- is used in cases like the above where the stimulus results in a counter-action: (20) a. L'accident lui a provoqué un choc. 'The accident gave him a shock.' b. L'accident lui a provoqué une réaction. The accident provoked a reaction from him.' However, one would not say: c.??L'accident lui a provoqué la mort. 'The accident brought about his death.' d.??L'accident lui a provoqué le silence. 'The accident caused him to be silent.' because cases like (20c) and (20d) denote a cessation or failure of interaction; a counter-action motivating lui- does not occur. Message (20c) would more likely be expressed with the possessive adjective: L'accident a provoqué sa mort', message (20d) with a preposition and disjunctive, as in (21):

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De tous ces gens dont nous parlons, aucun n'avait aimé M. de Coantré. Comment sa mort eût-elle provoqué en eux autre chose que de l'indifférence? MCE 241 'Of all these people we are speaking of, not one had loved Mr. de Coantré. How could his death have provoked in them (eux) anything but indifference?'

Like 'silence', 'indifference' denotes a failure to react, and lui- is avoided. Thus, with a message of "producing an effect" on someone, lui- is a response to a high degree of interaction between High and Mid Controllers. The expediter strategy of lui- may be a response simply to inert characteristics of the referent. In (22), Lucien, an adolescent in the midst of an identity crisis, is being fed a line by a self-styled psychoanalyst, Bergère. (22)

«Savez-vous, Lucien, comment j'appelle votre état?» Lucien regarda Bergère avec espoir; il ne fut pas déçu. «Je l'appelle, dit Bergère, le Désarroi. »... «Désarroi ...» dit Lucien. Il se sentait grave et inquiet comme lorsqu'il avait dit à Riri qu'il était somnambule ... «Désarroi ... pensait-il: à quoi est-ce que ça va m'engager?» Il ne savait pas bien si on lui avait découvert une dignité ou une maladie nouvelle ... SMU 191 ' "Do you know, Lucien, how I call your state?" Lucien looked at Bergère hopefully; he wasn't disappointed. "I call it," said Bergère, "Disarray." "Disarray ..." said Lucien. He felt himself serious and unsettled like when he had told Riri he walked in his sleep ... "Disarray ..." he thought: "What is this going to commit me to?" He didn't know whether there had been discovered in him (lui-) something dignified or a new sickness.'

Lucien's alleged character trait sets up a "discovering". There is an interest in the whole person here; Lucien believes that something profound about his character has just been discovered. In contrast, (23) shows lui- avoided in favor of y when interest is tightly focused on just one part of the whole being. A boy driving a horse and buggy notices the horse limping. He jumps down. (23)

Il examina longuement le pied de la bête et n'y découvrit aucune trace de blessure. AGM 45 'He examined the animal's hoof at length and didn't discover in it any trace of a wound.'

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The hoof is not here viewed as a whole entity in itself, but as part of a larger entity, the horse, whose behavior is the center of interest. Characteristics of an inanimate object, like those of a person, may pave the way for an event to take place. Example (24) talks about some paintings of a famous painter. (24) Un beau jour, on constata que dix-sept tableaux de Lafleur, représentant toute sa production d'une année, avaient disparu de l'entrepôt où de grossières copies leur avaient été substituées. AVP 237 'One fine day, it was found that seventeen paintings of Lafleur, representing his entire production for one year, had disappeared from the warehouse, where crude copies had been substituted for them {leur-).' Substituer 'substitute' denotes replacing one thing by another which is in some way inferior to the first. The superiority of the thing replaced is important, because it means that it sets a standard by which the replacement is measured and in relation to which it is found wanting. This is also true of the English word 'substitute'; compare expressions like "Accept no substitutes", i.e. other things are inferior to the product in question. (The etymology of the word is consistent with this: The replacement "is placed under" — substituere — the original.) This contrasts with remplacer 'replace', which implies no relationship of superiority; compare "You can be replaced by a machine", which implies that the machine is as good as you are. In (24) then, the original paintings, by virtue of whatever characteristic makes them famous, set a standard the crude copies fall short of. Without this standard-setting, there is no "substituting"; there is, at best, only "replacing". In a final group of "enabler" examples there is some predisposition on the part of the Mid Controller that sets the stage for an occurrence. In spite of the subtlety and relative non-overtness of this type of involvement, it is in fact a powerful kind of control. Typically, the Mid Controller sets things up to such a degree that the High Controller has only to give a little push, as it were, for the event to occur. This is why the High Controller in these examples is often nonhuman or inanimate; such participants have relatively little inherent ability to control. Since this usage is common, yet most French grammars pass over it in silence, we will illustrate it with several different types of activity. In contexts denoting "offering an opportunity", the Mid Controller, to whom the opportunity is offered, sets the stage for the "offering" by looking

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for a particular combination of events or circumstances to occur. In (25) a smalltown tax-collector enters a café where he finds a number of local taxpayers. They begin to complain about their tax burden, with oblique criticisms of the tax-collector himself. He does not know how to answer and suffers the outrage in silence. Also present is a prominent citizen, Mr. Rebuffaud, who always pays his taxes punctually and willingly. Rebuffaud sits back and takes it all in: (25)

... Ses yeux brillaient d'une flamme d'ironie et à chaque instant cherchaient le regard du percepteur pour y surprendre le reflet de ses propres pensées et le signal d'une action concertée. Mais le percepteur ne le voyait même pas et restait ignorant de la sympathie muette que lui offrait M. Rebuffaud. Celui-ci ne put le supporter. Une réflexion de Planchon touchant la gabegie dans l'Etat et qui lui parut plus subversive que les autres, lui fournit l'occasion d'intervenir. Il le fit posément, avec un sourire cordial à l'adresse du percepteur. APM 155 ' ... His eyes gleamed with an ironic flame and constantly sought to catch the eye of the tax-collector, in hopes of finding there the reflection of his own thoughts and the signal for a concerted action. But the tax-collector didn't even see him and remained ignorant of the silent sympathy offered him by Mr. Rebuffaud. The latter could not stand it. A remark by Planchon [one of the taxpayers] regarding waste in the government, and which seemed to him more subversive than the others, offered him (lui-) an opportunity to intervene. He did so with poise, smiling cordially in the direction of the taxcollector.'

The first paragraph gives a clear statement of Rebuffaud's predisposition to intervene: the look in his eyes, his desire to join forces with the tax-collector, his silent sympathy. The remark of Planchon gives him the opportunity he is seeking. But this remark would not constitute the offering of an opportunity were it not for the predisposition of Rebuffaud; it would be just another remark. Rebuffaud's seeking an opportunity to intervene sets the stage for this remark to touch off a reaction on his part. Often it is a particular character trait of a participant that sets the stage for an event. Example (26) is from a tongue-in-cheek story about a man who is so saintly and pious that Providence gives him a halo. This displeases the man's wife, who cannot put up with the attendant inconveniences. He therefore deliberately commits various sins, in an attempt to make the halo go away (it does not).

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... il prit la résolution d'être envieux ... Il se mit à jalouser ses parents, ses amis, son patron, les commerçants du quartier et même les vedettes du sport et du cinéma dont le portrait paraissait dans les journaux. Tout lui portait ombrage et il lui arrivait de trembler de basse rage en songeant que son voisin de palier possédait un service à découper en argent, alors que le sien n'était qu'en corne. AVP 92 ' ... he resolved to be envious ... He began to be jealous of his relatives, his friends, his boss, the neighborhood merchants and even the sports and movie stars whose pictures appeared in the papers. Everything made him resentful [lit.: brought him (lui-) umbrage] and it even happened that he trembled with rage to think that his next-door neighbor owned a set of silver carving-knives, while his were only made of horn.'

The man's enviousness, a trait adopted deliberately in this case, sets up his taking umbrage at everything. This strategy can of course also apply with a more permanent, inherent character trait. In (27) we have a woman whose character gradually becomes clear in the course of the story. She is a storekeeper, but considers herself socially superior; since her husband owns a store and a car, she feels she is separated from poorer people by "social structure". She is now looking into the window of a bric-a-brac shop where she has come to buy something. In the window are a number of antique objects with highly suspicious labels claiming them to be furniture and personal effects of kings, queens, and historical figures: Marat's soap-dish, the Seven League Boots, the pen with which Napoleon signed the treaty of Campo-Formio, etc. (27)

Elle s'attarda quelques minutes à examiner le bric-à-brac et les références manuscrites. Ses connaissances en histoire étaient fort peu de chose, et le stylographe de Campo-Formio ne l'étonna nullement. Elle ne prisait pas beaucoup ce genre de commerce, mais la vitrine lui fit plutôt bonne impression. Une pancarte surtout lui inspira confiance, celle qui portait l'inscription: "On ne fait crédit qu'aux riches." Elle jugea l'avertissement maladroit, mais le marchand lui parut avoir de bons principes. APM 193 'She tarried several minutes examining the bric-a-brac and the handwritten references. Her knowledge of history was minimal, and the Campo-Formio pen didn't surprise her at all. She didn't esteem this type of business very highly, but the window made quite a good impression on her [lit.: made her (lui~) ...]. One sign especial-

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ly inspired confidence in her [lit.: inspired her Qui-) confidence], one which bore the inscription: "We give credit only to rich people". She judged the notice clumsy, but the merchant appeared to her to have good principles.' The two lui-'s in this passage reflect the interaction between the woman's character and this particular store window. It is her arrogance and ignorance that allow these fraudulent references to make a good impression, something they might not do on another person. Likewise, her desire to be associated with the upper economic classes allows the suspicious sign to inspire confidence in her; such a sign would not be taken seriously by someone less pretentious and arrogant. In both cases, then, the woman's character traits pave the way to the producing of an effect. In (28), a hungry tramp passing by the window of an art gallery is struck by one of the paintings in the window, because this painting has the peculiar property of assuaging his hunger. Although he has no money to buy the painting, he enters the store and begins questioning the owner about it. The conversation quickly reaches a dead end; but the tramp desperately searches for something to say, since it is a matter of life and death for him. (28)

Moudru balbutia une réponse embarassée et, à contre-cœur, se dirigea vers la sortie. Mécontent de lui-même, il craignait d'avoir manqué la chance de sa vie et cherchait vainement un biais pour la ressaisir. Il ne trouvait même pas l'alibi qui lui eût permis de s'incruster dans la boutique. AVP 185 'Moudru stammered a clumsy response, and, with a heavy heart, walked toward the door. Unhappy with himself, he feared he had missed the chance of a lifetime, and vainly sought a subterfuge to get it back. He didn't find even an alibi which would have allowed him (lui-) to stick around the shop.'

Let us consider the nature of the event here: "allow". One only "allows" someone to do something he wants to do: Moudru's desire to remain in the shop is a necessary prerequisite to "allowing". Furthermore, "allowing" presupposes some factor that necessitates an excuse. Speaking of the owner of the shop, for instance, we would not ordinarily say that something "allowed" him to stay in the shop; since he doesn't need an excuse, "allow" is not an appropriate word. Moudru, though, does need an excuse: since he is not buying the painting, he has no business in the store. In fact, he is a dirty tramp whose entering the store in the first place is suspect. Thus, Moudru creates a need for an excuse that enables there to be "allowing". The aspect of this participant that sets up this

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event is somewhat broader than just his character; it extends to his physical, social, and economic characteristics as well. The predisposition in the Mid Controller that enables an event to occur can be a temporary state of mind. In (29), a man who is normally calm reflects on an old war experience in which he killed a Turkish soldier who attacked him. His thoughts take an unusual turn this time, because of a heated argument he has just had with his girl friend. (29)

... lorsqu'il pensait à son aventure, seul avec lui-même, c'était toujours avec un peu de mélancolie, parfois même avec le regret que les circonstances ne lui eussent épargné telle nécessité. Ce soir, pourtant, il revivait la minute meurtrière avec une certaine précision complaisante. Les images de l'escalade, du sergent et du soldat turc étaient traversées par un visage de femme et par le souvenir d'une querelle encore chaude, encore douloureuse, qui lui inspirait comme un désir de violence. AVP 35 ' ... when he thought about his adventure all by himself, it was always with a little melancholy, sometimes even with regret that circumstances hadn't spared him such a necessity. This evening, however, he relived the murderous moment with a certain complacent precision. The images of the climb, the sergeant, and the Turkish soldier were crossed by the memory of a quarrel that was still hot, still painful, which inspired in him {lui-) a kind of desire for violence.'

An occurrence of "inspiring" is usually set up by some preexisting state of mind. A particular, unusual state of mind is certainly prerequisite to inspiring a desire for violence in this man, who is not ordinarily a violent person. The state of mind resulting from his quarrel provides the condition necessary for "inspiring" to occur. At the end of the story, this man commits a murder. Afterwards, he walks alone in the street and the night, thinking he will now be an outcast; all his friends, neighbors, relatives and acquaintances will shun him, whereas until now he has always been sociable and outgoing. (30)

Pour la première fois, depuis le drame, Martin eut la sensation de se trouver seul avec son crime. Sa première pensée fut pour sa concierge. Il imagina son visage réprobateur et prit conscience qu'il était devenu un objet d'horreur pour la société. Il arrivait au carrefour de la rue des Abbesses et de la rue Ravignan. La solitude glacée de ce carrefour lui donna un vertige de peur. AVP 75

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Tor the first time since the drama, Martin had the feeling of being alone with his crime. His thoughts turned first to his concierge. He imagined her reproachful face and realized that he had become an object of horror to society. He arrived at the intersection of Rue des Abbesses and Rue Ravignan. The icy solitude of this intersection made him dizzy with fear [lit.: gave him (lui-) a dizziness of fear].' Here again, it is his momentary state of mind, his feeling of isolation, that exaggerates the isolation of the street, and sets the stage for his being overcome by fear. The expediter/enabler strategy, then, explains a large number of examples and occupies a wide range on the scale of Control, including more overt and less overt types of activity. The precise role associated with the Mid Control participant is again suggested largely by characteristics of the event and the participants; the contribution of lui-, MORE CONTROL, only gives the message a gentle nudge in a particular direction. 1.3. Causer The term "causer" is used here for a referent of lui- that brings about an event in a relatively straightforward, overt way.4 For example, the Mid Controller may simply tell the High Controller what to do, as in the following: (31)

— ... j'ai rencontré cette femme qui vous a vendu la poule. Elle avait tout l'air de m'attendre, sans faire semblant. Elle m'a dit: "Montrez-moi la bague que vous avez au doigt." Je vous assure que cela n'avait pas l'air d'une plaisanterie. Je la lui ai montrée. GHT 328 '

"... I met that woman who sold you the chicken. She looked like she was waiting for me, without making any pretense. She said to me: 'Show me the ring you have on your finger.' I can assure you, it didn't sound like a joke. I showed it to her (lui-). The cause of the "showing" is straightforward: the woman demanded it. Causation may even involve the use of physical force, as in (32). Two men struggle over a telephone receiver; on the line is the girl friend of one of them. (32)

Martin avait saisi l'appareil et essayait de le lui arracher. — Je vais lui dire deux mots, à ta garce. Grandgil lui abandonna l'objet, se contentant d'appuyer le support et de couper ainsi la communication. AVP 71

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'Martin had seized the telephone and was trying to tear it away from him. "I'm going to say a word or two to your girl." Grandgil abandoned the object to him {lui-), simply pressing on the hook and thus cutting off the call.' The cause of Grandgil's giving up the telephone is Martin's attempt to physically take it away from him. The causer may be thought of as simply a more direct kind of motivator than those to be discussed in the next section. Other instances of the causer were seen above in Chapter 2, examples (39), (41), and (47). 1.4. Motivator The "motivator" strategy is very common and has many subtle variations; yet "motivation" as a thematic role has been overlooked by most analysts. However, the categories "beneficiary" and "disadvantaged", or "maleficiary", regularly found in traditional grammars, include examples that overlap to a large extent with our "motivator". The notions beneficiary and "maleficiary" are red herrings. They are not listed here as strategies because they actually obscure, in most cases, the real reasons for lui-. Most such examples are in fact motivators; some are expediters or causers. Having looked at the motivator strategy, we will, in the last section of this chapter, return to the beneficiary and the maleficiary and attempt to show what actually lies behind the use of lui- there. The motivator of an event exerts a type of control less immediate than that of an enabler, and subtler than that of a causer. Whereas an enabler is often present on a scene helping to set things up, a motivator may play a less visible role. A causer's control is direct and overt, but a motivator's depends on the volition of the High Controller; hence the "motivation". The motivator pushes things one way or another, but the burden of responsibility for the act clearly lies with the High Controller. For this reason we find a higher proportion of human High Controllers here than with the expediter. Since the Mid Controller contributes less, the High Controller has to contribute more to precipitate the event, and this level of contribution is more likely to be provided by a human than by an inanimate entity or an abstraction. Several examples of the motivator were seen in Chapter 2, such as examples (22), (25) (33), (35), (37) and (48), which were given together with non-lui- pairs, The action motivated by the Mid Controller may be a straight reward for something he has done, as in (33), the first sentence of a humorous short story.

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Le meilleur chrétien de la rue Gabrielle comme de tout Montmartre était, en 1939, un certain M. Duperrier, homme si pieux, si juste et si charitable que Dieu, sans attendre qu'il mourût et alors qu'il était dans la force de l'âge, lui ceignit la tête d'une auréole qui ne le quittait ni jour ni nuit. AVP 83 'The best Christian of Gabrielle Street, as well as of all Montmartre in 1939, was a certain Mr. Duperrier, a man so pious, so righteous, and so charitable that God, without waiting for him to die and while he was still in his prime, encircled his (lui-) head with a halo which stayed with him day and night.'

The giving of the halo is a reward for Duperrier's just and pious behavior. He did not, however, explicitly make God give him a halo, and thus would not rank as a causer. Example (34) involves a kind of reward, albeit one that is given less directly. This is a biographical sketch of a man after whom a street is named in a French town. (34)

Hubert Lefinat, né en 1860 à Nangicourt. Bienfaiteur de la ville. Dota l'hôpital de trois lits et légua à la ville par testament une partie de sa propriété devenue l'actuelle promenade du Bord-del'Eau, où lui a été érigée une statue en bronze. APM 165 'Hubert Lefinat, born in 1860 in Nangicourt. Benefactor of the city. Donated three beds to the hospital and bequeathed to the city in his will a part of his property which is now the Boardwalk, where a bronze statue has been erected to him (lui-).'

Lefinat's beneficent acts are the ultimate motivation for the erecting of a statue, although this did not happen until after his death; the causation is thus even less immediate than in the case of Duperrier's halo. When the referent of lui- is inanimate, motivation is likely to come from its characteristics rather than its actions. In (35) a detective has gotten soaked in a rainstorm. An overeager chambermaid sees his suit, which gives every appearance of having been out in the rain. (35)

Elle aperçut le complet que le commissaire avait mis à sécher la veille sur le radiateur et s'en saisit. — Qu'est-ce que vous faites? — Je vais lui donner un coup de fer. — Non, merci, c'est inutile. Elle l'emporta tout de même! SMP 52

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'She caught sight of the suit which the chief had put on the radiator to dry the night before and grabbed it. "What are you doing?" "I'm going to give it (lui-) a touch of the iron." "No, thank you, it's not necessary." She carried it off just the same!' It is the suit's messy appearance that motivates the maid's giving a "touch of the iron". The Mid Control motivator can also be something more abstract. Example (36) talks about a man who is part of a group of sophisticated, upper-class people. He is a naive type and never quite sure whether he is doing or saying the right thing or understanding people's remarks correctly. When he hears an unfamiliar expression, he tries to get more information as to its exact sense. (36)

... sur les conseils qu'une mère prévoyante lui avait donnés quand il avait quitté sa province, il ne laissait jamais passer soit une locution ou un nom propre qui lui étaient inconnus sans tâcher de se faire documenter sur eux. Pour les locutions, il était insatiable de renseignements, car, leur supposant parfois un sens plus précis qu'elles n'ont, il eût désiré savoir ce qu'on voulait dire exactement par celles qu'il entendait le plus souvent employer: la beauté du diable, du sang bleu, une vie de bâtons de chaise, le quart d'heure de Rabelais, être le prince des élégances, donner carte blanche, être réduit à quia, etc ... PAS 23 '... acting on the advice given him by a foresighted mother when he left his native province, he never let go by either an expression or a proper noun that was unfamiliar to him without trying to get documentation on them. As for expressions, he was insatiable for information, for, sometimes supposing them to have [lit.: supposing them (leur-)] a more precise sense than they really did, he would have liked to know exactly what was meant by those which he heard used the most often: ... [follows a series of French locutions]'

It is the characteristic of these locutions that they are not ordinary words, they are expressions. This fact, against the background of the man's naïveté, motivates his attributing an overly precise sense to them. Sometimes a motivator is assigned a Mid degree of Control not for what it actually does but for what it has the potential to do. Both humans and things may have this characteristic. In (37), a mother waits outside a school for her son

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at the end of the day. Not seeing him, she begins to worry, and goes over to a group of boys to make inquiry. (37)

Germaine se posta au coin de la rue Paul-Féval et chercha Antoine du regard. En quelques minutes, les écoliers se furent éparpillés et répandus dans les rues et elle s'inquiéta de ne pas voir son fils. Bientôt, il ne resta plus devant l'école qu'un groupe d'une demidouzaine d'enfants qui parlaient sport. Ayant à se rendre dans des directions différentes, ils retardaient le moment de se séparer. Germaine s'approcha et leur demanda s'ils connaissaient Antoine Buge et s'ils l'avaient vu. APM 170 'Germaine stationed herself at the corner of Paul-Féval Street and looked to see if she could find Antoine. Within a few minutes, the schoolchildren had scattered and spread out into the streets, and she was worried because she didn't see her son. Soon, there remained in front of the school only a group of a half-dozen children talking sports. Having to go in different directions, they were postponing the moment when they would separate. Germaine went up and asked them (leur-) if they knew Antoine Buge and whether they had seen him.'

Characteristics of the children, rather than any particular action on their part, bring about the event: being schoolboys like her son, being where he should have been at the time he should have been there. They are likely candidates to provide the information Germaine wants, and this motivates her asking them. Verbs of communication — 'saying', 'asking', etc., used in reporting conversation as in example (37) — are good candidates to occur with lui-, since a conversation is an interactive situation in which each participant expects to elicit a reaction from the other by means of his remarks. Example (38) shows another kind of desired reaction motivating an action. Germaine has gone to a bric-a-brac shop to buy for Antoine the seven league boots that are in the window (cf. example 27). (38)

L'étalage était éclairé, mais elle ne put ouvrir la porte. Elle essayait encore de tourner le bec-de-cane lorsque le marchand, écartant un coin de la descente de lit qui aveuglait la glace de la porte, lui fit signe de s'éloigner. Germaine ne comprit pas et lui montra les bottes dans la vitrine. Enfin le vieillard entrebâilla la porte et lui dit: — Vous ne comprenez pas? Le magasin est fermé. APM 206

108

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE 'The lights were on in the window, but she was unable to open the door. She was still trying to turn the door-handle when the owner, moving aside a corner of the throw-rug that covered the door's window pane, motioned to her to go away. Germaine didn't understand and pointed out to him (lui-) the boots in the window. Finally, the old man half-opened the door and said to her (lui-): "Don't you understand? The store is closed." '

Germaine wants the owner to do something: open the door, speak to her, sell her the boots. This prompts her to point to the boots, the most direct way to obtain a reaction. It is the man's potential to do what she wants that motivates Germaine's action and ranks the owner as a Mid Controller. Notice also the second lui- in this example: he 'said to her'. Germaine's attempts to communicate with the proprietor motivate his speaking. Examples of lui- like these last three are, of course, very common; so common, in fact, that there is a danger of forgetting that they, too, require explanation. Since they are the types of examples typically cited in grammars to illustrate the category Indirect Object, they may appear banal; the reader may wonder why we deal with them in an unconventional way. Clearly, though, it will not be possible to allow both categories — Indirect Object and MORE CONTROL — into the grammar of French and assign examples arbitrarily to one or the other. These two categories stem from conflicting views of the nature of language, from mutually exclusive premises, and cannot coexist in one grammar. The category Indirect Object has presented enough problems to encourage a search for a new category; the task is now to test the category MORE CONTROL against these examples. The regular association between these verbs and lui- may appear to undermine the hypothesis that use of lui- is motivated by the meaning MORE CONTROL, because it is not obvious what alternative to lui- exists. Verbs like demander 'ask' and dire 'say', are verbs of communication. What they have in common with each other and with montrer 'show' is that all these activities almost always involve an entity, usually a human being, that interacts with the High Controller to a high degree; and this high degree of interaction provides the motivation for lui-. Now, this rationale leads to a prediction which can help show that use of lui- is due to its Control meaning. In the unusual cases where lui- has a nonhuman referent with these same verbs, we may expect to find some special effect. For example there may be personification of the referent of lui-', or this referent may provide a degree of motivation that is unusually high for an

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inanimate object.5 Thus, the consistent choice of lui- is due to the lexical nature of these particular verbs, with the result that: a) when a normally non-interacting entity is used with one of them it is perforce perceived as interacting; and b) these verbs do not occur altogether with a really non-interacting entity. A few examples will illustrate this point. Our collection happens not to contain any examples of inanimates with demander, dire, and montrer. However, we do have such examples with other verbs of communication, which make the point just as well. Example (39) describes a show put on by an expert in card tricks. (39)

Alors, il se met à tripoter son paquet de cartes comme s'il tirait sur un accordéon. Il le frappe, il le pince, il le soufflette, il le caresse, il l'étire et le referme. Il annonce: roi de pique, sept de carreau, trois de cœur, roi de trèfle, dame de cœur, neuf de pique, deux de carreau; et chaque fois la carte annoncée tombe ... Il fait couler les cartes de sa main droite à sa main gauche, en pluie, en gouttes, en cascades. Il leur parle, il les appelle par leurs noms; elles se dressent toutes seules hors du jeu, s'avancent, viennent, sautent. Il raconte de petites saloperies à la dame de cœur et la dame de cœur bondit jusqu'à sa bouche pleine de salive. Il dit que le roi de trèfle est jaloux; et le voilà qui vient. En effet, il a l'air jaloux; on dirait d'un coq. GGC 37 'Then he starts fingering his pack of cards as if he were pulling on an accordion. He hits it, he pinches it, he slaps it, he caresses it, he stretches it out and he closes it again. He announces: king of spades, seven of diamonds, three of hearts, king of clubs, queen of hearts, nine of spades, deuce of diamonds; and each time the card announced falls out ... He makes the cards flow from his right hand to his left hand, in a rainfall, in drops, in waterfalls. He talks to them {leur-), he calls them by their names; they stand up all by themselves out of the deck, move forward, come, jump. He tells dirty stories to the queen of hearts and the queen of hearts jumps up to his mouth full of saliva. He says that the king of clubs is jealous; and there he comes! He does indeed look jealous, like a rooster.'

The verb parler 'speak' is used with leur- referring to cards. The personification is clear; the cards are in fact acting and being treated like humans, which is the point of the show. Example (40) shows another act of communication — smiling — with trees as Mid Controllers. A young girl is about to leave the convent that has been her home.

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Puis je regardai vers la fenêtre: les ombres des tilleuls s'allongeaient de mon côté. J'imaginais qu'ils venaient me dire adieu, et je leur souriais. AMC 94 'Then I looked toward the window: the shadows of the linden trees were stretching out in my direction. I imagined that they were coming to say good-bye to me, and I smiled to them {leur-)'

The trees are personified in the girl's imagination: they stretch out as though human, and a human type of communication takes place between them and the girl. In (41) the theme is not personification, but rather the extremely important motivating role played by the object addressed. A group of boys see a pair of boots labeled "seven-league boots" in a shop window. The story is about the adventures these boys have trying to get their parents to buy them the boots. One boy has been promised the boots; but after an episode of particularly bad behavior, his mother withdraws her promise. (41)

Je me proposais d'aller acheter les bottes cet après-midi, mais tu peux leur dire adieu. APM 198 ' "I had planned to go buy the boots this afternoon, but you can say good-bye to them." '

What is unusual about these boots is the dominant role they play in the development of the story. They control the lives and machinations of the children, and this mother knows just how important they are to her son. One ordinarily says adieu to people, not to boots; the degree of control exerted by the boots in this story is unusually great for an inanimate object. Example (42) is particularly interesting because in it personified objects become de-personified, and the pronoun used to refer to them changes from leur- to non-clitic eux as this happens. Pierre is a demented man who has hallucinations about inanimate objects coming to life. His wife, Eve, who is more or less normal, is also present. (42)

Sur le damier, Pierre n'avait laissé que les pions noirs. Quelquefois il se levait, il allait jusqu'à la table et il prenait les pions un à un dans ses mains. Il leur parlait, il les appelait Robots, et ils paraissaient s'animer d'une vie sourde entre ses doigts. Quand il les avait reposés, Eve allait les toucher à son tour (elle avait l'impression d'être un peu ridicule): ils étaient redevenus de petits bouts de bois mort mais il restait sur eux quelque chose de vague et d'insaisissable, quelque chose comme un sens. «Ce sont ses objets, pensa-t-elle. Il n'y a plus rien à moi dans la chambre.» SMU 64

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'On the checkerboard Pierre had left only the black checkers. Sometimes he got up, went over to the table, and took the checkers one by one in his hands. He spoke to them (leur-), he called them Robots, and they appeared to become animate with a dull life between his fingers. When he had put them back down, Eve went to touch them in her turn (she felt a little ridiculous): they had turned back into little pieces of dead wood but there remained on them (eux) something vague and elusive, something like a sense. "They are his objects", she thought. "There is no longer anything of mine in the room." ' When Pierre handles the checkers, they take on humanlike characteristics and are referred to as leur- and with parler. When Eve touches them, they are only dead pieces of wood and merit no more than non-clitic eux. The verb in this second instance is rester 'remain'. Note that in the case of a human being, this kind of message with rester would be expressed with lui-: (43)

... Madame Rosa aime se faire voir en compagnie. Elle s'habille toujours longtemps pour sortir parce qu'elle a été une femme et ça lui est resté encore un peu. GVD 32 '... Madame Rosa likes to be seen in company. She always takes a long time dressing to go out because she was once a lady and it still remains with her (lui-) a little.'

To recap this point: the use of lui- with verbs of communication and others denoting typical human interactions may seem automatic and therefore appear arbitrary, and unsupportive of the semantic hypothesis we are testing. However, the fact that the same reason applies every time a form occurs does not mean that there is no reason for its occurrence.6 In this case, the lexical content of the verb is what makes the meaning MORE CONTROL appropriate. Because of their lexical content, these verbs are almost impossible to use with a non-interacting entity. This is a type of "government" effect; and, as will be seen later, "government" itself is the motivated result of interactions between lexical and grammatical meanings. A further impediment to understanding lui- has been the assumption that one can map directly between occurrences of a grammatical form and features of a scene. In fact, lui- is at least as likely to be motivated by an author's wish to make a subjective comment as it is to function purely descriptively. Example (44) is from a story of a cholera epidemic that decimated southern France, and of how people behaved during this time, especially toward one another. The hero, travelling through the plague-stricken region, enters a strange town. The villagers, not knowing the real cause of the cholera and hostile to strangers,

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suspect that hé is a government agent sent to poison their drinking water. An angry group pursues him through the streets. Hiding in a doorway, he overhears them talking, commenting on the expensive boots he is wearing. (44)

Ses poursuivants passèrent à côté de lui, à portée de la main. Ils étaient une dizaine. Un disait à voix basse: «Est-ce que c'est le gouvernement qui lui paie ses bottes? —Eh! Qui veux-tu que ce soit?» lui répondait un autre. GHT 105 'His pursuers passed near him, within a hand's reach. There were about ten of them. One was saying softly: "Is it the government that pays for his boots [lit.: pays him lui- his boots]?" "Well! Who do you think it is?" answered another.'

The theme of interaction, even conspiracy, is evident here. Now, in this example there is a double mention of the man, once with lui-, and again with the possessive adjective ses (cf. the literal translation). This double mention seems logically superfluous; English does quite well with a single mention (cf. the smooth translation). The same scene could be described just as well without lui-; what, then, is the purpose of this seemingly superfluous lui-? Without lui- we would know that this character owns the boots and that the government (allegedly) pays for them. Lui-, however, adds a nuance that reinforces the author's portrayal of these villagers' mentality. Including the hero as a controlling participant in the "paying" reinforces the suggestion that he is interacting and conniving with the government, that he is a guilty party. This is a subtle nuance, but subtlety is appropriate here. The speaker does not need to spell out the point at length, since his interlocutor thinks the same way and will grasp the suggestion with only a hint. Lui- provides an efficient and appropriately subtle way of making this suggestion. This nuance adds nothing to the description of the scene, but it helps shape the message as a whole. Such usage brings home the point that the function of language is not simply to encode scenes. Language is a tool that users exploit in whatever way they can to convey communicative intent. This more often than not means proffering a comment. Example (45), with a disjunctive rather than lui-, contrasts with (44). The narrator, an itinerant odd-jobber, has found a travelling companion ("the artist"), who subsists by playing the guitar and doing card tricks. But his hands have been broken so that he can do neither, and the narrator now supports the artist with his own earnings. He does so out of unreciprocated friendship for the artist and because he enjoys watching the card tricks; these, however, he has not seen for a long time because of the artist's injury.

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... je demande à l'artiste s'il ne va pas finalement se décider à jouer encore un peu aux cartes. Il me répond: est-ce que j'en ai déjà marre de payer la pension pour lui? GGC 214 '... I ask the artist if he's not going to finally decide to play cards a little again. He answers me: am I already fed up with paying his room and board for him?'

The message here is just the opposite of the conniving found with lui- in (44). Although the narrator merely wants to enjoy the card tricks again, the artist cynically implies that the narrator means he wants the artist to go back to work, and that the narrator thereby denies the interaction established by his supporting the artist. The nuance conveyed by lui- in (46) is perhaps even more subtle. This description of a cold, windy day is taken from a book written in a heavily Romantic style. (46)

C'est un jeudi, au commencement de février, un beau jeudi soir glacé, où le grand vent souffle. Il est trois heures et demie, quatre heures ... Pour celui qui ne veut pas être heureux, il n'a qu'à monter dans son grenier et il entendra, jusqu'au soir, siffler et gémir les naufrages; il n'a qu'à s'en aller dehors, sur la route, et le vent lui rabattra son foulard sur la bouche comme un chaud baiser soudain qui le fera pleurer. AGM 188 'It is a Thursday, at the beginning of February, a fine, icy Thursday evening, with a strong wind blowing. It is three thirty, four o'clock ... Whoever doesn't want to be happy has only to go up to his attic and he will hear, until evening, the shipwrecks whistling and groaning; he has only to go outside, on the road, and the wind will push down [lit.: push him (lui-) down] his scarf on his mouth like a sudden warm kiss which will make him weep.'

On a strictly literal interpretation, it is difficult to make sense of the passage, since lui- implies that this person motivates the wind to push down his scarf. However, such an interpretation does make sense in the highly imaginative, personified, and romantic style that characterizes the book, particularly this passage. The imagery points toward this reading: shipwrecks "groaning" (these shipwrecks, whatever they are, appear nowhere else in the book); the cold wind giving him a "warm kiss"; this person "wanting" to be unhappy and being made to weep by the warm kiss of the cold wind. The nuance conveyed by luiis something like: "That's what he wants." The person wants to be made to cry;

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inserting lui- is a subtle way of saying: "He is bringing it on; he wants the wind to do it." It is a slight touch that pulls this passage in the same general direction as the other elements mentioned. It makes sense in light of the writer's overall communicative intent. This completes our survey of types of involvement associated with the Mid Controller. We have looked at examples of lui- representing the interactor, the expediter/enabler, the causer, and the motivator. In the course of this survey some important points were left for later discussion. We now return to those points.

2.

Lui- with "Predicate" Nouns and Adjectives

Example (17) showed lui- closely connected in thought to an adjective. In such uses of lui-, the verb is one that denotes the existence of or entering into a state of being: être 'be', devenir 'become', rester, demeurer 'remain', rendre 'make'. The referent of lui- contributes something to the existence or bringing about of the state, and this fact is of importance to the message. These are thus straightforward applications of the meaning MORE CONTROL. Here too the non-lui- option — a preposition with a disjunctive — is available; and the rationales for invoking or not invoking the meaning MORE CONTROL are the same as in examples without predicate adjectives or nouns. Thus, we find lui- as expediter. The contribution of Degree of Control is: "Thanks to the characteristics/actions of this participant, the state exists". In (47), a boy daydreaming while staring at pictures of shepherds on his bedroom curtains and imagining that he is inside a cloud, has an unpleasant sensation upon suddenly waking. (47) Puis tout à coup il se dit: «Moi, je suis ...» et un léger déclic se produisit: il s'était réveillé de sa longue somnolence. Ça n'était pas agréable: les bergers avaient sauté en arrière, il semblait á Lucien qu'il les regardait par le gros bout d'une lorgnette. A la place de cette stupeur qui lui était si douce et qui se perdait voluptueusement dans ses propres replis, il y avait maintenant une petite perplexité très réveillée qui se demandait: «Qui suis-j e?» SMU 176 'Then all at once he said to himself: "I am ..." and there was a soft click: he had awakened from his long somnolence. It was not pleasant: the shepherds had jumped backwards; it

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seemed to Lucien as though he was looking at them through the fat end of an opera glass. In place of this stupor which was so sweet for him (lui-) and which was ebbing away so voluptuously in its own folds, there was now a small perplexity, very much awake, that was wondering: "Who am I?" ' Lucien's degree of interaction with the "sweetness" is high: it is created by his state of mind, and he thoroughly enjoys its "voluptuousness". Compare this to (48), which also uses doux 'sweet', but where the interaction is significantly different and where a disjunctive is used rather than lui-. We have an airplane flight inspector, a lonely, gray personality who is not allowed to think for himself but must take orders from his superiors. He is forbidden to be friendly with pilots since it is he who must inflict penalties on them when they do not do their job perfectly. He is stationed far from home with no social life and no friends, not even someone of his rank. He is plagued by eczema and troubles with his fiancée. At one point, in desperation, he tries to befriend a pilot. Unpacking his suitcase in front of this pilot, he takes out an object that obviously has special meaning for him: a little bag of stones. He timidly confides to the pilot that he has a passionate interest in geology. The text says: (48)

Seules, dans la vie, avaient été douces pour lui, les pierres. SVN 22 The only thing in life which had been sweet for him was stones.'

The central theme is the man's loneliness, isolation and inability to interact with his surroundings. The one thing to which he can relate — stones — is an unreciprocating, pitiful object of interaction that only serves to underscore his isolation. The avoidance of lui- in favor of a disjunctive suits perfectly this global denial of interaction. One frequent use of lui- as expediter with "stative" verbs occurs when the referent of lui- is judging. This participant is asserted to exercise control because he decides whether or not the state exists. The following pair shows use and non-use of lui- with égal 'equal, indifferent, all the same'. In (49), the author follows the thoughts of a man who is crusading, almost singlehandedly, to save the endangered elephant species in Africa. He pursues his goal with single-minded defiance of all sorts of obstacles. Short-term setbacks don't discourage him. As for the eventual outcome of his struggle: (49)

Quant au succès final ... Il ne désespérait pas. Il fallait continuer, essayer. Evidemment, si les hommes n'étaient pas capables de se serrer un peu, s'ils manquaient à ce point de générosité, s'ils ne consentaient pas à s'encombrer des éléphants, quel que fût le but poursuivi, s'ils s'obstinaient à considérer cette marge comme un luxe,

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eh bien! l'homme lui-même allait finir par devenir un luxe inutile. Personnellement, bien sûr, cela lui était égal. Sa misanthropie était du reste célèbre, officiellement reconnue et proclamée. GRC 268 'As for ultimate success ... He wasn't giving up hope. You had to go on, try. Of course, if humans weren't capable of tightening their belts a little, if they were so lacking in generosity, if they wouldn't agree to burden themselves with elephants, no matter for what purpose, if they insisted on considering this margin a luxury, well! man himself was going to end up becoming a useless luxury. Personally, of course, that was all the same to him {lui-). His misanthropy, moreover, was famous, officially recognized and proclaimed.' The word personnellement 'personally' underscores his personal involvement in the state of "being all the same". Indeed, that is the main point. The man is taking a stand; he is passing judgment on the human race. Although he says it's "all the same to him", this is a sardonic remark; in fact, just the opposite is true. He is a misanthropist; his pretended apathy betrays antipathy. The attitude he expresses here is: "Let them all go to hell". Precisely such elements are missing in (50), where lui- is avoided in favor of a non-clitic. This example has the man encountered in Chapter 2 (example 39), who carried on affairs with women while not becoming emotionally involved with them. The passage describes his attitude toward his current mistress, whom he was considering marrying. (50)

Mais, si elle voulait l'abandonner, et en donnait le signal la première il l'abandonnerait lui-même avec indifférence. Personne ne lui manquait jamais, que son fils, et d'ailleurs personne n'est irremplaçable ... Que la jeune fille devînt folle de lui, ou qu'elle le délaissât: ces deux solutions étaient pour lui égales. Il s'adapterait aux deux avec la même aisance, la même promptitude et le même contentement: plus ardent à mesure qu'elle deviendrait plus ardente, ou plus oublieux qu'elle, si elle choisissait de l'oublier. MPF 98-99 'But, if she wished to abandon him, and was the first to give the signal, he would abandon her himself, with indifference. He never missed anybody, except his son, and besides, nobody is irreplaceable ... Whether the girl became crazy about him, or whether she deserted him: these two solutions were all the same for him. He would adapt to either one with the same ease, the same promptness, and the same satisfaction: more ardent as she became more ardent, or more forgetful than she, if she chose to forget him.'

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There is plenty of evidence that this man really was indifferent: "... with indifference", "he never missed anybody ...". Far from taking a stand which creates a state of "being all the same", as did the character in (49), this man lets himself be pushed around by circumstances: "if she wanted to abandon him ...", "he would adapt to either one ... ", "more ardent as she became ... ", "more forgetful ... if she chose to forget ... ". This is a character who relinquishes control, and the avoidance of lui- is appropriate. Example (51) illustrates clearly the use of lui- when a participant takes a stand about the existence of a state. The elephant-crusader of (49) has been accused of using the elephants for clandestine political objectives. He publishes a manifesto making it clear that he is interested only in the elephants and has no ulterior motives. (51)

Le Comité rappelle, pour dissiper les rumeurs malveillantes, qu'il n'a absolument aucun caractère politique et que les questions politiques, les considérations d'idéologie, de doctrine, de parti, de race, de classe, de nation lui sont complètement étrangères. Il poursuit simplement une oeuvre humanitaire. GRC 241 T h e Committee repeats, to dissipate the malicious rumors, that it has absolutely no political character and that political questions, and considerations of ideology, doctrine, party, race, class, or nation are completely irrelevant to it (lui-). It is simply pursuing a humanitarian task.'

To say simply les considérations de ... sont complètement étrangères, 'considerations of ... are completely irrelevant', leaving out lui- altogether, would not be inappropriate in this context. But the inclusion of lui- asserts the involvement of the committee in the creation of this state of irrelevancy; and this is consistent with the theme of the passage, a statement of the nature and character of this committee. What is being said is: "Such questions are irrelevant because this committee asserts them to be so." The above examples show that individual adjectives do not "select" lui- or a disjunctive. Nevertheless, the lexical content of the adjective is a major consideration in the decision whether to use lui-. Let us compare two examples using two distinct but similar adjectives. One has lui-, and the other a non-clitic. In (52) a woman was about to leave her husband (Henri) and run away with her boyfriend. At the last minute she decides she can't do it, and writes the boyfriend a letter canceling the trip. The adjective is indispensable 'indispensable'.

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Mais Henri se tuerait s'il ne m'avait plus, je lui suis indispensable; je t'assure que ça ne m'amuse pas de me sentir une pareille responsabilité. SMU 147 'But Henry would kill himself if he didn't have me any longer, I'm indispensable to him (lui-); I assure you that it doesn't amuse me to feel I bear such a responsibility.'

Since the woman doesn't want to take blame for the change of plans, she shifts responsibility onto someone else. She says that because of Henri's characteristics, his extreme dependency (on her), she is indispensable, i.e. she cannot go away. A translation of this passage that more explicitly brings out the Control element might be: 'Because of him (lui-) I am not free (je suis indispensable).' The second example contains the adjective important 'important', which may be thought of, in many ways, as a less intensive version of indispensable. A young German soldier, sitting in the ruins of Berlin after World War II, reflects on the time before the war when he took the most important step of his life: joining the Nazi party. (53)

Quand Fritz pensait à ce numéro 96 du Kurfürstendamm où, la ville à présent détruite et occupée, s'était installée la Division des Personnes Déplacées et où défilaient, à longueur de jour, les D. P. et les prisonniers qui venaient s'adresser à la Mission de Rapatriement, devant lequel étaient toujours rangées les voitures automobiles que leurs chauffeurs menaient pour leurs missions vers la zone russe, il ne pouvait croire que ce lieu avait été si important pour lui et avait abrité la première permanence du parti qu'il lui avait été donné de connaître. VCH-I 168 'When Fritz thought about this number 96 Kurfürstendamm where, with the city now destroyed and occupied, the division of Displaced Persons had installed itself and where, all day long, there filed by the D.P's and the prisoners who came to address themselves to the Repatriation Mission, in front of which were always parked the cars which their drivers drove for their missions toward the Russian zone, he couldn't believe that this place had been so important for him and had housed the first headquarters of the party that he had been given to know.'

Here the preposition pour and non-clitic lui are used with important. True, this place played a major role in Fritz's life; however, the intense and intimate

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interaction of example (52) is lacking here. There, it was an interaction between two people, husband and wife; here, one of the participants is merely a building. The importance of the lexical content of the adjective vis-à-vis this interaction factor is brought out by a broad look at "predicate adjectives" with lui-. Here, traditional grammars have obscured a major point. In the section of grammars devoted to "the Complements of Adjectives", one finds, at best, a grouping of adjectives by the prepositions that follow them: adjectives taking à, those taking de, en, envers, pour, etc. (See e.g. Fraser, Squair & Parker 1948: §§222-225.) However, in the list of adjectives taking à, we do not find a separate grouping of those whose pronominal complement is a clitic and those whose complement is a disjunctive. They are all simply lumped together as adjectives taking à, and illustration is provided with noun complements, which do not distinguish the two different possibilities. This obscures a crucial distinction since, as the present analysis maintains, the clitics and the disjunctives represent two distinct underlying grammatical mechanisms of French, not simply two superficially different methods of pronominalization. The following list contains 28 out of 46, or 60 per cent, of the adjectives occurring with lui- in our data collection. All of these adjectives, in and of themselves and without any appeal to wider context, can be seen to imply interaction between participants of the kind discussed above. In many examples containing adjectives not on the list, a similarly high degree of interaction between participants is revealed by examination of the individual contexts. fidèle hostile dévoué favorable impossible précieux pénible pesant cher familier essentiel dur commode insupportable profitable

'faithful' 'hostile' 'devoted' 'favorable' 'impossible' 'precious' 'troublesome' 'ponderous' 'dear' 'familiar' 'essential' 'hard' 'convenient' 'unbearable' 'profitable'

reconnaissant nécessaire accessible désagréable sympathique indispensable difficile possible aisé facile mortel agréable fatal intolérable utile

'grateful' 'necessary' 'accessible' 'unpleasant' 'congenial' 'indispensable' 'difficult' 'possible' 'easy' 'easy' 'lethal' 'pleasant' 'fatal' 'intolerable' 'useful'

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The interacting role played by the non-high participant in bringing on the state denoted by one of these adjectives motivates invoking the semantic substance of Control. Let us compare to the above some of the adjectives that occur with à plus a disjunctive. Although the following is not a complete list, these appear to fall into a few clearly definable categories. With all we note a lack of the interaction seen with the lui- adjectives. 1) The relationship between two entities is one-sided. An example is the adjective accoutumé 'accustomed': (54)

Il n'est pas encore accoutumé à eux. 'He's not yet used to them.'

The "accustoming" all takes place on the part of il 'he', not necessarily involving any action on the part of eux 'them'. 2) The adjective implies a comparison, not performed by one of the entities compared. Adjectives showing this motif include comparable, pareil, semblable, égal. (55)

Marie est brilliante et sa sœur est pareille à elle. 'Marie is brilliant and her sister is just like her.'

The existence of similarity between Mary and her sister is not the judgment of Mary, but rather that of the speaker. The referent of non-clitic elle 'her' thus does not control the existence of the state in the same way as the referent of luiin examples like (49) and (51), where the state exists due to the judgment of the referent of lui-. The following pair brings out this point: (56) a. Marie est brilliante et sa sœur est égale à elle. 'Marie is brilliant and her sister is equal to her.' b. Marie est brilliante et cela lui est égal. 'Marie is brilliant and it's all the same to her.' In (56a), with non-clitic elle, the state of being 'equal/the same' is found not by the referent of elle (Mary), but by an observer. In (56b), with lui-, the state of being 'equal/the same' is found by the referent of lui- (Mary herself). 3) The relationship of the entity to the state is purely temporal, thus putting its involvement in the domain of circumstance, not in that of Control.

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Jacques était maire de la ville en 1960, et Marie en 1965. Jacques était antérieur à elle. 'Jacques was mayor of the city in 1960, and Marie in 1965. Jacques was prior to her.'

Further analysis may reveal other strategies operative in this area of French grammar. A with adjectives, then, presents a non-Control option just as do other prepositions. When the complement of the adjective is a pronoun, there are two choices: lui-, or a disjunctive. The choice between the two is motivated by the now-familiar factor of whether the referent is to be accorded the status of a controlling participant. The same criteria for choosing between lui- and a disjunctive apply to predicate nouns. In (58), a doctor in love with a woman (Maria Cross), makes time in a busy schedule for eagerly anticipated rendezvous with her. Here is the text preceding the example: "Sometimes, just before the awaited hour, he received a message from Maria Cross: she was not free any more ... The doctor would not have had the strength to go on living if, at the end of the letter, Maria Cross had not proposed another day. By an instant miracle, his whole existence became organized around this new rendezvous; even though he was occupied hour by hour, he saw at a glance, like a skillful chess player, the possible combinations and what he would have to move aside to be, at the appointed moment, immobile, at ease, in the room smothered with tapestries, his face turned toward this reclining woman. And when the moment had passed when he would have met her if she hadn't excused herself, he rejoiced, thinking: 'Now it would be all over; whereas I still have ahead of me all this happiness ....' " (58)

Les jours qui l'en séparaient, il avait de quoi les combler: le laboratoire surtout lui était un havre; il y perdait conscience de son amour; la recherche abolissait le temps, consumait les heures jusqu'à ce que soudain ce fût le moment de pousser le portail de cette propriété où vivait Maria Cross ... MDA 44 The days that separated him from it, he had what to fill them up with: the laboratory especially was a haven for him {lui-); in it, he lost consciousness of his love; his research abolished time, consumed the hours until suddenly, it was time to push open the gate of that estate where Maria Cross lived ...'

We have here a detailed examination of the doctor's state of mind. The laboratory is earlier described as a place full of "spots of blood or pus held between two glass slides", hardly a "haven". However, the doctor's state of mind makes

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it into a haven, since it provides him with the environment he needs to take his mind off his love affair. This contrasts with (59), where a non-clitic occurs with a predicate noun. An airplane pilot gets up at midnight for a solo flight, back in the days when flying at night was uncommon and dangerous. His wife reflects on her sadness at his departure; she tries to increase his attachment to her with music, flowers, etc., but he easily breaks away from it all. He thinks of his upcoming trip — the beauty of flying by night, the sight of the city from the air. He says: Once he is off the ground and on his way, "the city is nothing more than a sea bottom". Thinking of the home he must give up in order to conquer the sky, she feels a pang of jealousy. He laughs. Finally he leaves. (59)

Elle restait là. Elle regardait, triste, ces fleurs, ces livres, cette douceur, qui n'étaient pour lui qu'un fond de mer. SVN 40 'She remained there. She looked sadly at these flowers, these books, this sweetness, which for him were only a sea-bottom.'

The point is that these things were nothing for him. Unlike the doctor's making the laboratory into a haven for himself, the pilot's making the flowers, books, etc. into "the bottom of the sea" stresses his lack of response to or interaction with them. Rather than becoming objects of significance in his life, like the laboratory for the doctor, they fade into an obscure background. The avoidance of lui- in favor of a non-clitic correlates with a message of non-interaction. The motivator strategy, as well as the expediter, is found with stative messages. In (60) a young would-be dictator in colonial Africa considers ways of attracting the attention of the world to himself. (60)

Il ne pouvait être question de provoquer un soulèvement des tribus dont les chefs et les sorciers lui demeuraient hostiles et qui étaient séparées de lui par une barrière infranchissable d'ignorance, de superstitions et de pratiques primitives. GRC 280 'There could be no question of provoking an uprising of the tribes, whose chiefs and sorcerers remained hostile to him (lui-) and who were separated from him by an insurmountable barrier of ignorance, superstitions, and primitive practices.'

This young demagogue originated from one of the tribes but had had a European education and was Europeanized to the extent of expressing himself exclusively in French. The tribal leaders considered him a traitor, saying his head was filled with white men's ideas. They mistrusted him for wanting to abolish tribal rituals and the power of tribal elders, and especially for frightening the white people,

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who in turn made life difficult for the tribes. He himself then, by his actions, character, and ideas, brought on this state of "hostility", and he gets lui-. His personal involvement, moreover, is crucial, since his ability or inability to obtain what he wants from the tribes depends on his personal relations with them. Thus it is appropriate for him to be a participant in the state of "hostility". The phrase séparées de lui 'separated from him' suggests the centrality of personal relationships. Note also the lack of interaction denoted by séparées that motivates its own occurrence with disjunctive lui. The appropriateness of lui- in (60) is seen by comparison with (61), in which the opposite situation obtains and a non-clitic is used. A pilot and a radio operator are flying alone at night in a small plane when a storm arises. The radio operator, who is sitting behind the pilot, feels uneasy and helpless, but doesn't dare disturb the pilot to ask him how he intends to handle the situation. (61)

Une tête et des épaules immobiles émergeaient seules de la faible clarté. Ce corps n'était qu'une masse sombre, appuyée un peu vers la gauche, le visage face à l'orage, lavé sans doute par chaque lueur. Mais le radio ne voyait rien de ce visage. Tout ce qui s'y pressait de sentiments pour affronter une tempête: cette moue, cette volonté, cette colère, tout ce qui s'échangeait d'essentiel, entre ce visage pâle et, là-bas, ces courtes lueurs, restait pour lui impénétrable. SVN 26-27 'A motionless head and shoulders were the only things that emerged from the faint light. This body was only a dark mass, leaning a little to the left; its face, bathed, undoubtedly, by each gleam, was turned toward the storm. But the radio operator saw nothing of this face. Everything in the way of sentiments which crowded there to confront a storm: this pursing of the lips, this will power, this anger, everything essential which was exchanged between this pale face and, in the distance, these short glimmers, remained for him impenetrable.'

The radio operator does not motivate or control the pilot's expression; there is no interaction at all between them. 'Impenetrable' implies resistance to control from outside. Moreover, the operator's involvement is not central to the passage, which is above all a description of the pilot. To conclude this discussion, we note that the Control hypothesis differs sharply with the notion of datives "governed by" an adjective, akin to the category "dative with special adjectives" of Latin grammars. This category overlooks the fact that such datives show the same types of participation in

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states as do datives in non-state ("action") messages. One must therefore conclude that lui- is chosen on the basis of its own independent value. The strongest objection to the "government" view is that predicate adjectives as a group, and many individual adjectives (examples (47)-(48), (49)-(50), 56) are used both with clitics and with non-clitics. English translations and the universalist bias of traditional grammar erase this distinction, leaving no rationale for the choice of one "construction" over the other in French.

3.

Illusory Categories of Fractional Meaning: "Dative of Possession" and "Dative of the Disadvantaged"

Many categories of the traditional grammar of French derive from the fractional view of grammatical meaning. These include the "dative of possession", and the "dative of the disadvantaged" or "maleficiary", both of which are listed as separate functions of lui-. Our position is that these categories stem from a misidentification of the linguistic causes of pragmatic effects and from misleading translational equivalencies. We shall attempt to demonstrate that the contribution of lui- is the same in these examples as everywhere else, and that the "dative of possession" and the "dative of the disadvantaged" are entirely illusory categories, as far as French is concerned. 3.1. The "Dative of Possession" Traditional grammars suggest that the function of the possessive adjective — to indicate possession with a pronominal reference — may be taken over by the dative:8 The possessive adjective is replaced by the definite article when the relation of possession is clearly enough indicated by the general sense of the sentence, especially before nouns designating parts of the body or articles of clothing, the faculties of the mind, and in certain set expressions of a general sense ... In this case, one often finds, before the verb, an indirect object personal pronoun expressing the idea of possession. (Grevisse 1969: 363)

This statement, which alludes to the notion of "inalienable" possession, is selfcontradictory: If "the relation of possession is clearly enough indicated by the general sense of the sentence", so that the possessive adjective can be left out, why does something else then have to come and indicate possession; and why, of all things, should this other thing be the indirect object pronoun? Fraser, Squair & Parker (1948:533) assert that the "possession" in the

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message comes from the definite article; but they are vague about what function is actually fulfilled by the indirect object pronoun in these cases: 196. Article for Possessive. The definite article is commonly used with the force of a possessive adjective when no ambiguity arises from its use ... (a) The use of an indirect pronoun object + the definite article often avoids ambiguity.

In this puzzling passage it is first stated that the article can be used instead of the possessive adjective only when no ambiguity results. But then it is admitted that there are indeed cases where the article is used in spite of potential ambiguity, and that the indirect object pronoun is brought in to resolve this problem. What is still not made clear is in what way the category Indirect Object is appropriate for this purpose. Example (62) will illustrate the irrelevance of "possession" to the occurrence of lui-. A man in a small town comes to the home of the mayor for a formal meeting, and, never having been there before, is somewhat ill at ease. (62)

Il n'avait pas su se débarrasser de son chapeau melon dans le vestibule et Philippon le lui prit des mains en lui désignant un siège. AMS 66 'He hadn't known how to rid himself of his bowler hat in the vestibule and Philippon took it from his hands [lit.: took it him (lui-) from the hands] and showed him a seat.'

Essentially the same message, corresponding to the same scene, could have been communicated thus: ... et Philippon le lui prit en lui désignant... 'and Philippon took it from him (lui-) and showed him ....' This would simply eliminate some detail, by not mentioning the hands. This detail could well be dispensed with, since one would naturally infer that the man was holding the hat in his hands.9 In this revised version of the example, there is no temptation to attribute possession to the dative, since no body part is mentioned; rather, lui- is clearly used to indicate a motivator. Now, if we add back the original phrase des mains 'from the hands', the role played by the referent of lui-, motivator, is the same, and it is thus pointless to insist that the dative now indicates possession. Often, the temptation to speak of a "dative of possession" in French is merely the result of interference from a translation. (63) a. Elle se pencha vers Angélo pour lui parler. 'She bent over towards Angélo to speak to him.'

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b. Et elle se pencha vers Angélo pour lui parler près de l'oreille. GHT 272 'She bent over towards Angélo to speak close to his ear [lit: to speak to him (lui-) close to the ear].' Angélo is in fact a motivator/interactor in both examples, whether or not the ear is mentioned. Confusion arises in the second example because English and French handle the situation differently. Juxtaposing the two versions, we are easily led to conclude that French is using lui- as the equivalent of English his, that is, to indicate possession. But this is a misanalysis. The utterance offers two opportunities to mention "him": once as a participant in the event, and once when the "ear" is mentioned. Both languages agree that mentioning him on both occasions would be superfluous: just as French does not say "pour lui parler près de son oreille", English does not say "to speak to him close to his ear". The two languages simply disagree on which of the two opportunities to employ: French, which exploits its Control system more extensively than English, mentions "him" with the verb, and then, having once mentioned him, lets the reader figure out whose "ear" is meant; English, which, for its own reasons, prefers to mention the owner of the ear together with the ear, lets the reader figure out that that owner is also the addressee of the communication. In the following sets, note that the role played by the referent of lui- is the same whether or not a body part belonging to that referent is mentioned subsequently. (64) a. Pour le moment on l'habilla avec des habits à moi—elle devait avoir trois ans de moins que mon âge—et on lui mit des vêtements devenus trop petits pour moi et que maman avait conservés car on l'avait, me dit-on, trouvée vêtue de sa seule chemise. VCH-II 315 [A family has taken in a foundling.] 'For the moment they dressed her with clothes of mine — she must have been three years younger than I — and they put on her (lui-) clothes which had become too small for me and which mama had kept, for, they told me, she had been found clothed only in her shirt.' b. Julie était sortie sans endosser de manteau et son frère, en la voyant frissonner, retira sa veste qu'il lui mit de force sur les épaules. SPB 138 'Julie had gone out without putting on a coat and her brother, seeing her shiver, took off his jacket and put it on her (lui-) shoulders by force.'

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In both cases, the putting on of clothing is motivated by the Mid Controller's obvious need for it; a body part is mentioned only in the second example. In the same vein: (65) a. Il finit par accepter, car il était de naturel plutôt doux, me fit un discours sur la stupidité qu'il y avait à vouloir vivre sa vie ... mille recommandations, et réprima les larmes sincères qui lui venaient. CPE 273 'He finally agreed, for he was naturally rather gentle, gave me a speech on the stupidity of wanting to live one's life ... a thousand recommendations, and held back the sincere tears which came to him (lui-).' b. Ici, Requiem reprenait haleine et, d'un revers de main essuyait les larmes qui lui venaient aux yeux. AVO 236 'Here, Requiem caught his breath and, with the back of his hand, wiped away the tears which came to his (lui-) eyes.' (66) a. Cette attitude d'un inférieur choqua l'inspecteur, mais aucune réplique ne lui vint, et, irrité, il tendit le dossier. SVN 75 'This attitude on the part of an inferior shocked the inspector, but no reply came to him (lui-), and, irritated, he held out the file.' b. Une drôle de question lui venait aux lèvres, devant ces rides sévères. SVN 8 'A strange question came to his (lui-) lips, in front of these severe wrinkles.' The type of involvement associated with lui- is the same in the (a) as in the (b) of these pairs; only the (b)'s have body parts. One cannot claim that luiindicates possession in the (a)'s; consequently, there is no justification for maintaining that it does so in the (b)'s either. Source of "possession" in the message. If possession is not encoded by lui-, where then is this information coming from? Does not the fact that the English translation of examples like (62) contains a possessive adjective indicate that the French speaker is aware of the relationship of possession? The answer is that possession is not explicitly indicated by any linguistic device at all in the French; that the relationship of possession is merely an obvious, easily inferable aspect of the real-world situation, the scene, described by the utterance. Moreover, that relationship of possession will be inferred which is the most obvious one based on information actually given. Consider again (62), part of which we repeat here.

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE Philippon le lui prit des mains. 'Philippon took it from his (lui-) hands.'

The hearer is told that there is "taking"; that there is a High Controller ('Philippon'), a Low Controller ('it' = the hat), and a third participant ('him') who controls the "taking" less than Philippon but more than the hat. Then additional information is given: 'from the hands'. There are only two candidates here for ownership of the hands (hats don't have hands). The referent of lui-, being Mid Controller, is playing a fairly important role, and it therefore would be reasonable for him to be doing something with his hands. Philippon might also be doing something with his hands. However, we are told that the hat is being taken from the hands, and it is physically impossible (or very unlikely) for Philippon to take it from his own hands. Moreover, if Philippon were in fact the owner of the hands, it would remain unclear (without further information) what the Mid Controller was actually doing. The Mid Controller thus remains the most likely owner of the hands. But since the question of which of the two men owns the hands is not the point here, the author does not bother to provide that information in any explicit way. Now let us change (62) very slightly by substituting a different preposition, leaving everything else the same, to: Philippon le lui prit avec les mains 'Philippon took it from him with his [lit.: the] hands.' The inference is now reversed: Philippon is the owner of the hands. The only variable is the lexical content of the prepositions. This demonstrates that the inference of possession is entirely independent of the contribution of lui-. Actually, avec 'with' could be interpreted in two different ways, with variation in the inference of possession. Avec can have an instrumental interpretation, as just indicated, where the hands are the instrument of "taking" and naturally associated with the High Controller, who does the actual "taking". Or, avec might be interpreted as indicating accompaniment. Then the message would be that Philippon took both the hat and the hands from the Mid Controller. This would make sense if the Mid Controller were holding the hands of a mannequin, the severed hands of a corpse, or the like, as well as the hat.10 In this case, ownership of the hands would be hard to infer without additional context. Even if the Mid Controller owned the hands (of the mannequin, corpse, etc.), the relation would not be inalienable. In fact, it is precisely the inalienability on the scene that helps make inference of ownership easy with the instrumental interpretation ("... with his hands"), or in (62) ("... from his hands"). It is not the other way around, i.e. that inalienability is encoded in the utterance. Rather,

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the lack of inalienability in the "accompaniment" message ("He took it [together] with the hands") makes inference of ownership more difficult. To pose again our original question: In an example like (62), how does the French text communicate the relationship of possession that is indicated explicitly in English by the word his? The point of (62) clearly is not which of the two men owns the hands, but rather that one man is relieving the other of his embarrassment. Therefore the author does not bother to provide any information about ownership of the hands. This information is not encoded in any way in the French text; it has no special status, in spite of what the English translation may imply. There are all sorts of true but irrelevant features of the realworld scene in (62) — hat size, for example — that the author doesn't bother to indicate. Why the English does indicate possession is a question for an analysis of the English Control system and possessive adjectives. As we have noted, English exploits its Control system less than French; it is therefore not surprising to find English in effect passing up an opportunity to make a message distinction that French makes.11 The le- option. We earlier examined in some detail the choice between luiand a possessive adjective. As indicated in Chapter 2, there is yet another option: le-. Recall the three types presented there: A. B. C.

Je lui prends la main. Je le prends par la main. Je regarde sa main.

'I take his hand.' T take him by the hand.' T look at his hand.'

As was demonstrated, lui- (Type A) and le- (Type B) are used when there is reason to portray the owner of the body part as a controlling participant in the event. The possessive adjective (Type C) is used when interest centers not on the owner, but rather on the body part itself; in this case the body part is made Low Controller and the owner is demoted to the status of a mere differentiator. When the owner is lui-, the body part may be incidental, as in (62), and mentioned with a preposition. (Recall that the role of lui- is unchanged with the body part removed from that example.) If the body part is made Low Controller, the owner may be lui- (type A); or the role of the owner may not be worth distinguishing from that of the body part, and the owner is made a possessive adjective (type C). With A, the role of the owner is of sufficient interest to be kept distinct from that of the body part. In type A, our collection contains no instances where the roles are reversed, with a body part referred to by lui- and its owner by le-. This is clearly because the owner of the body part, the entire person, has more control over an event

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than any single part of him; the deployment of the Degree of Control meanings reflects this factor. Le- (type B) represents a step down in Control from type A. Le- is used for a participant presented as non-interacting or incapable of interacting, whose role may recall a sack of potatoes or a zombie. We find le- for a participant portrayed as helpless (a kind of non-interaction), often with an element of protectiveness (the Low Controller needing to be protected because he is helpless). The choice of a way of mentioning the body part works hand in hand with the means chosen to present the owner. When the owner is le-, exerting a minimum of control, the body part itself is merely a convenient handle by which the owner is manipulated. It does not merit the status of Controlling Participant and is made the object of a preposition. The preposition helps specify how the body part is used to manipulate the owner. The contrast between lui- and le- can be illustrated by a pair of examples of ear-pulling. In (67), with lui-, a mother is playing with her two children, a boy and a girl. The two females have taken sides against the boy. (67)

C'était le seul moment de la journée où l'Adélaïde prît le temps de jouer avec ses enfants. Elle courait après Gustave, lui barrait la porte en donnant la main à Clotilde. Quand il était pris, on faisait semblant de le fesser ou de lui tirer les oreilles. AJV 193 'It was the only moment in the day when Adelaide took the time to play with her children. She chased Gustave and blocked the doorway on him by holding hands with Clotilde. When he was caught, they pretended to spank him or pull his Qui-) ears.'

This game involves a high degree of interaction among participants. The women chase the boy; he tries to escape, until he is caught. Ear-pulling is part of the game. The ears are made Controllers because they have a certain status: this is a teasing gesture. A different effect would result from pulling e.g. his hair or his arm. Example (68) shows a different type of ear-pulling, with le-. Comparison of the two examples reveals why type B would be inappropriate in (67), for both the owner and the body part. In (68), a farmer's son (Armand) comes into the barn and finds his sister (Juliette) talking to her boyfriend (Arsène), a boy from a neighboring farm who is Armand's enemy. A fight ensues. (68) Armand, qui s'était approché de sa sœur, lui donna une gifle et, comme elle ripostait, la saisit par les cheveux. Arsène se trouvait reporté dix ans en arrière sur le chemin de l'école. Son intervention s'imposait. Les deux garçons s'empoignèrent, mais la bataille fut

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courte. Sans égard aux usages courtois, Juliette passa derrière son frère et le tira par les oreilles en même temps qu'elle lui décochait un dur coup de pied au jarret. Perdant l'équilibre, il tomba à la renverse. Arsène le tenait sous son genou et cognait sans ménagement. AVO 240-241 'Armand, who had moved toward his sister, gave her a slap; and, when she returned it, he seized her (la-) by the hair. Arsène was carried back ten years, back to the road going to school. His intervention was necessary. The two boys laid hold of each other, but the battle was short-lived. Paying no attention to proper etiquette, Juliette went behind her brother and pulled him (le-) by the ears, simultaneously giving him a hard kick in the shin. Losing his balance, he fell backwards. Arsène held him under his knee and beat him without restraint.' We have two examples of type B: Armand seizes his sister by the hair, and she pulls him by the ears. This situation is different from that in (67). Firstly, the body parts here are merely convenient handles by which to grasp and pull the person. Juliette's long hair is a ready-made handle; since Armand presumably had shorter hair which was hard to grasp, and since Juliette was standing in back of him, the only thing available by which to pull him was his ears. These body parts are thus made non-participants. Concerning the role of the owner: in (67), with lui-, there is a high degree of interaction; both sides participate in the playing of a game, with ongoing give-and-take. In (68), with le-, the pulling of ears (and hair) is intended to disable one of the combatants, to deprive him (or her) of control. This is "all give and no take"; Juliette's goal is to overpower Armand. After her coup, he can't fight back, as the text subsequently states: "the battle was short-lived". Option C, we note, would be inappropriate for both (67) and (68). It would highlight the body part rather than the owner; whereas in both examples, the owner is the objective of the High Controller: in (67), to tease him (they don't want his ears per se), and in (68), to knock him down (the ears are merely a convenient handle). In the next pair the event is frapper 'hit'. In (69), Angélo comes to a hamlet whose inhabitants have all been killed by cholera (see ex. (44)). Flocks of great black birds are busy devouring the corpses. Angélo, not yet aware of what has taken place, is curious about the presence of the birds. He comes across a large flock devouring the corpse of a woman in the road. He dismounts from his horse.

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Angélo sauta à terre et courut contre eux en agitant les bras. Les corbeaux le regardaient venir d'un air très étonné. Ils s'envolèrent si lourdement et quand il fut si près d'eux qu'ils lui frappèrent les jambes, la poitrine et le visage de leurs ailes. Ils puaient le sirop fade ... Il courut vers la maison; mais sur le seuil il fut repoussé par un véritable torrent d'oiseaux qui en sortait et l'enveloppa d'un froissement d'ailes; les plumes lui frappèrent le visage. Il était dans une colère folle de ne rien comprendre et d'avoir peur. Il saisit le manche d'une bêche appuyée contre la porte et il entra. GHT 41 'Angélo jumped to the ground and ran towards them, waving his arms. The crows looked at him coming with great astonishment. They flew off so heavily and when he was so close to them that they hit his {lui-) legs, chest and face with their wings [sic]. They had a vague, syrupy stench ... [there follows a vivid description of the gruesome remains of the woman.] He ran toward the house; but on the threshold he was pushed back by a real torrent of birds coming out, which enveloped him in a crush of wings, the feathers struck his (lui-) face. He was in a mad furor of incomprehension and fear. He seized the handle of a spade that was leaning against the door, and he went in.'

Several factors reveal a high degree of interaction between Angélo (lui-) and the birds. He causes the birds to take wing and thus causes them to hit him, first by running at them and waving his arms, and then by running into the house, which causes the birds to fly out. The text moreover gives Angélo's reactions to what the birds do. In the first case he notes their odor, the sensation they produce on him; the portion of text omitted here describes how Angélo examines with interest the damage done to the corpse by the birds. In the second case, Angélo reacts to the birds with anger and fear, quite naturally picking up the nearest object that can serve as a weapon. Type C would not be appropriate for these examples because the specific body parts involved are not of central interest; the point is that the birds hit him. The listing of several body parts in the first paragraph indicates that no one of them is singled out for special attention. On the other hand, the actual body parts are not entirely without significance; the fact, in particular, that these birds hit him on the face helps account for his strong reaction. The body parts thus at least merit the status of Low Controller.

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Example (70), with le-, shows the opposite of what has just been seen: a failure to react. Meaulnes is driving a horse and wagon in the countryside, when the horse suddenly slows down and starts limping. Meaulnes gets down to see what the matter is. (70)

Il comprit enfin qu'elle avait tout simplement un caillou dans le sabot. En gars expert au maniement du bétail, il s'accroupit, tenta de lui saisir le pied droit avec sa main gauche et de le placer entre ses genoux, mais il fut gêné par la voiture. A deux reprises, la jument se déroba et avança de quelques mètres. Le marchepied vint le frapper à la tête et la roue le blessa au genou. Il s'obstina et finit par triompher de la bête peureuse; mais le caillou se trouvait si bien enfoncé que Meaulnes dut sortir son couteau de paysan pour en venir à bout. Lorsqu'il eut terminé sa besogne, et qu'il releva enfin la tête, à demi étourdi et les yeux troubles, il s'aperçut avec stupeur que la nuit tombait. AGM 45

'He finally realized that she simply had a pebble in her hoof. Being expert in cattle-handling, he crouched down, and tried to grasp her right foot with his left hand and place it between his knees, but the wagon got in his way. Twice, the mare got away and moved forward several meters. The step came and hit him (le-) in the head and the wheel wounded him (le-) in the knee. He persisted and finally triumphed over the fearful beast; but the pebble was driven in so deeply that Meaulnes had to take out his peasant's knife to finish the job. When he had completed his task, and raised his head, half dazed and with clouded vision, he noticed with astonishment that night was falling.' When Meaulnes is hit in the head and wounded in the knee, he is le- both times. What seizes our attention is Meaulnes's obliviousness to what is happening to him. So absorbed is he in his task that he ignores his injuries. He is obstinate, perseveres, and in fact loses track of time until he finally comes out of his stupor. Le- underscores Meaulnes's zombielike state. The concomitant relegating of the body parts themselves to a prepositional phrase is also appropriate; since Meaulnes is completely oblivious to what is happening to him, the particular part of the body affected is obviously of little consequence. If lui- had been used here instead of le-, the message would be something more like: "He felt hurt". In fact, at the next mention of these wounds eight

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pages later, we see their effect on Meaulnes as well as the first indication of a reaction on his part. And here, finally lui- appears: Vint un moment où son genou, blessé au marchepied, lui fit si mal qu'il dut s'arrêter, la jambe raidie. 'There came a moment when his knee, wounded by the step, hurt him {lui-) so badly that he had to stop, his leg stiffened.' Example (71) shows le- used in another variety of non-interaction. Mathieu finds his friend Ivich in a discotheque, very drunk, and tries to take her away. (71)

— Venez, dit Mathieu doucement. Il la prit par les épaules et l'entraîna; il entendait derrière lui une rumeur consternée. Au milieu de l'escalier, Ivich se fit plus lourde. "Ivich", supplia-t-il. Elle secoua ses boucles, hilare. "Je veux m'asseoir là", dit-elle. — Je vous en prie. Ivich se mit à pouffer et releva sa jupe au-dessus du genou. — Je veux m'asseoir là. Mathieu la saisit par la taille et l'emporta. Quand ils furent dans la rue, il la lâcha: elle ne s'était pas débattue. SAR 364

'"Come on", said Mathieu softly. He took her {la-) by the shoulders and dragged her away; he heard behind him a clamor of dismay. In the middle of the stairway, Ivich got heavier. "Ivich", he begged. Hilarious, she shook her curls. 'T want to sit down here", she said. "Please." Ivich burst out laughing and lifted her skirt up above her knee. "I want to sit down here." Mathieu seized her {la-) by the waist and carried her out. When they were in the street, he let her go: she hadn't struggled.' Ivich isn't cooperating; but she isn't struggling or resisting, either. She is behaving like a sack of potatoes. Mathieu first has to "drag" then actually "carry" her away. For her part, her hilarity, etc. indicate that she is more or less oblivious to what he is doing. Type B is also appropriate for the role of the particular body parts: since her whole body must be displaced, large handles are needed; the shoulders and waist have no other significance than to provide the necessary handles for this purpose.

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Now some examples of arm-taking. Taking the arm can be a gesture with social significance, expressing friendship or solidarity; it can also be a mere handle for manipulating a person's movements. In (72), with lui-, three prisoners of the Spanish revolution have just learned they are to be executed. One, who is especially young, reacts very badly. Another one, Tom, tries to comfort him. (72)

Il n'avait plus rien dit mais il était devenu gris: son visage et ses mains étaient gris. Il se rassit et regarda le sol avec des yeux ronds. Tom était une bonne âme, il voulut lui prendre le bras, mais le petit se dégagea violemment en faisant une grimace. SMU 14 'He hadn't said anything more, but he had turned gray: his face and his hands were gray. He sat back down and looked at the ground with wide eyes. Tom was a good soul; he tried to take his (lui-) arm, but the youngster jerked away violently and with a grimace.'

The arm-taking is motivated by pity for the younger man; it is an attempt to establish interaction (even though the attempt is rejected, which shows that the young man was not unreacting). The arm symbolizes this attempt to assert solidarity and is made Low Controller. In (73) there is arm-taking for a different purpose, with le- twice. Meaulnes, after one day of marriage, has temporarily left his wife, with her permission. He is not heard from until a couple of years later, when he returns to his house and meets his best friend, who is now living there. Meaulnes is not aware that his wife has died in the meantime. At first, before he sees his friend and before he has reoriented himself, he wanders around a bit. (73)

Il avait disparu derrière la maison, en avait fait le tour, et il revenait, hésitant. Alors je m'avançai vers lui, et sans rien dire, je l'embrassai en sanglotant. Tout de suite, il comprit: "Ah! dit-il d'une voix brève, elle est morte, n'est-ce pas?" Et il resta là, debout, sourd, immobile et terrible. Je le pris par le bras et doucement je l'entraînai vers la maison. Il faisait jour maintenant. Tout de suite, pour que le plus dur fût accompli, je lui fis monter l'escalier qui menait vers la chambre de la morte. Sitôt entré, il tomba à deux genoux devant le lit et, longtemps, resta la tête enfouie dans ses deux bras. Il se releva enfin, les yeux égarés, titubant, ne sachant où il était. Et, toujours le guidant par le bras, j'ouvris la porte qui faisait communiquer cette chambre avec celle de la petite fille. AGM 245

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'He had disappeared behind the house, had gone around it, and he was coming back, hesitatingly. Then I moved towards him and, without saying anything, embraced him, sobbingly. He understood at once. "Ah!", he said curtly, "she's dead, isn't she?" And he remained standing there, unsensing, immobile and terrible. I took him (Je-) by the arm and gently drew him towards the house. It was daylight now. At once, so that the hardest part would be over with, I made him go up the staircase which led to the bedroom of the deceased. As soon as he had entered, he fell on both knees before the bed and remained for a long time with his head buried in his arms. Finally he got up, his eyes wandering, staggering, not knowing where he was. And, still guiding him (le-) by the arm, I opened the door joining this room with the little girl's room.' Meaulnes's behavior recalls the "zombie" theme. He is disoriented from the beginning to the end of this scene ("not knowing where he was", etc.). On top of this, he is stunned by the news of his wife's death. He allows himself to be led around without attempting to exert any will of his own. Unlike the owner of the arm in (72), Meaulnes is unreacting. The arm is the handle by which the friend leads him around, it being the most convenient part for that purpose. This is explicitly stated at the second occurrence of le-: "guiding him by the arm". The arm does not have special significance as in (72); the whole person is being taken around, and the arm is only the instrument for doing this. In his zombielike state Meaulnes is fairly helpless, having to be led around. The theme of "helplessness" is often associated with type B, which represents a participant unable to exert much control. In (74), Angélo and a nun are going around washing the corpses of victims of the cholera epidemic. After washing one body they find in the street, they discover that the man isn't dead after all, but merely unconscious after a severe choleric attack. When he revives a little, they try to make him walk. (74) — Mais non, dit Angélo, il est vivant, c'est magnifique. Prenez-le par un bras, moi par l'autre. Certainement il peut marcher. Ramenons-le chez lui. GHT 168 ' "Why, no", said Angélo, "he's alive; that's wonderful. Take him (le-) by one arm, I'll take him by the other. He should be able to walk. Let's take him back home." '

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A man coming back nearly from the dead as this man just has, weak, helpless, and having to be held up to walk, is very appropriately referred to with le-. The arms are again mere convenient handles. Many examples of helplessness also contain an element of protectiveness: the High Controller has a protective attitude toward a weak Low Controller. We see this in two examples of taking someone by the waist. The passage from which (75) is taken portrays the close relationships in a large laborer-class family. The father has been out in the evening walking with a young daughter. They enter a café where they find one of the man's older sons. (75)

Vers neuf heures et demie, le père d'Artevel entra dans le café, donnant la main à Marie-Louise qu'il venait de promener au bord du fleuve ... Le patron l'invita à s'asseoir, mais il se défendit de rien prendre. — La petite a sommeil, je n'ai pas le temps. J'avais promis à sa mère de la ramener à neuf heures et voilà qui'il est la demie ... Marie-Louise s'approcha de son frère qui la prit par la taille, et l'un des joueurs fit observer: — Ces deux-là, ils sont bien le frère et la sœur ... Le portrait AMS 117-118 d'Artevel, quoi ...

'Toward nine-thirty, the father of Artevel entered the café, holding hands with Marie-Louise with whom he had just taken a walk along the river ... The owner invited him to have a seat, but he refused to take anything. 'The little one is sleepy, I don't have time. I promised her mother to bring her back at nine o'clock, and it's already half-past..." Marie-Louise went over to her brother who took her (la-) by the waist, and one of the players remarked: "Those two are a real brother and sister ... Just the picture of Artevel ..." ' The passage goes on to talk about the closeness among the members of the family, how much the parents liked having a large family, and how they hoped to have even more children. The picture here is overwhelmingly one of an affectionate and protective attitude; witness the father's concern for the little girl's being tired and her going to bed on time. When Marie-Louise walks over to her brother, his taking her by the waist is a gesture motivated by an attitude of protectiveness toward his little sister. In (76), we see a very different type of waist-taking, with type A. The servant-girl of a town lawyer has been brutally murdered. The suspect is one

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Troussequin, a laborer employed by the lawyer. This suspicion is reinforced by the fact that Troussequin had tried to pinch the lawyer's cook on the very morning of the crime. In this passage, the public prosecutor reconstructs the crime as he imagines it. He assumes the servant-girl had asked Troussequin to come to her room to repair something, and that Troussequin had been unable to resist the passions that overwhelmed him once he found himself alone with her. (76)

Dans la chambre, je la pince, je lui prends la taille, l'émotion me rend maladroit, elle se défend, elle me fait mal. La colère, l'amourpropre, la lubricité me font perdre la tête. Je redeviens le Troussequin de ma première tentative de viol, et pire. AMS 139 'In the room, I pinch her, I take her Qui-) waist; emotion makes me clumsy, she defends herself, she hurts me. Anger, vanity and lust make me lose my head. I become again the Troussequin of my first attempt at rape, and worse.'

This waist-taking is the very opposite of protective: an erotic gesture, motivated by "lust" and "emotion". With lui-, there is no trace of the "defenseless little sister" theme seen with le-; the owner of the waist is resisting. The nature of the personal relationships brings out the contrast clearly: the brother-sister relationship calls forth le-, and the rapist-victim relationship evokes lui-. We may also compare the status of the waist in the two examples. With le-, the same attitude of protective caring could be expressed by taking the hand, the shoulders, or the arm. In these cases the body part, having no particular significance, is put in a prepositional phrase and denied controlling participant status. With lui-, however, the taking of the waist has a particular erotic significance which would not apply to just any body part, and the waist is therefore made Low Controller. In summary, the strategies of lui- in examples where it has traditionally been analyzed as indicating possession are in fact no different from its strategies everywhere else. The "dative of possession", unmotivated in its own right as a use of a form whose basic function is "indirect object", is completely unjustified as a category of the grammar of French. 3.2. "Beneficiary" and "Maleficiary" The rubrics "beneficiary" and "maleficiary" have their origins in the category "dative of interest", said to denote the person "in whose interest" an action is performed. This is broken down into "dative of the advantaged" and "dative of the disadvantaged", terms inherited from Latin grammars (dativus

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commodi out incommodi).12 The following are representative of examples cited in French grammars: (77) (78)

Quelqu'un lui a prêté de l'argent. 'Someone lent him some money.' ("advantaged")

Quelqu'un lui a volé son argent. 'Someone has stolen his money from him.' ("disadvantaged") Grammars having these categories imply that all datives in French are potentially instances of one or the other, owing mainly to the idea (see Blinkenberg 1961:172) that it is impossible to distinguish datives of interest from other datives in French due to the extreme vagueness of the notion "interest". Yet there is a fundamental incoherency in the category "dative of interest". "Advantaged" and "disadvantaged" are not merely different aspects of the same thing; they in fact contradict each other. Moreover, in an example like (78), the subject {quelqu'un) seems to be the one "advantaged", and thus it is not clear why it should not be in the dative. Moving to a higher level of abstraction so as to encompass both "advantaged" and "disadvantaged" yields a category so vague that many subjects and direct objects must be included. Grevisse (1969: §192), for instance, talks about "the person or thing toward which the action is directed"; but this would seem to include an example like J'atteins le livre 'I reach the book', where the action is directed towards the book, yet the book is a direct object. The result of this unresolved conflict is that grammars tend to view the French dative as primarily denoting a beneficiary, with a troublesome residue of examples where it denotes a maleficiary. The notion "beneficiary" necessarily applies in a very loose sense; some grammars in effect see a beneficiary in every dative. From the vantage of the Control hypothesis, most alleged beneficiaries are actually motivators. The term "beneficiary" is best reserved for the more limited situation in which the High Controller's motivation for doing an action is the benefit that will accrue to the Mid Controller. That is, the High Controller is motivated by good will toward or high regard for the Mid Controller, rather than by any particular thing the Mid Controller does to precipitate the action. Bona fide beneficiary examples thus constitute a small subcategory of motivator. Here are some examples of beneficiary in this sense. In (79) a boy is just going home from a hospital stay. His parents have promised to buy him the seven league boots (see example (41)) when he gets out of the hospital.

140 (79)

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE Durant le trajet de l'hôpital à la maison, qu'il fit avec son père, il ne posa pas de questions, ne voulant point, par délicatesse, gâter à ses parents le plaisir le lui faire la surprise. En arrivant chez lui, personne ne lui parla des bottes, mais il n'en eut point d'inquiétude. Le matin, ses parents étaient occupés à l'épicerie. Sans doute, se réservaient-ils de les lui offrir au moment du repas. APM 197-198 'During the trip home from the hospital, with his father, he didn't ask any questions, not wanting, out of considerateness, to spoil for his parents the pleasure of surprising him [lit.: make him (lui-) the surprise]. Upon arriving home, nobody spoke to him about the boots, but he wasn't worried. In the morning, his parents were busy in the store. They were undoubtedly waiting to give them to him (lui-) at dinnertime.'

This is pure gift-giving. What motivates the "surprising" and the "giving" is the pleasure these acts will give the boy. The boy, although he deliberately avoids any overt act that will precipitate the surprise or the giving of the boots, is still a motivator, by virtue of the fact that his parents want him to have some benefit. Example (80) repeats part of (25). A tax-collector suffering insults from taxpayers is rescued by a civic-minded onlooker: (80)

Ses yeux brillaient d'une flamme d'ironie et à chaque instant cherchaient le regard du percepteur pour y surprendre le reflet de ses propres pensées et le signal d'une action concertée. Mais le percepteur ne le voyait même pas et restait ignorant de la sympathie muette que lui offrait M. Rebuffaud. APM 155 'His eyes gleamed with an ironic flame and constantly sought to catch the eye of the tax-collector, in hopes of finding there the reflection of his own thoughts and the signal for a concerted action. But the tax-collector didn't even see him and remained ignorant of the silent sympathy offered him (lui-) by Mr. Rebuffaud.'

The tax-collector does not actively solicit Rebuffaud's sympathy; he is not even aware of it. This sympathy is entirely gratuitous. It is motivated by the patriotic high regard Rebuffaud has for tax-collectors. The same general approach applies equally to the other dative of interest: the dative of the disadvantaged or "maleficiary". The maleficiary is of particular interest because it appears to contradict every approach to the French dative. If we look only at the single-sentence examples found in traditional treatments,

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the maleficiary seems to contradict the Control hypothesis as well. If lui- really is used for an innocent victim, then this appears to represent a participant who has no control whatever over the event (look again at example (78)). However, upon closer examination, and in context, these examples prove to be more subtle and complex than they first appear. Careful investigation shows that with maleficiarles, lui- is used in the same Control-derived strategies as elsewhere. Often the lui- participant is presented as in some way motivating that which is done to him; in other cases, he is an interactor, a causer, or an expediter. Of great significance is the fact that the various non-clitic alternatives to luithat we have seen all along appear here as well, expressing similar messages of deprivation or disadvantaging, but without the motif of a Controlling Participant. The "maleficiary", then, is not a discrete category of grammar, or even a strategy. It is a classic case of a distracting factor, a message element whose source has been misidentified, leading to the introduction of an irrelevant category in the traditional grammar of French. First let us establish that whenever "disadvantaging" accompanies lui-, the disadvantaging comes not from lui-, but from some other aspect of the event or larger context. This can be shown with a set of examples using the same or similar verbs, all with lui-, where the message is sometimes maleficiary, sometimes beneficiary, sometimes both, or indeterminate between the two. These examples have to do with taking something away from someone. The verb in the first two is enlever 'take away, remove'. In (81) a man who has lost a dog is talking to another man who may have seen it. (81)

—Il n'avait pas de collier, votre chien? Le grand-père hoche la tête. —Non, le chien avait grossi et nous avions dû lui enlever le collier qui l'étranglait, surtout quand nous étions obligés de l'attacher. GCB 41

' "Didn't he have a collar, your dog?" The grandfather shook his head. "No; the dog had gotten fat and we had to take the collar off him (lui-) because it was choking him, especially when we had to tie him up." ' The "taking off" is clearly for the dog's benefit. The dog motivates the act because of its size and its choking. Now a passage from later in the same story, with the same verb enlever and also with lui-. This dog turns out to be a dangerous attack dog, and the dog's finder has put it in a kennel. There it is

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cared for by a keeper, Keys, who is fiercely determined to break the dog of its vicious habits, and employs extreme methods to do so, including starvation. This infuriates the kennel owner, who disapproves. The owner and Keys have a violent argument. The owner calls the finder and tells her to come and take the dog back. She later reports to her husband what happened: (82) —J'ai dit, d'accord. J'ai pris ma voiture et je suis allée au chenil. Seulement, voilà. Keys ne veut pas qu'on lui enlève le chien. GCB 67 ' 'T said, OK. I took my car and I went to the kennel. Only, Keys doesn't want the dog to be taken away from him [lit.: that one take him (lui-) away the dog]." ' After which there followed another violent argument between Keys and the owner, in front of the woman. Keys is not a beneficiary of the "removing"; on the contrary, he is presented as a victim, being deprived of the dog he wants to keep. Yet lui- and enlever are present here as in (81), and the meaning MORE CONTROL is no less appropriate here than there. Keys, firstly, motivates removing the dog by his actions: starving the dog and creating a situation the kennel owner cannot tolerate. These actions directly bring on the "taking away". Further, Keys's resistance to the removal of the dog provides additional justification for lui-. The kennel owner and the finder are clearly in charge of removing the dog; but Keys maintains a considerable degree of control over the removal by resisting it. The crucial point is that in these two examples, neither the "benefit" nor the "disadvantaging" is anywhere actually encoded, not by lui- nor by enlever. Benefit and disadvantaging are merely aspects of the scene evoked in the mind of the reader. In (82), the reader infers "benefit" because he knows that taking a collar off a choking dog is a kind thing to do. In (82), the role of "victim" emerges when it becomes clear that there is a conflict of wills between Keys and the kennel owner. However, neither of these inferences can emerge until after the reader has figured out the general shape of the message. This being the case, these notions obviously cannot be part of the encoding mechanism. Luisignals the same thing in both cases: MORE CONTROL for its referent. The need for appeal to context is seen clearly in (83), which initially looks like a "disadvantaged" participant. However, context casts a different light on it: (83)

La lampe tremblait si fort entre ses doigts qu'elle la lui arracha. BCR 24 'The lamp was trembling so hard between his fingers that she snatched it away from him (lui-).'

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In this scene, a housekeeper is awakened by a noise in the middle of the night. She goes to her bedroom door and opens it, to find the master of the house standing outside the door, trembling in terror, with the lamp in his hand. His trembling is what motivates her taking away the lamp; but it is ultimately to his advantage and to protect him that she does so, since he could drop the lamp and start a fire. In this instance, then, the participant referred to by lui- is both deprived and a beneficiary. Example (84) is familiar from our earlier discussion (see example (62)). (84)

Il n'avait pas su se débarrasser de son chapeau melon dans le vestibule et Philippon le lui prit des mains en lui désignant un siège. AMS 66 'He hadn't known how to rid himself of his bowler hat in the vestibule and Philippon took it from his hands [lit.: took him (lui-) it from the hands] and showed him a seat.'

In this context of a cordial visit, between entering the house and being offered a seat, there is no reason to think that this man was being robbed of his hat by his host, and thus no temptation to see a maleficiary. The sensible inference is that of a courteous gesture, intended to put the man at ease. In (85), also with prendre and lui-, the young boy of example (37) imagines what he will do with the seven-league boots when he gets them. His mother is very poor, and he dreams of using the boots to get necessities. He will take a piece of meat from a display counter in one city; then he will take a loaf of bread in another city; vegetables, milk, coffee in three other cities. Then he thinks of a way to get rent money. (85)

C'est assez facile. On entre dans une boutique à Lille ou à Carcassonne, une boutique cossue où les clients n'entrent pas en tenant serré dans la main l'argent des commissions. Au moment où une dame reçoit sa monnaie au comptoir, on lui prend les billets des mains et, avant qu'elle ait eu le temps de s'indigner, on est déjà rentré à Montmartre. S'emparer ainsi du bien d'autrui, c'est très gênant, même à l'imaginer dans son lit. Mais avoir faim, c'est gênant aussi. APM 190 Tt's easy enough. You go into a shop in Lille or Carcassonne, an affluent shop where the customers don't come in clutching their errand-money in their hand. Just when a lady is getting her change at the counter, you take the bills from her (lui-) hands and, before she has the time to get upset, you have already returned to Mont-

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martre. Snatching other people's possessions like this is very uncomfortable, even to imagine it in your bed. But being hungry is uncomfortable too.' The topic is robbery, the lady is a stranger, she is rich and the boy is poor, and it is money that is being taken. This context is what suggests viewing lui-, the lady, as a victim, or maleficiary. But what is actually encoded here is very close to that which is encoded in (84), even though the result is the opposite. The strategy of lui- is the same in both: Motivator. In (84) the man looks ill at ease, motivating Philippon to take his hat from him. In (85) the lady is a carefully chosen victim whose characteristics motivate the theft. The boy is looking for a rich lady, one who shops in a shop for rich people, and especially a lady who doesn't hold on to her money too tightly. The "haves vs. have nots" theme here also makes this lady, although she does not consciously bring on the theft, something less than a completely innocent victim. To recapitulate, any disadvantaging in the message can clearly be attributed to sources other than lui-, and cannot even be pinned entirely on the verb; it emerges from the total context. It is thus not reasonable to posit "disadvantaging" as a function of lui-. The paradox of lui's meaning two opposite things, beneficiary and maleficiary, disappears, because lui- indicates neither of these things; its function is to signal MORE CONTROL. Under the influence of these two ill-founded categories, traditional presentations have omitted precisely the data which bring out most sharply the true function of lui-: examples containing a victim indicated by lui- contrasted with examples containing a victim indicated by other linguistic means. Let us examine a few such sets. Example (86) repeats a portion of (69), seen above, in which Angélo encounters birds devouring corpses. (86)

Les corbeaux le regardaient venir d'un air très étonné. Ils s'envolèrent si lourdement et quand il fut si près d'eux qu'ils lui frappèrent les jambes, la poitrine et le visage de leurs ailes. Ils puaient le sirop fade ... Il courut vers la maison; mais sur le seuil il fut repoussé par un véritable torrent d'oiseaux qui en sortait et l'enveloppa d'un froissement d'ailes; les plumes lui frappèrent le visage. GHT 41 'The crows looked at him coming with great astonishment. They flew off so heavily and when he was so close to them that they hit his (lui-) legs, chest and face with their wings [sic]. They had a

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vague, syrupy stench ... [there follows a gruesome description of the remains of the woman. ] He ran toward the house; but on the threshold he was pushed back by a real torrent of birds coming out, which enveloped him in a crush of wings, the feathers struck his (lui-) face.' Angélo, victim of the hitting, in fact causes it, as noted above: first by running at the birds and stirring them up, and then by running into the house and again stirring them up. Now an example from the same story, with the same verb, in which Angélo is also victimized, but where lui- is not chosen. Angélo passes by a house and a woman comes out and asks him for help. Inside, her husband is undergoing choleric convulsions. She and Angélo try to straighten him out against the great force of these convulsions, during one of which he is thrown against Angélo. (87)

Une convulsion plus violente encore que les autres arracha le malade aux mains de la femme et le jeta contre Angélo. Il sentit les dents frapper sa joue. GHT 93 'A convulsion even more violent than the others tore the patient out of the woman's hands and threw him against Angélo. He felt the teeth strike his (sa) cheek.'

Angélo does not bring on this "striking"; it is the result of a convulsion. We do not even have interaction between Angélo and the man, since Angélo is a stranger who walked in off the street and the man is so near death that he is not aware of Angélo. Hence the possessive adjective, which presents Angélo not as a Controlling Participant. One type of "maleficiary" context that frequently has lui- is a fight. The verb in (88) is saigner 'bleed'. (88) Ils se battirent ... Certains des coups que frappait Giuseppe, s'ils n'avaient pu être parés avec promptitude auraient été presque mortels. Mais Angélo lui fit saigner le nez et Giuseppe se coucha, griffa l'herbe et la terre, écuma et pleura avec de petits sanglots d'enfant. GHT 224 'They fought ... Some of the blows which Giuseppe struck, if they hadn't been promptly parried, could have been almost fatal. But Angélo made his nose bleed [lit.: made him (lui-) bleed the nose] and Giuseppe lay down, clawed the grass and the earth, foamed, and cried with little childlike sobs.' It is inherent in a fight that every action by one participant is motivated by enmity for the other participant and what he has just done. Angélo's making

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Giuseppe's nose bleed is immediately motivated by Giuseppe's blows. Now another example with saigner, where lui- is not used and there is no fight. A man drinking too heavily falls off his bar stool. His wife and a friend take him home, where they have their first chance to examine him. (89)

A peine l'avaient-ils étendu sur un lit, qu'ils virent que sa main saignait abondamment et que les prunelles étaient révulsées. MDA 224 'Hardly had they stretched him out on a bed when they saw that his (sa) hand was bleeding abundantly and that his pupils were turned up.'

This man is presented as completely non-interacting: he has been in an accident; he is stone drunk and nearly unconscious. Of central interest here is not the man's participation in the bleeding, but rather the body parts themselves and the clinical symptoms they present. Example (90) illustrates a more subtle use of lui-, with piquer 'sting, prick'. In this folk-story narrative, a young farmer encounters a mythical creature, the Vouivre, or Viper-Lady, who possesses a fabulous ruby crown and a horde of vipers to safeguard it. This farmer has a particular horror of snakes; but when he sees the Vouivre he forgets everything else and follows her into the forest. (90)

Le premier moment de surprise passé, il ne pensa plus qu'à la rejoindre et à son tour entra dans le sous-bois. La crainte des vipères ne l'effleurait même pas. Il marchait à grands pas dans les fougères, les bas de pantalon trempés par la rosée qui dégouttait dans ses sabots et lui piquait les pieds. AVO 11 'Once the first moment of surprise was past, he thought only about joining her and he in turn entered the undergrowth. Fear of the vipers didn't even graze him. He walked with large steps in the ferns, the bottoms of his trousers soaked by the dew which dripped down into his wooden shoes and pricked his (lui-) feet.'

At first it seems strange for the author to insist on the farmer's central involvement in the dew pricking his feet; this seems a minor descriptive detail. But if we ask why this detail is mentioned at all, we see that it does relate to the theme of the passage: the farmer's single-mindedness, captured in the phrase "he thought only about joining her". His desire to overtake the Vouivre made him forget even his horror of snakes. It also made him get his pants and feet wet, in spite of the discomfort. By taking large steps, another measure of his determination, and by walking off the footpath into the undergrowth, he is

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himself responsible for soaking his pants and getting the water on his feet. By adding to the message the element: "He (the farmer) was responsible for this", lui- gives the author an opportunity to remind us of his theme: the deliberateness of the farmer's actions. Bringing on his own discomfort is an indication of just how determined he is. This example of lui- illustrates a principle of great importance in understanding the distribution of linguistic forms: When a speaker or writer wants to push a message in a certain direction he will take advantage of whatever opportunities are available to him to do so. Much of what may seem useless redundancy in the deployment of linguistic forms actually reflects a well-known aspect of human behavior. When we want to get a point across we will repeat ourselves, often by trying to say the same thing in several different ways. This type of behavior is ultimately what lies behind various types of "government" phenomena in language, as later discussion will make clear. This explanation for lui- in (90) is confirmed by an example with piquer and the possessive adjective instead of lui-. A husband and wife are on a business trip in a town bordering the southern Algerian desert. She is unhappy about being there. When the time comes for them to return to their unpleasant hotel room, she suggests that they go instead to visit a fort the hotel manager had recommended. (91)

Lorsqu'ils grimpèrent l'escalier du fort, il était cinq heures de l'après-midi. Le vent avait complètement cessé. Le ciel, tout entier découvert, était maintenant d'un bleu de pervenche. Le froid, devenu plus sec, piquait leurs joues. CER 25 'When they climbed the staircase of the fort, it was five o'clock in the afternoon. The wind had completely stopped. The sky, entirely clear, was now a periwinkle blue. The cold, having become drier, stung their (leurs) cheeks.'

The central item in this passage is the weather. The weather, in fact, is a major theme throughout the story: the hostility of both the people and the climate of the region help set up the woman's dislike of it. Here the weather is described in terms of three factors: the wind, the sky, and the temperature. The mentioning of cheeks is simply a measure of how cold it was. There is no reason to allot any more centrality of involvement to the man and woman at this point. Now a passage from a little later in the same story. The woman, upon arriving at the top of the fort, is deeply affected by the view of the desert from there. It strongly attracts her and seems to fulfill something that is lacking in her. Late that night, after she and her husband have gone to bed, she wakes up. She is ill

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with fever and pierced with the cold; but she hears that place calling to her, and she must go. She gets up and goes out, taking great precautions not to wake her husband or alert other people. She heads for the fort. (92)

Elle courait le menait au fort. avait envahi la courait, à demi

long de la courte avenue, maintenant déserte, qui Le froid, qui n'avait plus à lutter contre le soleil, nuit; l'air glacé lui brûlait les poumons. Mais elle aveugle, dans l'obscurité. CER 32-33

'She ran along the short avenue, now deserted, which led to the fort. The cold, which no longer had to struggle against the sun, had overwhelmed the night; the icy air burned her {lui-) lungs. But she ran, half blind, in the darkness.' The participants, the woman and the cold, are the same as above; but the roles they play are very different thematically. The strategy of lui- here is very much like that in example (90). The theme is the woman's determination to get to the fort, which means overcoming various obstacles: her fever, the late hour, the extreme cold, the presence of other people, the darkness. By explicitly reminding us that she herself brings on the burning of the lungs, the author underscores her determination. Thus, all the above examples of "maleficiary" can be explained as familiar exploitations of MORE CONTROL; there is no need to invoke any new factor. In tracing the connection between meaning and message, one must keep in mind that the deployment of lui- reflects its use as a tool to convey messages, in the best ways speakers and writers can devise. Since they often want to be subtle or behave in other characteristic ways, analysis must take this factor into account; there is no justification for insisting that language users must always be simpleminded and verbally clumsy. Let us round out this discussion of lui- in contexts of "disadvantaging" by examining in more depth some of the subtleties presented by these examples. We have noted that the context of a fight paves the way for lui- because of the enmity of each participant for the other and the give-and-take of a fight. Of our 275 "maleficiary" examples, in about 60 (22%) either a fight is going on, or the High and Mid participants are enemies, or there is some adversary relationship inherent in the situation. In (93), for example, a Mid Controller motivates because he is the enemy. A government commission in Russia has come to a village after the Bolshevik revolution to deal with the kulaks, rich peasants who owned their own property before the collectivization of land.

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Il s'agissait des koulaks. On voulait en finir avec eux. On allait leur prendre leurs biens, et faire rentrer ceux-ci dans la communauté. On instituerait des fermes collectives, des «kolkhozes», dans lesquelles chacun trouverait sa part. Pour les «koulaks», ces misérables, on les déporterait en Sibérie, dans l'Oural, loin en tout cas. VCH-II 335 'It was about the kulaks. They wanted to be finished with them. They were going to take their property from them {leur-), and bring it into the community. Collective farms, "kolkhozes", would be set up, in which each would have his share. As for these wretched "kulaks", they would be deported to Siberia, or to the Urals, in any case far away.'

This passage is from a first-person narrative, told by a fervent supporter of the revolution. In his eyes, the kulaks are bad guys, who therefore deserve to have their goods confiscated. Note the double mention of this participant, with both leur- and the possessive adjective. The latter alone would suffice to describe the scene.13 But leur- underscores the narrator's view that they are enemies, by insisting: "They brought it on themselves; it's their fault." This use of lui- to project a point of view is frequent. In (94) we have a farm family, a woman and her daughter-in-law who live in one house and don't get along. (94)

Louise Muselier, la mère, était engagée jusqu'à la ceinture dans un placard de la cuisine à la recherche d'une terrine qu'elle soupçonnait sa bru de lui avoir cassée. Elle n'en était pas encore à formuler une accusation, ni même un soupçon, mais le ton de ses paroles étouffées dans les profondeurs du placard était déjà imprécatoire ... Lorsque Louise sortit du placard, sa conviction était faite. On lui avait cassé sa terrine et tout désignait Emilie comme la seule coupable possible. Louise n'aimait pas sa bru et la traitait avec froideur, tout en lui laissant d'être dure à la peine et dévouée aux intérêts de la ferme. AVO 22-23 'Louise Muselier, the mother, was involved up to her waist in a kitchen cupboard, looking for a terrine which she suspected her daughter-in-law of having broken on her (lui-). She wasn't yet at the point of formulating an accusation, or even a suspicion, but the tone of her muffled words from the depths of the cupboard was already imprecatory ... When Louise came out of the closet, her mind was made up.

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE Somebody had broken her terrine on her {lui-), and everything pointed to Emily as the only possible guilty party. Louise didn't like her daughter-in-law and treated her coldly, although granting that she was a hard worker and devoted to the interests of the farm.'

Due to the tacit adversary relationship between them and her inclination to attribute evil motives to her daughter-in-law, Louise takes the breaking of the terrine as a deliberately hostile act on Emily's part. Now, it turns out that Emily did not in fact break the terrine, and thus was not actually guilty of a hostile act. What Louise does here is project her own feelings: she chooses to view herself as the object of an attack. As in these two examples, such use of lui- is frequent in narratives that are presented from a particular character's point of view. When entities that a character regards as his enemies are High Controller, the character himself may be included in the message as Mid Controller. He thereby asserts himself to be involved in the event even though in reality he may not be, just as Louise was not actually involved in the putative breaking of the terrine. She thus projects her view that she is being victimized. The message is: "She did it just to get at me." Note here again the double mention of the Mid Control participant, with both lui- and the possessive adjective, superfluous for a mere description of the scene. Recall our earlier discussion of this subtlety in relation to the "motivator" and "interactor" strategies (examples (44), (46)). Subtleness is appropriate in example (94) too. This is where Louise is first introduced, and the details given here are intended to reveal something about her character. Louise does come to the point of openly accusing her daughter-in-law of breaking the terrine. When the terrine turns up intact, the text says that Louise "would have given plenty for the terrine to be really broken". Feuds, both within the family and between families, are a major theme of this book (cf. example (68)), and each feud occupies its own niche in the story. By including these "extra" lui-'s, the author achieves subtle reminders of the adversary relations permeating the story without diverting attention from the immediate point: the missing terrine. The intrusion of a participant's point of view may be made explicit, as in example (95) from the story of the cholera epidemic. People entering a town were often stopped and forced to stay in a quarantine before being permitted into the town. While in quarantine, they were usually tricked into giving up their possessions or paying large sums for bribes, and in most cases, they caught the disease and died there. In (95), some travelers are considering how to avoid getting caught as they approach a town. The speaker comments on how people

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at this stage have gotten over their fear of the disease and are now exploiting the epidemic for selfish gains. (95)

Les gens se sont guéris de leur frousse (qui était trop grande) en se rendant compte que la maladie était une affaire; qu'on pouvait, grâce à elle, d'abord gagner facilement des sous, et ensuite avoir le droit de prendre du bon temps. Il leur faut des clients pour tout ça. Quand on essaie de les éviter ils considèrent qu'on leur enlève le pain de la bouche. GHT 341 'People have been cured of their fright (which was too great) by realizing that the epidemic is good business; that, thanks to it, one can first make some quick cash, and then be entitled to take it easy. They need customers for all this. When one tries to avoid them, they think that one is taking the bread out of their mouths [lit.: taking them (leur-) the bread from the mouth].'

Those who do the "avoiding" are, in all likelihood, not really trying to victimize these people. We know, in fact, in the present case, that they are merely trying to avoid the quarantine. But the speaker is here depicting the viewpoint of the "disadvantaged" (Us considèrent que ... 'they think that ...'), and the fact that they are acting in their own mercenary interest makes it likely that they will regard themselves as targets for, and thus motivators of, the hostile actions of others. The expression "take the bread out of their mouths" confirms that they consider themselves victims of deliberately hostile acts, since taking the bread out of somebody's mouth is a mean thing to do, a calculated attempt to harm. Thus, the adversary relationship echoed by lui- often exists only in the mind of one of the participants. It can even be pure fantasy, with lui- reflecting not an actual adversary relationship, but simple exaggeration. Example (96) is from a story about two adolescent boys who thrive on adventure and whose actions are guided more by their imaginations than by practicality. Meaulnes had befriended Frantz shortly after the latter became depressed when his fiancée broke off their wedding engagement; this situation led the two boys into a series of adventures. In time, the two parted ways and lost contact with each other; Meaulnes met and became engaged to the girl with whom he speaks here. During this conversation she berates a boy to whom she had previously been engaged, for his "crazy ideas". It emerges that the former fiancé was none other than Frantz. Meaulnes furiously accuses the girl of responsibility for his friend's unhappiness.

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«C'est, expliqua-t-elle, très vite, un bijou qu'il m'avait donné en me faisant jurer de le garder toujours. C'étaient là de ses idées folles.» Mais elle ne fit qu'exaspérer Meaulnes. «Folles! dit-il en mettant les lettres dans sa poche. Pourquoi répéter ce mot? Pourquoi n'avoir jamais voulu croire en lui? Je l'ai connu, c'était le garçon le plus merveilleux du monde! — Vous l'avez connu, dit-elle au comble de l'émoi, vous avez connu Frantz de Galais? — C'était mon ami le meilleur, c'était mon frère d'aventures, et voilà que je lui ai pris sa fiancée! «Ah! poursuivit-il avec fureur, quel mal vous nous avez fait, vous qui n'avez voulu croire à rien. Vous êtes cause de tout. C'est vous qui avez tout perdu! tout perdu!» AGM 235 ' "It was," she explained very quickly, "a jewel that he gave me and made me swear that I would keep it always. That was one of his crazy ideas." But she was only exasperating Meaulnes. "Crazy!" he said, putting the letters in his pocket. "Why repeat that word? Why did you never want to believe in him? I knew him; he was the most marvelous boy in the world!" "You knew him?" she said, at the height of emotion, "you knew Frantz de Galais?" "He was my best friend, he was my brother in adventures, and now I have taken his fiancée from him (lui-)! "Ah!" he continued furiously, "what harm you have caused us, you who didn't want to believe anything. You are the cause of everything. It's you who's ruined everything! ruined everything!" '

Of course Meaulnes didn't deliberately steal Frantz's fiancée; he hadn't even known who she was. Frantz was the last person Meaulnes would have wanted to victimize, and this engagement is pure coincidence. But Meaulnes doesn't want it to be viewed as a coincidence, after which things can simply continue as they were before. He exaggerates to create an effect: to make the girl feel as guilty as he does. A coincidence in which all parties are innocent is not nearly as horrible as a situation in which one has done such a deed to his best friend on purpose. Meaulnes is a hyperemotive, highly imaginative character, incapable of viewing life in neutral, colorless terms. For him, there are no coincidences. By attributing responsibility to both himself and Frantz he portrays this as a purposeful, highly significant event. This lui- fits well both with the character of Meaulnes and with the highly contrived nature of the plot in this story.

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In (97) an adversary relationship motivating lui- takes the form of a kind of game. A rustic farm girl speaks to members of her household. (97)

— J'ai trouvé où qu'elle pondait, la grise, cria-t-elle. Onze oeufs je lui ai ramassés. AVO 95 ' "I found out where she was laying her eggs, the gray one", she yelled. "Eleven eggs I gathered from her (lui-)." '

The explanation of this comes a little later in the passage as she continues to speak: ' "For several days now, the gray hen, I was thinking to myself, but, for heaven's sake, I was thinking, a hen that eats well, that doesn't refuse the rooster, she must lay eggs. Several times, yesterday, I had tried to follow her, but they are cunning, they can tell if you're on the lookout. And it was just now, without thinking about anything in particular, coming out of the barn, what do I see? my gray hen coming out of the hedge by the orchard cackling over her egg." ' The girl views this as a contest between her and the hen, to see which can outsmart the other. This view is evidenced by the kind of attributes she assigns to the hen ("they are cunning ... they can tell ..."). It is as though each one, by her own actions, were forcing the other to take defensive countermeasures. When the girl inserts lui- in telling how she collected the eggs, the message is not simply: "I collected her eggs", but more like: 'T was out to get her, and, by gosh, I got her!", the adversary relationship being thereby alluded to. Examples were seen above (e.g. (85)) in which a person's characteristics motivate harm done to him. The same can apply to a thing. In (98) a woman explains the story of a broken vase in her house. (98)

— Celui-là, disait-elle, les Prussiens lui ont cassé les anses, en soixante-dix, parce qu'ils ne pouvaient pas l'emporter. AGM 162 ' "That one", she said, "the Prussians broke its handles [lit.: broke it (lui-) the handles] in 'seventy, because they couldn't carry it away." '

The characteristics of this vase which prompted these pillaging soldiers to break its handles are twofold: (a) its non-transportability, and (b) the fact that it belonged to the enemy. Since they were out to wreak destruction, and since they couldn't carry the vase off, they took revenge on it by damaging the part that was acting like an enemy by refusing to cooperate: the handles. If an adversary relationship is indeed a factor that motivates the occurrence of lui-, we may expect lui- to be avoided in instances where the High Controller

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is some ulterior, impersonal or abstract force over which people have no control and which therefore cannot be interacted with, or whose behavior cannot be influenced. In (99) a man approaching middle age looks at himself in a mirror. (99)

... il regarde ardemment, reflété par les glaces, son visage sous des cheveux drus — ce visage que la trente-cinquième année épargne encore. Il songea que le vieillissement, avant de toucher son corps, touchait sa vie. Si c'était son orgueil d'entendre les femmes s'interroger: "Quel est ce grand jeune homme?" il savait que les garçons de vingt ans, plus perspicaces, ne le comptaient plus parmi les enfants de leur race éphémère. MDA 10 '... he looks eagerly, reflected by the mirrors, at his face, under thick hair — this face which the thirty-fifth year still spares. He reflected that the aging process, before affecting his body, affected his life. If he was proud to hear the women ask: "Who is this tall young man?" he knew that twenty-year-old boys, more perspicacious, no longer considered him among the children of their ephemeral race.'

Instead of using the possessive adjective as here, one might, under appropriate circumstances, say lui toucher le corps ... lui touchait la vie. But le vieillissement 'the aging process' is an inexorable, impersonal force, beyond this man's control or ability to influence; this whole passage reflects the dreary inevitability of his growing older. Use of lui- would inappropriately suggest that he was somehow controlling or motivating the aging process. Traditional grammars are quick to appeal to the notion of "idiom", a use of a form that cannot be related to other uses of the same form, or an unanalyzable expression whose component parts do not function in combination as they do independently. Underlying the positing of an idiom is often an unscrutinized assumption that one knows accurately the functions of the individual components. Failing this, one cannot, of course, assert that these components are or are not operational in the alleged idiom. The Control hypothesis can shed light on one such idiom: lui en vouloir 'have a grudge against him', 'have it in for him', which, in addition to bearing the stigma of "idiom" also bears that of "maleficiary". In (100), a secretary in an art gallery notices a tramp staring in the window. She starts to go to inform her boss, who is engaged in a conversation in the back; but she is annoyed at him for having excluded her from this conversation, and has second thoughts about informing him of the tramp's presence.

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(100)

155

Elle faillit rentrer pour en informer le patron et, à la réflexion, s'abstint d'en rien faire, car elle lui en voulait un peu de cette longue conversation pendant laquelle son beau-frère et lui n'avaient cessé de lui jeter des coups d'oeil méfiants, comme s'ils l'eussent AVP 188 soupçonnée de tendre l'oreille à leur murmure. 'She almost went in to inform the boss about this, and, on second thought, abstained from doing anything about it, for she was a little angry at him [lit.: wished him (lui-) some (i.e. some evil)] for this long conversation during which he and his brother-in-law had not stopped casting distrustful glances at her, as though they suspected her of eavesdropping on their murmur.'

The reason for her "wishing him evil" is clearly stated: he was carrying on a long conversation (without her), during which he was looking at her distrustfully. Her angry feelings for the boss are thus brought on by something he has done. Lui- in this usage is therefore a straightforward motivator. The component parts of the "idiom" lui en vouloir thus transparently contribute to the whole.14 Our examples so far have concentrated on the motivator strategy of lui- in messages of disadvantaging. However, lui- can just as well represent a causer or expediter. A number of the examples seen earlier, in the discussion of the expediter in this chapter, represent maleficiarles: examples (5), (8), (18), (26) and (30). Here is one more, from the story seen in (41) about a group of boys who see in a store window a pair of boots with a sign declaring them to be the "Seven League Boots". This passage describes the boys' expectations in regard to the magical qualities attributed to the boots. (101)

Peut-être les six enfants ne croyaient-ils pas positivement qu'il eût suffi à l'un d'eux de chausser ces bottes pour franchir sept lieues d'une seule enjambée. Ils soupçonnaient même que l'aventure du Petit Poucet n'était qu'un conte, mais n'en ayant pas la certitude, ils composaient facilement avec leurs soupçons. Pour être en règle avec la vraisemblance, peut-être aussi pour ne pas s'exposer à voir la réalité leur infliger un démenti, ils admettaient que la vertu de ces bottes de sept lieues s'était affaiblie ou perdue avec le temps. En tout cas, leur authenticité ne faisait aucun doute. APM 176 'Perhaps the six children didn't positively believe that one of them would have only to put on these boots to leap over seven leagues with one stride. They even suspected that the adventure of Tom Thumb was only a fairy tale, but not being certain, they easily rationalized their suspicions. To conform to what seemed most

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likely, and also perhaps in order not to expose themselves to having reality inflict on them (leur-) a denial, they admitted that the special quality of these seven-league boots had weakened or disappeared in the course of time. In any case, their authenticity was beyond doubt.' If reality did inflict on the children a denial of what they believed, it would be their own fault for believing it. Their potential belief in the fairy tale paves the way for the inflicting of a denial. That which enables the event to take place in this case, then, is a mental state approaching an overt act, which exists in the children. Let us conclude with a pair of examples which illustrate well an author's strategic placement of lui- for the purpose of promoting the development of a character. In (102), a man is walking down a street. He has stepped off the sidewalk to avoid a crowd, wrapped up in his thoughts, when a car comes along and nearly knocks him over. (102)

"Espèce de con!" Mathieu se jeta en avant pour éviter l'auto; il buta contre le trottoir et se retrouva par terre: il était tombé sur les mains. "Sacré nom de Dieu!" Il se releva, les paumes lui cuisaient. Il considéra ses mains boueuses avec gravité: la main droite était noire, avec quelques petites écorchures, la main gauche lui faisait mal; la boue maculait son pansement. "Il ne manquait plus que ça, murmura-t-il sérieusement, il ne manquait plus que ça." Il tira son mouchoir, l'humecta de salive et frotta ses paumes avec une sorte de tendresse; il avait envie de pleurer. SAR 382 ' "Stupid jerk!" Mathieu threw himself forward to avoid the car; he struck the sidewalk and ended up on the ground: he had fallen on his hands. "For God's sake!" He got back up, his (lui-) palms were burning. He examined his muddy hands gravely: his right hand was black, with several small scratches, his left hand hurt him; the mud spotted his bandage. "That's all I needed", he muttered seriously, "that's all I needed." He took out his handkerchief, moistened it with saliva, and rubbed his palms with a kind of tenderness; he felt like crying."

Lui- should be telling us that Mathieu was responsible for his palms burning him; yet, this would seem not to have been his fault, but rather that of the

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person driving the car. He certainly did not intentionally bring on the burning of his own palms, and there is no reason to believe that the driver deliberately wanted to run him down. The author could have divested Mathieu of responsibility with the possessive adjective, but rejected this option. Now, one might hold Mathieu ultimately responsible for the "burning" because he was walking in the street, wrapped up in his thoughts, and not paying attention to traffic. But this chain of causality is fairly indirect; moreover, there seems to be good justification for the possessive adjective because of all the attention on hands and palms in the passage quoted. There must, then, have been very strong motivation for choosing lui- in spite of these other considerations. What could this motivation be? An answer emerges when we consider what Mathieu was thinking about at that moment, and more generally what kind of a character he is. Mathieu, a confirmed bachelor, has a mistress whom he has made pregnant through carelessness. He wants to get her an abortion, but can't come up with the money. This is the main story line. Mathieu also has a female friend who is not his mistress. He has just botched his relationship with her, first by being overly familiar, then by offering to pay for her friendship with money which she finds out he doesn't have. Mathieu, in short, is a clumsy bungler. This theme is central to the author's development of this character. Just before the car nearly hits him, he is busy thinking, precisely, about the mess of things he has made with these two women. The author has doubtlessly inserted this episode with the car in order to underscore Mathieu's clumsiness; in fact, a few lines after this passage, Mathieu bursts out laughing "at his own ridiculous clumsiness". To present him as responsible for the accident, then, with lui-, fits neatly into the overall narrative strategy; in fact, this lui- placed just here may be intended to help the reader fit the automobile incident into the story as a whole by recalling the "clumsiness" theme. Earlier on in the same story we have more strategic placement of lui- for the same purpose. Mathieu has bungled things pretty badly on this occasion. For months he had been taking his female friend Ivich to concerts and art expositions; she hadn't really liked going, and he should have realized it, although she never told him so. She has just now made him aware that she hadn't liked it. Furthermore, this very morning, on an impulse, Mathieu embraced her for the first time, although this was totally inappropriate. He is now attempting to apologize to her, although his apology (which would have better been left unsaid) only makes things worse; with every word he utters he gets himself more deeply into the mess he has created.

158 (103)

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

"Ivich, je vous prie de m'excuser pour ce qui s'est passé ce matin. — Ce matin? dit Ivich. Je n'y pensais même plus, je pensais à Gauguin. — Ça ne se reproduira plus, dit Mathieu, je n'ai même pas compris comment ça a pu se produire." Il parlait par acquit de conscience: il savait que sa cause était perdue. Ivich ne répondit pas et Mathieu reprit avec effort: "Il y a aussi les musées et les concerts ... Si vous saviez comme je regrette! On croit qu'on est d'accord avec quelqu'un ... Mais vous ne disiez jamais rien." A chaque mot il croyait qu'il allait s'arrêter. Et puis un autre lui venait du fond de la gorge en lui soulevant la langue. Il parlait avec dégoût et par petits spasmes. Il ajouta: "Je vais essayer de changer." "Je suis abject", pensa-t-il. Une colère désespérée lui embrasait les joues. Ivich secoua la tête. SAR 116

' 'Tvich, please excuse me for what happened this morning." "This morning?" said Ivich. "I wasn't even thinking about it any more, I was thinking about Gauguin." "It won't happen again", said Mathieu. "I don't even understand how it could have happened." He spoke to clear his conscience: he knew that his cause was lost. Ivich didn't answer and Mathieu made an effort and began again: "There's also the museums and the concerts ... If you knew how I regret it! One thinks one is in agreement with someone ... But you never said anything." At each word he thought he was going to stop. And then another came from the bottom of his {lui-) throat and lifted up his {lui-) tongue. He spoke with disgust and in little spasms. He added: "I'm going to try to change." "I'm despicable", he thought. A desperate anger inflamed his {lui-) cheeks. Ivich shook her head.' Mathieu continues putting his foot in his mouth in spite of the repeated opportunities given him by Ivich to stop or change the subject, and even though he knows he ought not continue. This passage brings out well Mathieu's bungling nature, and it is appropriate that it be loaded with lui-'s. Each time the author says: "The real Mathieu is bringing this on; he's responsible for his own troubles."

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Readers may feel at this point that they have just been led through a section of literary analysis, rather than linguistic analysis. Nonetheless, the purpose has been to establish a purely linguistic point. Let us recapitulate the line of argument. The grammar of French that attributes lui-'s appearances in texts to the syntactic category Indirect Object is an incorrect grammar. We hypothesize a constant semantic value for lui-, the meaning MORE CONTROL. Examples with a maleficiary appear to pose a problem for this hypothesis, since "maleficiary" implies a participant that exercises no control over the event. Contextualized examples have shown that the meaning posited for lui- is operative even in these examples, because lui- is used for a maleficiary only when it in some way motivates, expedites, brings on, or interacts in the disadvantaging event — the same strategies that motivate lui- in all its occurrences. A purely innocent, noninteracting victim is denoted by some linguistic means other than lui-. Even when lui- appears, the disadvantaging in the message can be traced to sources other than lui-. In some examples, including some maleficiaries but not limited to them, the Control factor is subtle, and such examples require detailed examination to establish the presence of this factor. The instrumental view of meaning underpinning this analysis allows the possibility of an author's employing meanings to make subjective comment or to present things from a particular point of view. This may be the point of view of one of the characters, as with Louise; it may be part of the author's development of a personality, as with Louise and Meaulnes. Such comment is often better accomplished by subtlety than by heavy-handedness. This means that an author may use a tool like lui- in ways that appear redundant, in order to reinforce an important theme. Such redundancy, however, is functional, not functionless. In order to establish just what point the author is making, one must examine the content of the text very carefully and even appeal to broader considerations of theme, genre, etc. Finally, the positing of an "idiom" often reflects an analytical failure to recognize the communicative strategies of a form. A correct analysis can reveal consistency of function without positing an "idiom" or "construction". In the next chapter we turn to the value side of the system of Degree of Control. Against the background of semantic substance established in this chapter, the value-based part of the analysis will illuminate some of the more obscure aspects of the clitic pronouns and enable us to crack the toughest nut of all, the so-called "government" phenomenon.

Chapter 4 Linguistic Value: Lui versus Le

1.

Substance and Value in Linguistic Analysis

To Ferdinand de Saussure goes credit for introducing linguistic value into linguistic analysis. His dictum: "La langue est une forme et non une substance" requires definition of linguistic units in terms of oppositions to other units. This was a great innovation, since grammatical analysis up to Saussure's time had been carried on atomistically, in a spirit of pure substance. In the context of grammar, "substance" refers to the establishing of grammatical categories on the basis of the diverse messages associated with forms, or abstractions over these messages. The classical grammars of Latin and Greek, and their modern descendants, offer lists, like Smyth's (1920) ninety-nine uses of the Greek dative discussed above in Chapter 1. The putative existence of this state of affairs in languages was attributed to a largely mysterious process of historical development: Of the cases belonging to the Indo-European language, Greek has lost the free use of three: instrumental, locative, and ablative. A few of the forms of these cases have been preserved; the syntactical functions of the instrumental and locative were taken over by the dative; those of the ablative by the genitive. The genitive and dative cases are therefore composite or mixed cases. Through the influence of one construction upon another it often becomes impossible to mark off the later from the original use of the genitive and dative. It must be remembered that since language is a natural growth and Greek was spoken and written before formal categories were set up by Grammar, all the uses of the cases cannot be apportioned with definiteness. (Smyth, Greek Grammar (1920), §§1279-1280) The Genitive appears to have expressed a great variety of relations and to have had no single primitive meaning; and the same may be true of the Dative.

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161

The other cases perhaps at first expressed relations of place or direction (to, from, at, with), though this is not clear in all instances. The earlier meanings, however, have become confused with each other, and in many instances the cases are no longer distinguishable in meaning or in form. (Greenough et ai, New Latin Grammar (1931), §338)

This view presents grammar as a kind of random accretion of uses, a disorganized product of historical accident. The Saussurean notions of linguistic value and the linguistic sign — a pairing of signal and meaning — offer a different view. In this view, a linguistic form has a consistent function in any given synchronic state of a language, without regard to what the function of that form may have been in an earlier state of the language. Thus, the present study has endeavored to show that the "different datives" of the traditional grammar of French are actually distractions suggested by something else in the context. Value, on the other hand, requires looking across units and focusing on their relation to one another. It implies an essentially synchronic view, seeing any language as a system functioning at a given moment in time; it implies as well an element of choice on the part of speakers. The role of value in the present study began to emerge above when lui- and le- were presented as members of a system. In an exceptionally lucid and insightful discussion of substance and value in linguistic analysis, Diver (1974) argues that Saussure's insistence on linguistic value inspired a school of linguistics which attempted to carry out his injunction by completely removing considerations of substance from linguistic analysis. Diver shows how this line of thought is realized in phonology by the work of Trubetskoy, and in grammar, by that of Roman Jakobson. Diver's discussion focuses on Jakobson's work (1936) on case in Russian. This approach, Diver maintains, gave rise to as many problems as the purely substantive approach. Firstly, Jakobson casts value in the form of binary oppositions, with marked and unmarked members. The justification for this a priori position, either from the distribution of case forms or from any independently verifiable deductive premise' about the nature of language, is unclear. Jakobson did not actually achieve an analysis based solely on value, but he attempted to do so by diluting substance as much as possible. He constructed an analysis in which one half, the unmarked members of the pairs, is an extreme of value, and one half, the marked members, an extreme of substance. The result is that the unmarked members are not testable against the semantic substances for which they are unmarked; and to this extent these categories, and thus the hypothesis as a whole, are untestable. Even the meanings of the marked members are so vague as to be extremely difficult to test; one can make a case for fitting almost any

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example into almost any one of Jakobson's categories. Jakobson's presentation of his analysis in fact contains almost no validation. The conclusion Diver wishes to draw from this experience is that, even when value is given its place in a grammatical hypothesis, testability cannot be ensured without substance. Columbia school linguists have attempted to redress the balance by achieving an appropriate mixture of substance and value. The division of semantic substance represented by meanings is sought in the principe de classification, as suggested by distributions of morphemes, and not in an a priori logical categorization. A grammatical hypothesis is rendered testable by (a) an explicit statement of semantic substance (in the present case, Degree of Control), whose appropriateness for the various messages to which it allegedly contributes must be established, and (b) the fact that the value relations or divisions in that substance, i.e. the actual meanings (in our case: MORE and LESS), share a single semantic parameter, which means they can be tested against one another. In Chapter 2, the problem to be solved in this analysis was stated as follows: a) When lui- or le- is used, what motivates its being used at all? and b) When one of these two forms is used, why isn't the other one used instead? Question (a) is the question of substance; question (b) is the question of value. This means, strictly speaking, that the explanation for any individual occurrence of lui- or le- has two parts: one part for substance, and one part for value. Discussion in the previous two chapters has focused on the issue of semantic substance, mainly by examining the substantive contribution of lui- to messages. This chapter and the next will deal with the value side of the analysis. In this chapter we will deal with value in the system of Degree of Control by reintroducing le- and validating the opposition between lui- and le-.

2.

Validating the Opposition between lui- and le-

One of our central arguments is that lui- and le- do not encode specific types of involvement in an event. Their meanings are relatively imprecise. This has the advantage of making them usable with a great variety of events, but places on the hearer the burden of figuring out the specific type of involvement intended in each instance. What lui- and le- signal is relative degree of involvement. The purely relational terms MORE and LESS are designed to bring out this aspect of their meanings. To establish that lui- and le- stand in a systemic opposition of relative degree of Control, it will be useful to employ a quantitative test. This test reveals a skewing that supports the Control hypothesis, but which emerges

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clearly only when large amounts of data are examined; its presence may not be observable or confirmable with certainty in a particular example. We know — independently of the Control hypothesis — that in general, humans are attributed more power to make things happen, and happen in specific ways, and thus are likely to exert more active control over an event, than inanimates; the latter, being lifeless, inert, or abstract, are comparatively powerless. The Control hypothesis thus leads to the prediction that lui- will tend to have a human referent more than will le-, and that le- will skew towards having an inanimate referent, in comparison with lui-. Table 4.1 shows the results of this count, made on two modern French novels. Table 4.1. Referent of l- Form in Three-Participant

Messages

Human Referent

Inanimate Referent

314 +

13

LESS

2

le-, la-, les-

-

40 +

MORE

lui-, leur-

Text: MBE and MSO (combined) d = ±34.0 OR-483.1

-

N = 369

This count includes only messages containing three participants; two-participant messages are treated below. The count includes finite verb forms with at least one /-form associated. The other non-high participant, if not also signalled by an /-form, was required to be a noun which would commute with an /-form (e.g. à + noun phrases which would commute to lui-); of course, only the actually-appearing /-forms themselves were counted.

There is a strong skewing in the direction predicted. The correlation is not 100%, of course, since lui- and le- do not actually mean "human" and "inanimate". The test result says: Other factors being equal, participants that are inherently capable of more control over events will be referred to by the form hypothesized to signal more Control, and participants inherently capable of less control by the form hypothesized to signal less Control. With this test we have directly addressed the opposition between lui- and le-, an opposition of value within the semantic substance of Degree of Control. In Chapter 2 this opposition was hypothesized to be scalar. One of the strongest confirmations of the scalar nature of the system comes from examples where the same role, in a given type of event (i.e. with the same verb), is indicated now by lui-, now by le-, depending only on the total number of participants in the event. We now turn our attention to these examples.

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The Superagent: A Striking Manifestation of Value

Figure 3.1 (page 84) showed a scale of types of involvement associated with the various degrees of Control. At the top of the scale was the "superagent". It was stated that the next lowest role, "agent", can be associated with either the High or the Mid Controller. This section will explain and illustrate that variation. Example (1) contains two participants and the verb apprendre, whose gloss will be discussed shortly. (1)

Il apprend la comptabilité. 'He's learning accounting.'

77 'he' is the "learner", or the agent in this two-participant example. Example (2) contains everything that (1) does and, in addition, a third participant. This participant, whose role may be characterized as "superagent", ranks even higher in Degree of Control than the agent of (1). (2)

Je lui apprends la comptabilité. 'I'm teaching him accounting.'

Of interest are the morphological consequences for the "learner" in these examples. In (1), where there are two participants ('he' and 'accounting'), the learner, ranking higher in Control, is High Controller. But in (2) the participant playing the role of "learner" ranks only in the middle, between the other two. Competition from the superagent of the learning, who has prime responsibility for bringing it about, prevents the "learner" from being ranked highest. The "learner" thus gets lui-. Note that the verb is the same in both examples: apprendre is glossed first as 'learn', then as 'teach'. This difference in message is conveyed in French by exploitation of the scalar Control system, whereas English uses two different lexical items. The same thing is seen with éviter 'avoid': a role associated with the High Controller in a two-participant message is associated with the Mid Controller in a three-participant message, when there is competition for the top spot from a superagent. (3) Il a évité un tas de problèmes. 'He avoided a lot of problems.' The "avoider", in this two-participant message, is the High Controller. (4)

Je lui ai évité un tas de problèmes. T caused him to avoid [lit.: I avoided him (lui-)] a lot of problems.'/'I spared him a lot of problems.'

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In a three-participant message with a superagent, the "avoider" ranks no higher than Mid Controller. Again, French makes this distinction with the Control system alone; the verb is identical. English, not having this strategy, must resort to adding the word "cause" or switching to a different lexical item altogether. We may also have the opposite: competition at the low end of the Control scale. In (5) payer 'pay' has two participants: High Controller is the "payer", and Low Controller is the "payee". (5)

Je le paye. 'I pay him.'

Example (6) will contain everything in (5) plus one additional role: "payment": (6)

Je lui paye son salaire. 'I pay him his salary.'

The "payment" ('his salary') of course exercises less Control than the "payee" (who is the motivator); consequently, when all three roles are included together, the "payee" finds itself between the other two in degree of Control, and is the Mid Controller. This time, that which is Low Controller in the two-participant message is forced up the scale to Mid Controller in the three-participant message by a participant which exerts even less Control. Finally, there are cases in which both factors operate: there is competition at both the top and the bottom of the scale. French has a regular device for communicating messages of "causation": the verb faire 'make' plus the infinitive of the particular event. This device specifically introduces a superagent; and here, the full range of possibilities is open. Take, for example, a one-participant event: (7)

Il chante. 'He is singing.' There is only one participant, 'he', and it is the High Controller: the "singer" or agent. Now, with faire we can have a two-participant message with a superagent, who exerts even more Control than the agent. (8)

Je le fais chanter. 'I am making him sing.' The same referent, 'he', plays the same role, "singer"; yet it gets le- because, in relation to the superagent, the agent is a Low Controller. Now we may add a third participant that is even lower than the "singer": the "thing sung": (9)

Je lui fais chanter une chanson. 'I am making him sing a song.'

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This time the "singer", being intermediate in Control between the other two participants, 'is the Mid Controller, indicated by lui-. The "thing sung", as it were, pushes the "singer" back up the scale to lui-. What we have, then, is a distinct "jostling" effect, with participants pushing each other around in the three available "slots" represented by degrees of Control. This effect is made possible by the relational nature of the meanings of the Control system, that is, by its value side. Note further the effect of this strategy on the satellite relationship. All participants are grouped together in one satellite arrangement, as though faire and the second verb were actually melded into a single verb: (10)

Je la lui fais chanter. T make him sing it.'

The participants are not grouped separately as they are in English: ??Je le fais la chanter.1 Faire suggests causality: "to make someone do something." Causality, in turn, is part of the parameter of control, dealt with explicitly by the system of Degree of Control. The close affinity between the function of faire and that of the clitics tempts speakers to think of all participants involved as standing on a single scale of degree of Control. Their degree of control is then evaluated relative to each other, in a single operation. Once again, the divergence between English and French in achieving a particular communicative goal reveals a fundamental difference in the grammatical strategies of the two languages. Traditional grammars of French treat the so-called "causative construction" with a rule: "If the infinitive with faire has a direct object, the personal object of faire must be indirect" (Fraser, Squair & Parker 1948:§99,6b). It is also tempting to think of a triplet like (7), (8) and (9) as standing in a transformational relationship to one another. However, there exist cases where the rule or transformation fails to apply. Such cases are generally ignored by standard grammars. The Control hypothesis, by contrast, not only accounts for the ordinary pattern with "causative" examples, as just explained, but also accommodates the "exceptional" examples, and even predicts that there should be such "exceptions".2 Once again, we are dealing with a skewing. Other things being equal, with three participants the agent (= "subject of the dependent infinitive") is luibecause it ranks as Mid Controller between the superagent and the Low Controller. However, other things are not always equal. The counterexamples to the "rule" are merely the short end of the skewing; the Control hypothesis applies equally to them when they are considered individually.

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167

3.1. Harmer 's Examples with faire We will look at examples collected in Harmer (1979:212-229), discussed also in Bailard (1982). Harmer's interest is in cataloguing "aberrations" in French grammatical usage, not in explaining either the standard usage or the aberrations. It is evident, both from Harmer's comments on how grammarians have treated this "causative rule", as well as from his collection of examples, that the rule is not as categorical as most grammars imply. Harmer's comment is (p. 214): " ... a number of authors do not consistently adhere to one of the two constructions but use either, seemingly as the spirit moves them, without making any discernible distinction between the two." There are two types of examples which "break the rule": three-participant examples where the agent is le-, and two-participant examples where the agent is lui-. We will look at the examples of both types cited by Harmer, and show how the Control hypothesis explains them.3 To support his view that authors distribute lui- and le- "as the spirit moves them" and that there is no "discernible distinction between the two", Harmer cites examples from these same authors which conform to the rule, along with those which break it. Since the reasons for choice of /- form emerge most clearly when examples are contrasted, we will have occasion to cite some of Harmer's "correct" examples as well as the "incorrect" ones.4 It turns out that these occurrences of lui- and le- correlate straightforwardly with degrees of control over the event. One can identify various themes, or message types, in these examples, all reflective of relative degrees of control. Since the meanings MORE and LESS Control themselves are the underlying constant factor, there will naturally be some overlapping among the message types. 1. The first two themes have to do with the inherent nature of the participants in the event. If the High Controller is a force over which the other participant has no control, the latter will be indicated by le-, because of its powerlessness in comparison to the High Controller. We find here High Controllers that are overwhelming forces or superior powers. The reverse of this is a High Controller who is a relatively weak force, not exerting much control over the event. In this case, we may find lui- for the other participant; that is, in relation to the High Controller, it is relatively powerful. The relational nature of the Control meanings is reflected clearly in this factor of relative power status of the two controllers.

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2. If the Non-High Controller is a helpless individual, one who needs special protection, who cannot control things by himself, he will be referred to by le-. By the same token, if this participant is an especially powerful or superior force, this provides motivation for lui-. 3. If a participant is portrayed as being very firmly in control of himself or of a situation, this is motivation for lui-. Similarly, a character who is presented as being out of control of himself or of a situation will be likely to evoke le-. Category 2 thus has more to do with inherent characteristics of participants, and category 3 with transitory characteristics. 4. If a participant must make a decision, render a judgment, or give assent before an event can take place, he holds a relatively great amount of control over the event, and lui- is likely. A corollary to this will be instances in which a participant has his mind very firmly made up about something, or is defending a particular position that he has adopted. This also motivates lui-. 5. If a participant reacts in a way that can be described as an automatic reflex, kneejerk, or zombielike, that is, he exercises no judgment or does not strive to exert any control over his action, we find le-. On the other hand, if a participant's behavior is presented as specifically not being a kneejerk reaction, we find lui-. There are, of course, examples which combine features of two or more of these categories; e.g. we may have both a powerful High Controller and a powerless Non-High Controller in the same example, both factors pulling toward le-, or vice versa. We offer here a selection of Harmer's examples illustrative of each of the above categories. Readers who wish a more comprehensive discussion are referred to Huffman (1985:204-228), where the Control hypothesis is applied to explain all of Harmer's examples. In most cases, we translate a considerable portion of surrounding context along with the example itself, to make clear the relevant thematic factor motivating the choice of /- form. 1.

High Controller is an overwhelming or uncontrollable force: Non-High Controller is le-. High Controller is weak: Non-High Controller is lui-. (11) Il l'aurait immédiatement fait rebrousser chemin vers la ville. (Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe, I) 'For the two angels who had been placed at the gates of Sodom to determine whether its inhabitants, says Genesis, had really done all these things about which the cry had gone up to the Almighty, these

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169

angels had been, one can only be glad, very badly chosen by the Lord, who should have entrusted the task only to a Sodomist. The excuses: "I'm the father of six children, I have two mistresses, etc." would not have made such a one benevolently lower the flaming sword and soften the penalty. He would have answered: "Yes, and your wife is suffering pangs of jealousy. But even when these women haven't been chosen by you in Gomorrha, you spend your nights with a shepherd from Hebron." And he would have immediately made him {le-) retrace his steps toward the city he was about to destroy in a rain of fire and brimstone.' The High Controller is an angel of death, flaming sword in hand, whose word admits no contradiction. Even though the dependent verb has an object, the agent of faire is le-, since this participant clearly has no freedom of action. (12)

Nous pourrions les séquestrer quelques jours en les privant de nourriture et sous la menace du fusil les faire signer leur reddition. (P. Colin, Les Jeux Sauvages)

(A group of youngsters with some savage tendencies discovers that their hideout in the woods has been ransacked by a rival band. They make plans to take revenge.) ' "We'll exact vengeance! We'll get them all! ... We'll wage a grand battle against them, and when we have subdued them, when all spirit of resistance has left them, we can perhaps think about reducing them to slavery. We have to have ropes, lots of ropes; long cattle ropes will be best. And whips too ... We'll attract them in groups of four or five that we'll crush one after the other ... After defeating Gardot and his band, and tying them up solidly with cattle ropes, we'll attack the others in turn; and they, deprived of their leader, will be helpless ... When he's made prisoner, the others will keep quiet ... We'll make them go before a court composed of us four; we will have to decide their punishment, taking into account their responsibilities. We could sequester them for several days, depriving them of food, and with rifles at their heads, make them (les-) sign their surrender." ' The objective is to overwhelm them with force, crush them, render them helpless, and deprive them of all control over the situation, literally with a gun at their head. This example combines categories 1 ("High Controller is overwhelming force") and 2 ("Non-High Controller is helpless"). There are thus two compelling reasons to use le- for the agent of'faire even though there is a third participant.

170

(13)

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Le hasard le fit rencontrer deux jeunes sourdes-muettes. {Grand Larousse encyclopédique)

(Taken from an encyclopedia article about a man who developed a method for teaching deaf-mutes, this passage describes his first encounter with deaf-mutes.) 'Chance had him {le-) meet two young deaf mute women.' "Chance" is a force over which one has no control; hence the use of le-. Now we look at the reverse: instances in which the High Controller is a very weak force. Such a participant may precipitate the event by giving a nudge to the other participant; but the latter is the one who really has to perform the action, and thus gets mentioned with lui-. (14)

La montre en or de sa mère ... lui fit penser au calendrier. (G. Simenon, La fenêtre des Rouet)

(A woman wakes up on an ordinary morning, but forgets to tear the page off her calendar. For two pages the author describes the thoughts running through her head; then suddenly she remembers the calendar.) 'It was the third of March. She didn't know it right away, because she forgot to tear the page off the calendar ... She looked at the time on the little clock that hung above the silk slipper. Her mother's gold clock studded with minuscule diamonds, made her {lui-) think of the calendar, from which she tore off the preceding day's page, and uncovered a big 3, very black.' The real motivation for thinking of the calendar came from within the woman herself; it was something she intended to do, but was temporarily distracted. The High Controller — the clock — is an inanimate object with little inherent power to control; it merely nudged her toward the act. (15)

La jalousie lui a fait voir clair d'un seul coup. (G. Chevallier, Clochemerle)

(A man's wife has been cheating on him. This tells how he comes to realize that he has been made a cuckold.) ' "... I have to tell you how the whole affair of September 19th came about. It was through an anonymous letter, received in the morning, that Arthur found out Adele was cheating with Tardivaux. Once you find out one thing on that subject, it easily reminds you of others. That's what happened with Arthur, when he began to think about the bizarre conduct of Adele since the troop arrived. Jealousy made him {lui-) see clearly all at once, without the others

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171

suspecting it, so that they continued to help themselves, while Arthur, to be more certain, watched without saying anything, through the door in the back corridor. The way he saw Adele cozy up to Tardivaux and talk to him in a soft voice, he no longer doubted. That's when he got angry and he jumped Tardivaux in the street ..." ' Arthur's jealousy was a mere catalyst that made him put two and two together and jump to the appropriate conclusion. Moreover, the jealousy is something that came from within him; it was his own feeling, not some outside force, that acted on him. Thus, from all angles, he is responsible for bringing about the "seeing clearly". 2. (16)

Non-high Controller is inherently helpless: le-. If the opposite: lui-. Il fut un père excellent, adorant ses enfants, s'occupant beaucoup d'eux et de leur santé, veillant à les faire changer d'air dès que quelque danger menaçait. (L. Batiffol, Le Siècle de la Renaissance)

(A description of King Henry II.) 'All things considered, he was quite a sweet and likable prince ... He was an excellent father, adoring his children, taking great care of them and their health, careful to give them a change of air [lit.: make them (les-) change air] when any danger threatened. On returning from a trip, he galloped out ahead of his retinue to embrace them the quicker. His tenderness was touching.' The picture is one of an adoring father protecting his helpless children from threatening danger. The emphasis on Henry's tenderness makes it all the more likely that he would regard his children as helpless and in need of protection. The helplessness of the children that is brought out here correlates with the use of le- for them. (17) Tout, d'ailleurs, la fait convenir qu'elle est un simple événement... (Valéry, Oeuvres) (A philosophical discussion of the human personality. We give the full context, and put in boldface phrases which will be relevant to the following discussion.) 'Our personality itself, which we consider roughly our deepest and most intimate property, our sovereign possession, is only a thing, both mutable and accidental, next to this naked I; since we can think about it, calculate its interests, and even lose sight of them a little, it is thus only a secondary psychological divinity that lives in

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE our mirror and obeys our name. It is of the order of the Penates. It is subject to pain, partial to perfumes like the false gods, and, like them, the temptation of verses. It flowers in praises. It doesn't resist the power of wines, the delicacy of words, the witchcraft of music. It cherishes itself, and is consequently docile and easy to lead. It disperses itself in the carnival of madness, it bends strangely to the anamorphoses of sleep. Even more: it is constrained, with annoyance, to recognize equals to itself, to admit to itself that it is inferior to certain others; and this is bitter and inexplicable to it. Everything, moreover, makes it {la-) agree that it is a mere event; that it belongs, with all the accidents of the world, in statistics and in tables; that it began by a seminal chance, and in a microscopic incident, that it ran a thousand risks, and that, in short, as admirable, as willful, as revealed and glittering as it may be, it is the effect of an incalculable confusion.'

The boldfaced phrases are almost an adequate commentary in themselves. The whole passage emphasizes the impotency of this entity, how it is pushed around by other forces and exerts no control of its own. The phrase "it disperses itself in the carnival of madness" even alludes to a dearth of control. The use of LESS CONTROL la- fits perfectly in this context. Now the opposite: a participant portrayed as not helpless, as particularly self-assured, or by its very nature a powerful force, motivates use of lui-. (18)

— Vous allez à la messe, le dimanche? — Ça dépend. Quand nous avons la sécheresse, moi je n'y vais pas, jusqu'à tant qu'il pleuve. Le bon Dieu a besoin qu'on lui fasse comprendre. (M. Pagnol, La gloire de mon père) ' "Do you go to mass, on Sundays?" "That depends. When we have a drought, I don't go until it rains. The good Lord needs us to make him {lui-) understand" (i.e. has to be made to understand).'

The speaker is a simple peasant man, being questioned about the degree of his religiosity by a city man. The referent of lui-, "the good Lord", is a superior force, who is really in control of things. The peasant's use of lui- reflects his submissiveness to the Divine Force, who has to be manipulated, persuaded, but cannot be controlled. Note that using lui- when the Non-high Controller is an uncontrollable force is really the mirror image of strategy 1 (e.g. example (11)), in which le- is used when the High Controller is an uncontrollable force. This balancing off of

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173

participants in the event illustrates well the role played by value in the functioning of the Control system. We have not a disparate list of "uses of the dative", but rather a system. In consequence, all these examples follow a single simple principle. The same factor that accounts for the "ordinary" uses of lui- as agent also explains the smaller body of cases in which the agent is le-. It thus makes no sense to establish a grammatical rule and then set up a class of ad hoc exceptions, whose only relation to the rule is that they break it. 3.

Participant firmly in control: lui-. Out of control of self or of situation: le-.

(19)

Il n'avait pas besoin de regarder son carnet pour se rappeler une adresse que rien ne lui ferait oublier et qui était celle de Frida. (P. Vi alar, Cinq hommes de ce monde) 'He didn't need to look in his notebook to recall an address which nothing would make him (lui-) forget and which was Frida's.'

This Englishman had an affair with a German woman in London. She then returned to Berlin, and they had no further contact. Some time later the man's business took him to Berlin; during the course of this visit he took the opportunity to look up his former mistress. The text portrays the man as being sure of himself and firmly in control. After Frida's departure from London he had carefully studied a map of Berlin to find her street. When he got there he walked straight to the address, although he had never set foot in the neighborhood before. The absolute negativity of "nothing would make him forget" reinforces the picture of a man completely in control. (20)

Il se prend pour un don Juan, et trouve en lui une assurance qui lui fait plaire aux femmes. (G. Pillement, Anthologie du théâtre français contemporain)

(A summary of the plot of a play.) 'Love belongs to whoever has confidence in himself and knows he is loved. This is the theme of the play. When he was young, Leopold had a disappointing love affair and all his life he proved himself a misogynist. Believing, thirty years later, that the woman who spurned him has written him that she loves him, he thinks he is a don Juan, and finds in himself an assuredness that makes him (lui-) please women.' [N.B.: 'Femmes' is object of a preposition, not "direct object" of the verb 'please'.]

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

The theme is, as stated, self-confidence, and specifically Leopold's assuredness of his own powers. He is thus appropriately mentioned with lui-. Now the reverse: le- for participants who are presented as not in control of themselves or of a situation. (21)

Un sentiment obscur le faisait hanter les lieux où les autres travaillaient. (J. Fougère, La Cour des Miracles) 'An obscure feeling made him {le-) haunt the places where the others worked.'

This is the only example in Harmer's collection that appears to illustrate this strategy of le- ; and this example is less than satisfactory because its full context was not available to us. The little bit cited suggests a person not fully in control of himself, pushed about by the whim of some vague, indefinable force. Example (22), however, is more useful; it contains the themes both of a relatively powerful High Controller and of a relatively powerless, out-of-control Non-High participant. (22)

«Mais pourquoi, au nom du ciel, dit Ursula, tenez-vous à la faire finir sa vie comme une ... une . . . » Elle tenait mon article du bout des doigts ... «une souillon», dit-elle avec dégoût. (R. Massip, Les Déesses)

(A woman writes a "Good Sense" column for a mediocre women's magazine. She decides to try something a little daring, featuring a Tolstoy character who started out as a flirtatious young woman but settled down and became completely devoted to her husband when she got married. The article emphasizes this latter aspect. The woman's editor, Ursula, reads the article and disapproves strongly.) 'Ursula, like the producers of a play, would have preferred that the story of Natasha Rostov end at the moment when coquettishness, puberty, the war, and remorse made of her the Countess Bezukhova. That would be good ... "But why, in the name of heaven," said Ursula, "do you insist on making her (la-) finish her life like a ... a ..." She was holding my article by her fingertips ... "a slut", she said with distaste. And she read with this same expression of disgust: "Natasha did not follow the golden rule proclaimed by sensible people, particularly the French, according to which a girl, when she marries, shouldn't neglect herself nor say good-bye to her talents, but should care even more for her appearance and seek to seduce her husband as much as she sought to seduce her fiancé.

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175

Natasha, on the contrary, had at once abandoned all her seductions, of which the strongest was her singing. She had abandoned it for the simple reason that it was the greatest of her charms." ' The passage, which goes on to say how Natasha neglected her appearance and manners and gave herself over slavishly to her husband, is merely a quotation from Tolstoy, but Ursula seems not to realize this at first. She accuses the writer of making poor Natasha into a "slut", depriving her of her feminine talents and accomplishments. She implies that the columnist literally has the power of life and death ("make her finish her life") over her subject, and that she has used this power to destroy Natasha. 4. (23)

Non-high Controller must give assent, render judgment, decision for event to take place: lui-.

make a

Je me multipliais pour lui faire apprécier la rue provinciale et le dos d'un hôtel particulier construit par Servandoni: «Vous m'en direz tant!» disait-elle. J'agissais ainsi car elle répandrait son enthousiasme évident au cours des essayages chez Juliette ou chez Constance. (R. Massip, Les Déesses) T exerted every effort to make her (lui-) appreciate the provincial street and the back of a town house built by Servandoni: "You'll tell me so much about them!" she said. I was acting this way because she would spread her obvious enthusiasm during fittings at Juliette's or Constance's.'

The speaker has joined a snobbish, exclusive circle of women. She invites one of them to her home and tries hard to impress her with the home and its surroundings so that, as stated, this woman will spread the good word to the others. It is obviously important that this woman be impressed, and her acquiescence is not to be taken for granted. Lui- acknowledges the woman's power to withhold approval, which motivates the speaker's exaggerated efforts. (24)

Vous lui ferez changer de chemin. (M. Butor, La

Modification)

(In this second-person narrative, a man goes to Rome to meet his lady-friend, who does not know he will be there. He imagines what their meeting will be like and her surprise at seeing him there.) 'She will walk left immediately towards Sant'Andréa della Valle, it's the route she's accustomed to, which she prefers, even though it's not the shortest, but this time she can't fail to see you (especially since you will motion to her, call her if necessary, you will rush toward her if that is not sufficient), to stop, not believing her eyes.

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Then the emotion on her face will be like the wind upsetting a tuft of gladioluses. You will begin to laugh. You will tell her only that you are there until Monday evening, no longer, you have to gradually increase the surprise, squeeze out all the enjoyment from it, make her savor it drop by drop without her being able to miss one of its elements: you will make her (lui-) change route, taking her to have her coffee on the Largo Argentina, in spite of her protests, her fear of arriving late at the embassy ...' This is a woman who knows her mind: she has reasons for choosing a particular route. The man's goal is to get her to change her mind; but he must do it by obtaining her assent, not by forcing her. This is why he must "gradually increase the surprise". He wants to obtain her full participation, to make her "savor it drop by drop", to overcome her misgivings: her "protests", her "fear of arriving late", which would be explicit reasons for her not to agree. The assent and cooperation required for this "change of route" to take place give the woman a relatively high degree of control, and earn her mention with lui-. 5. (25)

Automatic reaction: le-. Not "kneejerk": lui-. Elle restait jolie. Qu'on le lui dît la faisait hausser les épaules; elle avait bien besoin d'être jolie! (A. Perrin, Le Père)

(A description of the author's grandmother.) 'She was ... a woman so round that she seemed to roll when she walked, overflowing with activity, and having a vehemence in her action which denoted an iron constitution combined with a fiery temperament. In spite of her age, and although the explosion of an alcohol lamp had once slightly burned her face, she remained pretty. Telling her so made her (la-) shrug her shoulders; she had to be pretty ! ' The point is her indifference and lack of reaction to the compliment; shrugging the shoulders is a mechanical response involving no commitment on her part. Use of la- helps communicate her lack of deliberate involvement. (26)

Ismérie s'approcha à son tour. Il la regarda avec une grande curiosité, la fit tourner le dos et marcher devant lui. (M. Audoux, Marie-Claire)

(Young girls in an orphanage. They are treated severely by temperamental nuns, and sometimes even beaten. Here, a new priest has taken charge and makes his first systematic inspection of the girls.)

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177

'Ismerie approached in her turn. He looked at her with great curiosity, made her {la-) turn her back and walk in front of him. He compared her size with that of a three-year-old baby, and when he asked Sister Marie-Aimée if she was intelligent, Ismerie turned around brusquely and said that she was less stupid than the others.' A combination of factors motivate la-. First, the High Controller, the priest, being an authority figure, is a superior force over whom this girl has no control. Secondly, she acts mechanically, this because he treats her like a machine, making her walk back and forth, looking at her as though she were a strange object, comparing her to a baby, not even talking directly to her. We get a zombie-like effect, consistent with low Control of la-. Now the reverse: lui- to deny an automatic reflex. Example (27) is especially good, since the possibility of such a reaction is explicitly set up, then denied. (27)

Si l'on veut que les Français de demain sachent écrire et sachent parler, il importe de leur enseigner la grammaire, cette architecture de la langue, dont la belle harmonie doit être mise en valeur par des maîtres compétents. Surtout ne pas dresser les élèves en perroquets: leur faire comprendre, avant de leur faire apprendre. (A. Dauzat, Voyage à travers les mots) 'If it be desired that the Frenchmen of tomorrow know how to write and to speak, it is important to teach them grammar, this architecture of the language, whose beautiful harmony must be brought out by competent teachers. Above all, do not train the students like parrots: make them (leur-) understand, before making them (leur-) learn.'

The phrase "train them like parrots" clearly suggests the possibility of an unthinking, automatic reflex, and since the whole point is to not have them learn this way, using leur- to refer to the students is most appropriate. (28)

La naissance de son enfant lui faisait recommander le mariage avec enthousiasme. (J. Fougère, La Cour des Miracles)

'The birth of his child made him (lui-) enthusiastically recommend marriage.' Context not available. Here again, what we see is apparently not an unthinking, automatic reaction, as in (25) and (26), but one motivated by a reasoned persuasion. We may also compare this to example (21), where the stimulus is not well defined and the referent of le- reacts in apparently zombielike fashion; here, by contrast, the referent of lui- reacts with enthusiasm. This concludes our survey of the examples cited by Harmer. It should be

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noted that the way we have categorized the examples is altogether different from Harmer's way. Harmer's organization is based largely on syntax. Thus, there are groups of examples showing lui-lle- variation where the verb has only one object and a prepositional complement (cf. examples (14), (16), (20), (24)), Harmer commenting that it is unclear whether the object is a direct or an indirect object, and that French writers have consequently "used both the dative and the accusative more or less haphazardly for the past hundred years." This categorization is clearly irrelevant. The choice of lui- or le- follows in a remarkably straightforward way from their Control meanings, and the syntactic categorization not only serves no purpose, but actually confuses the issue. 3.2. Other Instances of the Superagent There are other verbs besides faire which occur with an infinitive and where the "object" of the main verb is the agent of the activity denoted by the infinitive. The most common of these are laisser 'let', voir 'see', and entendre 'hear'. With these verbs there is also variation between lui- and le-, as in the following examples. (29)

Peut-être ... les avait-il suppliées d'être gentilles avec lui, de lui laisser jouer son rôle de maître de maison sans l'humilier par leurs remarques. SMP 110 'Perhaps ... he had begged them to be nice to him, to let him (lui-) play his role of head of the household without humiliating him with their remarks.'

(30)

Une fois de plus, Vernoux ouvrait la bouche et le commissaire ne le laissait toujours pas parler. SMP 178-179 'Once again Vernoux opened his mouth and the chief still didn't let him (le-) speak.'

(31)

... je m'inclinais, non sans soulagement d'ailleurs, devant la détermination farouche, l'assurance exemplaire que je lui voyais montrer. PPE 161-162 ' ... I yielded — not without relief, moreover — to the fierce determination, the exemplary self-assurance I saw him (lui-) exhibit.'

(32)

Je m'attristais d'abord de la voir renoncer au piano et à la lecture; mais Edouard Teissières n'aime pas la musique et n'a pas grand goût pour les livres. GPE 121 T was sad at first to see her (la-) give up the piano and reading; but Edouard Teissières doesn't like music and has little taste for books.'

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

(33)

(34)

179

C'était la première fois que Tarrou lui entendait prononcer le nom de son fils et il comprit que quelque chose était changé. CPE 264-265 'It was the first time Tarrou heard him {lui-) pronounce his son's name, and he realized that something was changed.' Elle pleurait. Elle tenait ma main violemment serrée entre les siennes, et elle pleurait. J'ouvris la bouche pour dire quelque chose, n'importe quoi, essayer de l'aider, de la réconforter, lorsque je l'entendis rire. Oui, rire. Je dois dire que je suis resté complètement pétrifié de stupeur. Et au même moment, alors que je ne comprenais plus rien, je l'entendis dire d'une voix déchirée, sanglotante, que tout le monde sur la terrasse dut entendre: "Oh, colonel Babcock, vous êtes un si brave homme!" GRC 86-87 'She was crying. She held my hand, grasping it violently between hers, and she cried. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, to try to help her, comfort her, when I heard her {la-) laugh. Yes, laugh. I must say that I sat there completely petrified with stupor. And at that very moment, while I was in complete incomprehension, I heard her {la- ) saying with a torn, sobbing voice which everyone on the terrace must have heard, "Oh, colonel Babcock, you are such a fine man!" '

Such examples deserve in-depth study. A sentence-grammar approach, viewing this lui-/le- variation as a mere "surface" quirk belying an underlying identity of grammatical category, would certainly obscure the message differences that motivate the variation. We offer a few observations to suggest that the categories used above to explain faire examples will apply with these other verbs as well. Firstly, example (29), lui- with laisser, represents a disfavored type, and examples (31) and (33), lui- with voir and entendre, are even more uncommon, as any grammarian of French will readily recognize. This skewing parallels the likelihood of the main verb and infinitive each having its own clitics satellite to it, as in (35): (35)

Je l'ai entendu le dire. T heard him {le-) say it {le-)'

or having all clitics satellite together as in (36): (36)

Je le lui ai fait dire. T made him {lui-) say it {le-).

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

This difference in handling of satellite relationships reflects the different lexical content of the verbs. Faire strongly suggests causality on the part of its High Controller, which tempts speakers to think of all participants involved as standing on a single scale of degree of Control. Thus all participants are placed in a single satellite group. Laisser suggests causality, but more weakly than faire: "to let someone do something". Voir and entendre, however, do not necessarily suggest causality at all, and thus do not prompt a lining up of the participants of two verbs on a single scale of Control. With faire, then, all participants are most likely to be satellite together and their relative degree of control evaluated as a single package. With laisser, the suggestion of causality being less strong, there is less likelihood of a single satellite arrangement; and, by the same reasoning, even less likelihood of this with voir and entendre. All of this, nevertheless, explains only the general tendency; we may still find lui- with verbs other than faire when its relatively high degree of Control is locally appropriate. Thus, example (29) highlights the desire of the referent of lui- to be given control, whereas (30) emphasizes denial of control to the referent of le-. The referent of lui- in (31) is obviously a very powerful force who exerts a great deal of control, while the referent of le- in (32) submits to her new husband's authority and does something against her inclination. The referent of lui- in (33) has had to perform an unusual act of willpower; the referent of la- (twice) in (34) clearly represents a participant temporarily out of control of herself and helpless. A broader study of this topic than is possible here, with a larger collection of examples, is called for. The main point of this section may be summarized as follows: It is not possible to fully understand lui- or le- in isolation; their semantic opposition must be taken into account. The opposition being a closed one, use of one of these forms requires an assessment not only of the consequences of using it, but also of the consequences of using the other one; a decision to use one is equally a decision not to use the other. The deployment of lui- and le- reveals a scalar relationship, whose consequences have just begun to emerge. Henceforth, the value side of the Control system will dominate the development of the analysis.

4.

Three- versus Two-participant Messages

Between the clitic system of Degree of Control and the system using word order, as explained in Chapter 2, French has means for indicating three degrees of Control, permitting a maximum of three distinct controlling participants in a given event. The lui-lle- opposition is most directly observed in the three-

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participant example. When all three levels are exploited together, it is easily seen that one participant does more than another to control the event. (37)

Je la lui écris.

'I write it to him.' (e.g. I write the letter to my friend)

With examples having only two participants, the rationale for the choice between lui- and le- requires more scrutiny. In a two-participant example, all possibilities are not laid out at once, as they are with three participants. It may be necessary to compare across examples. (38)

Je lui écris.

'I write him.' (e.g. my friend)

It is not immediately apparent why lui- is used here rather than le- until we look at the following: (39)

Je l'écris.

'I write it.' (e.g. the letter)

Comparing the two, one sees that the type of participant represented by lui- in (38) does more to control the 'writing' than does the referent of V- in (39). As seen earlier, the "addressee" in an act of communication is a Mid Controller because of its motivating the High Controller to communicate and the high degree of interaction between the two participants. In light of the particular kinds of involvement associated with "writing", lui- is reserved for the first type of message and le- for the second. Similarly: (40)

Il leur parle.

'He speaks to them.' (e.g. to his friends)

(41)

Il la parle.

'He speaks it.' (e.g. the French language)

In comparison to an interlocutor, a language is non-interacting in the act of communication; it is thus made Low Controller.5 Here again the two examples may be combined into one with three participants and identical strategies: (42)

Il la leur parle. 'He speaks it to them.' (i.e. French to his friends)

Thus, when a speaker includes only two Controlling participants in a message — "High" and "Non-High" — he has a choice between lui- and lefor Non-High and must know the consequences for the message of each of the two before he can choose one of them. The above sets are fairly simple, since everything but the /- form is held constant, and the three-participant message with both lui- and le- appears to be simply the sum of two two-participant messages, one with lui- and one with le-.6 Note that in these sets the Mid and Low Controllers are very different types of entities (person vs. letter, language).

182

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Other lexical items present a more complex situation because their semantic content opens them to a broader range of messages. An example is siffler 'whistle': (43)

Puisqu'il ne connaissait pas cet air je le lui ai sifflé. 'Since he didn't know the tune I whistled it to him.'

'Him' is a typical motivator of a type of communication. This holds true of the two-participant example with lui-: (44)

Pour attirer l'attention de l'acteur, je lui ai sifflé. 'To attract the actor's attention, I whistled to him (lui-).'

But with this verb, le-, in addition to denoting the "thing whistled" (as in (43)), can be exploited in yet another way: (45)

Cet acteur a si mal joué son rôle que les gens l'ont sifflé. 'That actor played his role so badly that the people hissed [lit.: whistled] him (le-).'

In (44) lui-, the actor, is "addressee". In (45), the same referent gets le-, and siffler is translated 'hiss'. In (44), the activity aims at interaction — communication — between the two participants. But in (45), the action is one-way. The hapless actor is sent a message to which no response is desired. To be sure, one could also characterize the actor in (45) as a motivator since here too, something he has done motivates the "hissing". But a motivator who interacts, as in (44), is clearly more in control of the activity than the one who does not interact in (45). The actor surely does not desire the hiss. Communicating this sort of difference is an appropriate job for the lui-/le- opposition.

5.

Animacy Skewing in Two-participant Messages

Table 4.1 showed that, in three-participant examples, human referents skew strongly toward lui- in comparison to inanimates, which skew to le-. This result is predicted by the Control hypothesis: Since humans are inherently more capable of control over events than inanimates, then, other factors being equal, humans should get the higher degree of Control, and inanimates the lower degree. Table 4.2 applies the same test to two-participant examples.

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE Table 4.2. Referent of l- Form in Two-Participant

183

Messages

Human Referent

Inanimate Referent

MORE lui-, leur-

276 +

3

LESS le-, la-, les-

1279

725 +

Text: GHT and SAR (combined) d = ±86.0 OR = 52.1

N = 2283

The result is as before: a strong skewing with regard to animacy. This is perhaps not surprising in light of the earlier count; still, this test is important for several reasons. Firstly, it confirms what is seen in the individual examples: When there are only two controlling participants, French speakers do not automatically reach for the top and the bottom of the scale. In traditional terms, the accusative is not, in fact, the case of the direct object. The semantic opposition between luiand le- actively influences the choice even when only one is needed. Furthermore, the fact that both tests reveal the same skewing with regard to the same parameter — human vs. inanimate referent — confirms that exploitation of the Control scale is at least partially similar in two- and threeparticipant situations. Finally, having this quantitative point explicitly established will be important in Chapter 5 when we focus attention on the most perplexing two-participant messages, the "governing" instances.

6.

Low Level of Activity with lein Chapter 3 we examined the use of lui- with verbs denoting a low level of activity or the existence of a state (e.g. Cela lui était égal). We asked there: When is the substance of Control invoked and when is it not? Lui-, to recall, is used to indicate a participant that contributes to the existence or creation of a particular state; we saw lui- used in expediter and motivator strategies. Le- occurs as well as lui- with the same verbs (most often être 'be'). We must now consider what determines the choice between lui- and le- here. For example:

184 (46)

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

"Hubert Vernoux ... est... un homme accablé de soucis. Il a été très riche. Il l'est moins et je me demande même s'il l'est encore ..." SMP 41 ' "Hubert Vernoux ... is ... a man overwhelmed by worries. He used to be very rich. Now he is less so [lit.: is it (le-) less] and I even wonder if he still is at all [lit.: still is it (le-)] ..." '

As can be seen, le- is used with a state to provide a pronominal reference to the state itself. As between the state itself (referred to by le-) and the one who helps bring about the state (referred to by lui-), it is clearly the latter who exercises the greater degree of Control. This is brought out by the following pairs: (47) a. Je lui suis indispensable. T am indispensable to him.' b. Je le suis. T am.' (i.e. indispensable) (48) a. Le laboratoire surtout lui était un havre. 'The laboratory especially was a haven for him.' b. Le laboratoire surtout l'était. The laboratory especially was one.' (i.e. a haven) (49) a. Les chefs et les The chiefs and b. Les chefs et les The chiefs and

sorciers lui demeuraient hostiles. the sorcerers remained hostile to him.' sorciers le demeuraient. the sorcerers remained so.' (i.e. hostile)

(50) a. L'exercise lui paraissait trop facile. The exercise seemed to him too easy.' b. L'exercise le paraissait. The exercise seemed so.' (i.e. too easy) Theoretically, there could be such an example with both lui- and le- (our collection happens not to contain one): (50) c.

L'exercise le lui paraissait. The exercise seemed so to him.'

We see here the familiar pattern: lui- used for a participant having higher inherent potential for control, and le- for a lower-potential participant, which in this case is a mere abstraction, a state. We note in passing the contradiction posed by this use of le- to the traditional category "pronoun". The pronoun is, by definition, a part of speech whose function is to substitute for a noun. In these examples, though, it appears

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

185

to replace an adjective. This use poses no problem for the Control hypothesis. As will be discussed in Chapter 7, "pronoun" is not a grammatical category in the present framework. The use of le- is accounted for here, as everywhere, by the systemic opposition between le- and lui- within the semantic substance of Degree of Control.

7.

Wider Exploitation of the Control Opposition in Two-Participant Messages

As seen above, a three-participant message with écrire or parler represents simply the sum of two two-participant messages, since lui- and le- have the same strategies in both. Elsewhere, though, a given example with lui- or lealone may not represent a fraction of some three- participant message. Overall, lui- and le- have a wider range of exploitation when used separately than when used together. An example occurs with presser 'squeeze'. We may have a three-participant example such as the following: (51)

Avant de lui donner le citron, je le lui ai pressé. 'Before giving him the lemon I squeezed it {le-) for him (lui-).'

We may also have le- alone in the same role: (52)

Pour extraire le jus d'un citron il faut le presser. 'To get the juice out of a lemon you have to squeeze it.' Example (53), however, is an interesting two-participant message with lui-. The role here is quite different from that of lui- in (51); it appears closer to that of le-, "thing squeezed". In this scene, a little boy is fantasizing, trying to get a reaction from inanimate objects as though they were human. First he tries talking to a tree. When it doesn't respond, he reacts as he would to similar inaction by a human: by cursing and kicking the tree (which is referred to with lui-). Then he turns to grasshoppers. (53)

Il était beaucoup plus amusant d'arracher les pattes d'une sauterelle parce qu'elle vous vibrait entre les doigts comme une toupie et, quand on lui pressait sur le ventre, il en sortait une crème jaune. Mais tout de même les sauterelles ne criaient pas. Lucien aurait bien voulu faire souffrir une de ces bêtes qui crient quand elles ont mal, une poule, par exemple, mais il n'osait pas les approcher. SMU 160

186

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE 'It was much more fun to tear the legs off a grasshopper because it vibrated between your fingers like a top, and when you squeezed its belly [lit.: squeezed it (lui-) on the belly], there came out a yellow cream. But still, grasshoppers didn't scream. Lucien would have liked to torture one of these animals that scream when they are hurt, for instance a hen, but he didn't dare approach them.'

As with the tree and the hens, Lucien wants a reaction from the grasshopper. As in acts of communication, motivation for this act comes from the High Controller's desire to elicit a response or reaction from the Mid Controller. When Lucien squeezes the grasshopper's stomach, he gets one of the two reactions obtainable from this creature. The boy's own strange characteristics make the tree and the grasshopper into entities from which a response is expected; and the combination of the characteristics of this boy and these NonHigh Controllers results in a type of interaction greater than that between e.g. a lemon and its squeezer. In this way, lui- here is motivated by the same factors as with parler in example (40).7 We find similar strategies with frapper 'hit, strike'. Example (54) depicts a man with a strong sense of fatality. It is wartime, and he contemplates his manner of death. (54)

... il avait choisi la canne plombée qui le frapperait à la tempe, la SAR 175 grenade allemande qui l'éventrait. ' ... he had chosen the weighted nightstick that would smite him Qe-) on the temple, the German grenade that would eviscerate him.'

The action indicated here with frapper and le- is intended to inflict harm, certainly not to establish interaction or communication between participants. Now see what happens when frapper is used with lui-.8 In (55), a young man has been associating with a group of youths belonging to a reactionary political organization. They urge him to join, but he at first hesitates. Finally he decides. (55)

Il se sentait grave et presque religieux quand il annonça la bonne nouvelle à Lemordant. "C'est décidé, lui dit-il, je suis avec vous." Lemordant lui frappa sur l'épaule, et la bande fêta l'événement en buvant quelques bonnes bouteilles. SMU 236 'He felt serious and almost religious when he announced the good news to Lemordant. "It's decided," he told him, "I'm with you." Lemordant slapped him Qui-) on the shoulder and the gang celebrated the event by drinking a few good bottles.'

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

187

This "hitting" is clearly different from that of (54). This is a friendly pat, a symbolic gesture representing the establishment of solidarity — tighter communication and closer interaction between the participants. This gesture is followed up by other such gestures: drinking together, etc. What lui- contributes here, as well as with siffler, presser, and the verbs of communication, is the suggestion of interaction between participants.9 Note the serious problem these examples pose for sentence grammar. With verbs like parler and écrire, the direct/indirect object distinction has some plausibility, because these objects correspond to distinct types of entities. But when the same type of entity can be either direct or indirect object, as with frapper and presser, the distinction erodes. Notional and syntactic definitions of indirect object fail to account for this variation; the "hitting" and "squeezing" affect their objects equally directly whether lui- or le- is chosen. Moreover, neither the syntax of the sentence nor "syntactic features" of the verb, such as transitivity, can predict the choice of pronoun; these verbs occur with each form independently, as in (52) and (53), as well as with both together. The expedient of positing homonymous verbs presser and frapper is also highly suspect. Clearly there is great similarity between the allegedly distinct "meanings" of such homonyms. It is a classic case of misplaced blame. The inputs of lui- and le- are demonstrably the same here as elsewhere. Recognizing these as responsible for the morphological variation makes much more sense than invoking homonymy. The same is true for these examples of peser 'weigh': (56)

Ses lourdes responsabilités lui pesaient. 'Her heavy responsibilities weighed on her {lui-)'

(57)

La balance la pesait. 'The scale weighed her {la-)'

As was seen in Chapter 3, lui- with peser 'weigh' indicates a participant who has some responsibility for a state of affairs that "weighs on" her. With le-, however, the Non-High Controller is more passive; in (57) that participant is merely being measured by an instrument. Here, as in the frapper examples but unlike the earlier sets, the two High Controllers are very different kinds of things, whereas the two Non-High Controllers are the same thing. For this reason, it is unlikely that the lui- /le- contrast could be demonstrated directly by combining these two two-participant examples into a sensible three-participant example. One could, of course, do so by invoking a different strategy of lui-. Suppose a woman has chosen some meat in a butcher shop; one might then say:

188

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

(58)

Le boucher la lui pesait. 'The butcher weighed it for her.'

Once again, when the le- participant is a different type of entity from the luiparticipant, a message with both together is plausible; this was the case with presser in example (51). However, there is no apparent sensible message to be communicated combining the type of activity represented in (52) with that in (53), or of that in (56) with that in (57). It is thus clear that the motivation for the choice between lui- and le- in two-participant examples must be sought outside the sentence. Yet, when found, this motivating factor — Degree of Control — turns out to be identical to the factor explaining the occurrence of lui- and le- in three-participant examples, where the choice sometimes can be understood on the basis of what is in the sentence. (Even here, though, the analyst must supply extrasentential knowledge about the nature of participants, the event, and the situation.) This single explanatory construct thus transcends the traditional tripartite division of responsibility among syntax, pragmatics, and semantics. In summary, the value side of the analysis demands more attention with two-participant examples because the factors motivating the choice between luiand le- have to be ferreted out more deeply. Strategies must often be elucidated by comparison across examples. Moreover, there are skewings in the distribution of lui- and le- which emerge only from the standpoint of the two-participant message. There are (de facto) three positions on the Control scale; thus, a maximum of three distinct participants can be included in a given event. When only two of the slots are filled, there is room for maneuvering, and additional exploitations are possible. However, not all three-participant examples are as simply explained as those discussed so far. We must return to the three- participant example for a deeper look.

8.

Occurrences of lui- and le- with Semantically-Defined Verb Classes

It is clear from the foregoing discussion that the number of participants mentioned with a particular event is an important factor in the choice of lui- or le-. This is one consequence of the relational nature of the Control meanings. The exact effect produced by this factor, however, varies markedly depending on the event. In two-participant examples with payer 'pay', only the le- option is

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

189

exploited; but with three participants, there is a relativistic "pushing" of one of them up to lui-. (59) a. Je le paie. b. Je le paie. c. Je le lui paie.

'I pay him.' 'I pay it (e.g. his salary).' 'I pay him it.'

With écrire, on the other hand, both options are exploited in the two-participant example; and the strategies of lui- and le- with three participants parallel those of the two-participant example. (60) a. Je lui écris. b. Je l'écris. c. Je la lui écris.

'I write him.' 'I write it (e.g. the letter).' 'I write him it.'

With presser, frapper, and peser, one use of lui- and le- in a two-participant situation parallels the three-participant exploitation, but the two-participant situation offers broader possibilities with lui- that are unlike the three-participant message. Siffler is similar, but here it is le- that has the extra possibilities. Faire + infinitive goes one step further; the value relation between lui- and le- sets up a kind of canonical strategy, but speakers are then free to choose on the basis of local considerations, even in a three-participant situation. What explains these different patterns of occurrence of lui- and le- with different events? There is a bigger picture that must be grasped. Since the patterns correlate with individual verbs, one immediately suspects that the distribution of lui- and le- is sensitive to the lexical content of the verbs. We shall therefore group the verbs cooccuring with each pattern, and look to the meanings MORE and LESS CONTROL for explanation of the groupings. This constitutes a further appeal to linguistic value. In doing this, we take note of one more pattern, in which one potential participant is made a non-participant. Consider the situation with conseiller 'advise, recommend'. (61)

Si le général songe à la retraite, je la lui conseille. Tf the general is considering retreat, I recommend it to him.'

The three-participant message uses le- and lui-. If we decompose this into two two-participant messages using the same referents, we find that both are le-. (62) a. Je le conseille. b. Je la conseille.

T advise him.' (i.e. the general) T advise it.' (i.e. retreat)

The pattern with this verb is thus like that with payer. But there is another possibility:10

190

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

(63)

Je le conseille sur la retraite. 'I advise him about retreat.'

As seen in Chapters 2 and 3, mentioning an entity with a preposition denies it the status of a Controlling Participant. However, this mechanism may serve as a way of adding, de facto, an extra option, at the bottom of the Control scale. Examples (61) and (62b) show that "retreat" is a potential Low Controller in "advising". But when the "advisee" is made Low Controller (for reasons to be seen), "retreat" is, in effect, pushed off the bottom of the scale. By including "retreat" as a non-controller with a preposition, one retains it in the message. It is a way of handling a message with four entities in the face of the fact that French has only three signalled levels of meaning for Control. Although our collection does not contain one, an example including all four entities is at least imaginable:11 (64)

Je lui conseille le général sur la retraite. 'At her behest (lui-), I advise the general about retreat.'

We thus have three distinct patterns of distribution of lui- and le- relative to two- and three-participant messages. The result of grouping verbs according to these three patterns is three groups, all the verbs within each group occurring the same way with lui- and le-, and all, as will be shown, sharing some semantic commonality.12 These three distributional patterns, or types, represent different ways of exploiting the grammatical apparatus of French for relating entities to events. Below, we summarize and illustrate each of the three types (referred to as A, B, and C). In each class we show how both higher-potential entities and lower-potential entities are dealt with, in both two- and three-entity messages.13 As noted, one of the classes, class B, contains a bifurcation. First we show the patterning, and then we will explain the correlation between the patterning and the Control meanings. Type A. Higher-potential entity: Je lui parle. Lower-potential entity: Je la parle.

T speak to him.' (e.g. my friend) 'I speak it.' (e.g. the French language)

In the three-entity event the distribution parallels the two-entity event: Je la lui parle. Type B. Higher-potential entity: Je le paye. Lower-potential entity: Je le paye.

T speak it to him.'

T pay him.' (e.g. my employee) T pay it.' (e.g. the salary)

191

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

The Non-High Controller is le- in both cases. In French, two distinct participants playing different roles cannot both be Low Controller at the same time.14 Consequently, in the three-entity event, we do not get le le, or le + noun Low Controller. There are two different possibilities for the higher-potential entity: B1 B2:

Je lui paye son salaire. T pay him his salary.' Je le paye de belles paroles. T pay him off with nice words.'

Type C. Higher-potential entity: Je la guéris. Lower-potential entity: Je la guéris.

T cure her.' (e.g. the patient) T cure it.' (e.g. the disease)

In the three-entity event, the type represented by B1 is not available, and we have only: Je la guéris de sa maladie. T cure her of her disease.' Figure 4.1 summarizes these types.15 luiType A Higher potential Lower potential Three-participant Type B1 Higher potential Lower potential Three-participant Type B 2 Higher potential Lower potential Three-participant Type C Higher potential Lower potential Three-participant Figure 4.1. Three-Entity Events

le-

non-Controller

X X

X X

X

X X X X (X) X

X

X (X) X

X

192

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

A, B, and C represent different sets of verbs. The Xs represent the distributional patterns of lui- and le-. Verb groups A and C each occur with only one pattern; in this sense they appear to "govern" a particular cooccurrence set. Group B occurs with two different patterns, one of which is identical to that of type C. The purpose of the chart and this discussion is to relate the three sets of verbs to the patterns of Xs. The line of analysis we will develop is as follows. Each of the three verb groups has a certain semantic character. These aspects of the semantic content of the verbs are exploited by speakers in conjunction with the meanings of luiand le- in readily understandable ways, producing the distributional patterns. The association between verb group and distributional pattern is thus semantically motivated. So far, our discussion has concentrated on the semantics of lui- and le-. Hereafter, to explain correlations between /- forms and verbs, we will explicitly address the semantics of the verbs themselves, both quantitatively and with individual examples. First a few observations based on Figure 4.1. Type B1 shows the same kind of "sliding" effect seen with the superagent: a higher-potential participant mentioned with le- in a two-participant message "slides" up to lui- when a third, lower-potential participant is added. In types B2 and C there is a somewhat different kind of sliding, where the lower-potential entity "slides" off the bottom of the scale in the three-entity event, being no longer a Controlling Participant. In type A, by contrast, the relationship is fixed: the Control forms are distributed in the three-participant message just as in the two-participant. In light of the superagent strategy, one might expect, a priori, a distributional pattern everywhere as in the B 1 examples. What needs to be explained then is: (a) what factors lie behind the differentiation into three classes of verbs; (b) why there is a "fixed" relationship in A but "sliding" in B1 and the others; and (c) why there exists a bifurcation within type B. The answer to all these questions lies, as suggested above, in concurrent coherent exploitation of the lexical content of the verbs and the meanings of the Control forms. We shall examine each category separately. Type A. These verbs denote activities that aim at an interaction between the High and Non-High Controllers. They are, essentially, the verbs of communication, including:

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

parler écrire répondre demander crier, hurler, etc. téléphoner, télégraphier, etc. chuchoter, souffler murmurer lire chanter aboyer

193

'speak' 'write' 'answer' 'ask (for)' 'shout' 'telephone, telegraph' etc. 'whisper' 'murmur' 'read' 'sing' 'bark'

In messages with these verbs, lui- refers to the addressee of communication, and le- to that which is communicated. As seen in Chapter 3, an addressee is one type of motivator; it thus represents a relatively high degree of Control compared to the thing communicated. In a two-participant situation, the determination that addressee is relatively high-Control and therefore merits lui- is made by comparison both of: (a) what the message would be with the same verb and le-, and (b) these verbs to other verbs of French, namely, the verbs of types B and C, where the higher-potential entity exerts less Control than with the verbs of type A. Thus, any given example actually enters into an extensive network of linguistic oppositions. Verbs like sourire 'smile', rire 'laugh' and mentir Tie' are type A, even though le- rarely occurs with them. The high interaction/communication motif is shown by example (65), from an amorous conversation. (65)

"... Je vous aime tendrement, Lucette. Vous êtes si charmante et si jeune ..." Lucette lève les yeux vers André qui lui sourit, puis, avec une confiance enfantine, elle laisse aller de nouveau sa tête sur son épaule. SJF 51

' "... I love you tenderly, Lucette. You are so charming and so young ..." Lucette raised her eyes to André who smiled at her {lui-), then, with childlike confidence, she again let her head fall on his shoulder.' Smiling is her response to his words. Each action of one of the characters leads to an action by the other: he says he loves her, she raises her eyes, he smiles, she puts her head on his shoulder. Each character, then, motivates the other to keep up the interaction.16

194

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Our collection contains no examples of sourire with a Low Controller; however, such an example is imaginable: (66)

Elle lui a souri son contentement. 'She smiled her happiness at him.'

Some French speakers might never encounter an example like this; with rire and mentir a. Low Controller is even harder to imagine.17 Nonetheless, the semantic affinity of these verbs to the others of class A is sufficient to trigger an unhesitating choice of lui- for the non-high participant. This is an impressive manifestation of value in French grammar. The position of a verb within the semantic field is enough by itself to motivate a certain pattern of cooccurrence with Control forms. Strictly speaking, one might call rire and mentir "governing" verbs, since le- is never found with them. And, as will be demonstrated in detail below, it is precisely this network of semantic interrelationships that drives "government". Type B. The distinctive characteristic of type A is that either lui- or le- may occur in a two-participant message. In type B, le- occurs, but not lui-. Lui- occurs only with three-participants, a consequence of the relational nature of the Control scale similar to the effect with a superagent. The first question, then, is what motivates these different treatments of high-potential entities in the two-participant message. We again start with a list, not necessarily complete, of verbs of this type: conseiller 'advise' enseigner 'teach' inspirer 'inspire' payer 'pay, pay for' rembourser 'reimburse' fournir 'furnish, supply, provide' garantir 'guarantee, protect' Inspection of this list does not immediately reveal the coherency observable with the verbs of type A. Rather, the coherency of this list emerges upon comparison to the other lists, and then it is a negative factor: Type B verbs are marked by the absence of the high degree of interaction that characterizes type A. This explains the greater variety of exploitations with type B. The absence of a strong motivating factor leads to a less skewed cooccurrence pattern. So, for example, the type B verbs that indicate some kind of communication, 'teach', 'advise', and perhaps 'inspire', are much more one-sided actions than those of type A. In type B the Non-High Controller only has to listen to what the High Controller says, whereas in type A, the High Controller either

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

195

wishes to elicit some reaction from the Mid Controller or is more directly motivated by him to pursue the communication. Similarly, the verbs of 'paying' and 'providing' of type B involve a Low Controller relatively little involved with the High Controller in controlling the action. The Low Controller is "paid off"; the expression payer de belles paroles, an example of type B 2 , implies getting rid of a creditor with mere talk. This explains why the scale does not "slide" in Type A. The interaction implicit in a type-A activity forces the higher-potential participant up to a higher position on the scale. Such motivation is lacking with type B. It is thus reasonable for that participant to be represented by lui- in A, and le- in B. Just as was the case with individual verbs like parler, écrire, and conseiller (examples (37)(42), (61), (62)), so too here the /- forms are "reserved" for particular uses in view of the other uses of the system. The value-based rationale now applies across classes of verbs. We see here a practical application of the dictum that in language "tout se tient", a theme that will grow in importance as the present line of analysis develops. We may further consider why in class B there are two ways — types B1 and B 2 — of handling a three-entity message. As suggested above, type B 2 , using a preposition, is a means of including an entity in a message without making it a Controlling Participant. We may return to the pair: a. b.

Je lui paye son salaire. Je le paye de belles paroles.

T pay him his salary.' T pay him off with nice words.'

The "salary" in (a) is more of a genuine participant in the "paying" than the "nice words" in (b), since the salary is a bona fide filler of the role of "thing paid"; whereas the "nice words", after de, are merely an empty substitute for money, a poor excuse for a payment.18 The payer examples, moreover, show the prepositional device as a de facto means of assigning to an entity even less control than le-, where this lower entity is pushed off the bottom of the scale, as it were. The payee in message (a) motivates payment of the salary by his work. The "payee" in (b), though, doesn't ask for this kind of payment. He moves down the scale to le- because he is being "gotten rid of". Thus the belles paroles of (b), standing in for the payment, can not enter the message via the Control system, the lowest level of Control being preempted. A good example of this trade-off is provided by the following pair with fournir. These examples are taken from Charles De Gaulle's War Memoires. In (67), De Gaulle has just begun to organize his "Free French" army after the German invasion. At this point he is trying to form an alliance with Great Britain. But he is afraid that the British will use his forces as mere auxiliaries to

196

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

their own; whereas he, De Gaulle, wants his army to be independent and the true representative of France in the war. (67)

Quant à l'immédiat, au nom de quoi mener quelques-uns de ses fils à un combat qui ne serait plus le sien? A quoi bon fournir d'auxiliaires les forces d'une autre puissance? Non! Pour que l'effort en valût la peine, il fallait aboutir à remettre dans la guerre, non point seulement des Français, mais la France. DMA 88 'As for the immediate future, in the name of what was [France] to lead a few of her sons into a battle which would no longer be her own? What good would it do to furnish with auxiliaries the forces of another power? No ! For the effort to be worthwhile, what had to be put back into the war was not just Frenchmen, but France.

The Low-Control participant is 'the forces of another power', and the object of de is 'auxiliaries' (the French soldiers), making this an example of type B 2 . The High-Control participant (not mentioned here because the verb is an infinitive) would be De Gaulle and his Free French. This "furnishing" is, of course, a oneway street: the "other power" is not even asking for these forces, and can presumably get along without them; the French forces would be clearly subordinate, merely "auxiliary". This, then, represents a particularly low degree of interaction and cooperation between the High and Non-High Controllers. The Non-High is thus made Low (commutable with le-), and the "auxiliaries", who rank even lower in this whole arrangement, are not assigned any place at all in the Control hierarchy. Contrast this to (68), an example of type B 1 with fournir. De Gaulle is attempting to rally support in Chad, where he finds a great deal of enthusiasm for his cause. (68)

Les militaires, dans leurs postes, au contact de la Libye italienne, conservaient l'esprit de guerre et aspiraient aux renforts que De Gaulle pourrait leur fournir. DMA 116 'The soldiers, in their posts, in contact with Italian Lybia, maintained a fighting spirit and aspired to the reinforcements which De Gaulle could furnish them.'

The Africans actively desired the French troops and happily anticipated getting them. The higher degree of cooperation and interaction between High Controller (De Gaulle) and Non-High Controller (the Chadian military) motivates leur- for the latter;19 the bottom position on the Control scale is left open for the "reinforcements", and the prepositional option is unnecessary. Observe that in (67), with de, the thing furnished, auxiliaries, has no

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

197

article; whereas in (68), where de is not used, the thing furnished, renforts, has a definite article. This seems to represent a general tendency in French20 explained by a factor mentioned earlier: the extent to which an entity is worthy of the status of a Controlling Participant. An article or determiner helps reify.21 The more an entity is viewed as a thing, a physical object, the more it has the characteristics of a bona fide participant; the more likely it is, in turn, to be referred to with a member of the system of Degree of Control. Thus, the double option within type B is useful because it provides more ways to relate entities to events, allowing fuller exploitation of the Control system. The existence of two patterns within type B but only one within type A reflects the greater homogeneity of type A. Type B verbs are used for a greater range of messages; they are associated with a greater range of types of entities and, as individual verbs, potentially with more entities than the verbs on list A. One may thus expect list B verbs to be associated with a greater variety of ways of relating entities to events. Again the central point: the different distributional patterns of /- forms with these two groups of verbs is a consequence of the semantics of the verbs and the /- forms, and of speakers' attempts to exploit both to communicate messages. Type C. In type C, lui- is found neither in two- nor in three-participant messages; and when three entities are mentioned in an event, they are dealt with as in type B 2 , not as in B1 The reason for this absolute skewing becomes apparent upon examination of the list of verbs of this type. All represent actions in which the Non-High Controller has very little control, or is deprived of control. These fall into a small number of thematic subtypes. I. Victimized. With these actions, the Low Controller is somehow deprived of control, or the action aims at depriving him of control. Thus one says: On l'a privé de ses biens 'He was deprived of his property', not *On lui a privé ses biens; On.l'a menacé de mort 'He was threatened with death, not *On lui a menacé la mort, etc. menacer priver frustrer dépouiller dégoûter punir accuser charger

'threaten' 'deprive' 'deprive, defraud' 'plunder' 'disgust' 'punish' 'accuse' 'burden'

198

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

II. Helpless. These events have a Low Controller who is inherently weak, defenseless, or helpless, who lacks control of things or must resort to others for help. guérir protéger préserver consoler plaindre secourir

'cure' 'protect' 'preserve' 'console' 'pity' 'help, rescue'

There is also a group of verbs of "informing" in type C; we list them here since they involve a participant who is out of Control (and to that extent, helpless) because he lacks certain knowledge; some of these may be glossed 'warn', indicating a participant in danger. prévenir avertir informer

'inform, warn' 'warn' 'inform'

III. Non-interacting. These are essentially one-way actions; the action is directed toward the Low Controller but there is no implication that he responds in any way. These actions are a kind of dead-end street; they often represent the last stage in a series of events. féliciter remercier louer gratifier doter

'congratulate' 'thank' 'praise' 'favor, reward' 'endow'

Type C, being associated with le- to the complete exclusion of lui-, represents a kind of "government". Yet the semantic factors underlying this category are definable as in type A, where both lui- and le- occur. Furthermore, the existence of a choice in type A requires explanation no less than the nonexistence of choice in type C. Full explanation, it can now be seen, comes from comparison across classes. Indeed, looking across types A, B, and C, we see a spectrum effect. Type A represents the greatest degree of interaction among participants and the greatest degree of Control by the Non-High Controller; type B represents overall a lesser degree of these factors; and type C, the least. Correspondingly, in type A lui- is used the most, appearing in both three- and two-participant messages; in type B lui- is used less, occurring with three participants but not with two; in type C lui- is not used at all.

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

9.

199

The Network of Oppositions: Verbs of "Commanding"

The present analysis, then, rather than listing arbitrary "selectional restrictions" with individual verbs, seeks motivations for these selections in the communicative intent of speakers. In some messages the theme of control over an event is salient. This may occur when there is a particularly high degree of interaction between participants, as in acts of communication, or a particularly low degree, as when one participant is victimized, helpless, or the like. In such cases, speakers and writers of French may have two opportunities to highlight control: once by their choice of verb, and again by their choice of pronoun. It is not surprising that they will exploit both opportunities. This is predictable in light of people's well-known tendency to get a point across by repeating themselves, or by saying things "in other words". Reid (1991: Chapter 8) has coined the term "textual resonance" for situations where the same motivation for a particular kind of choice applies twice, resulting in the appearance of an automatic association. Reid develops this notion for another area of grammar traditionally viewed as an instance of automaticity: "concord / subject-verb agreement"; here we apply the notion to selection of case in French. Much of what has been viewed as non-functional redundancy in language is actually communicatively motivated. Reid draws an analogy with ... a holographic negative. Each small point on a conventional negative encodes information relevant to a particular feature of the image being represented; if a fraction of the negative is removed, a corresponding fraction of the image is lost. On a holographic negative however, there is no analogue correspondence between points of the negative and features of the image; the image is simultaneously encoded at all points, though at lower degrees of resolution. Excising a portion of the negative reduces the resolution but leaves the image as a whole intact. In the case of holography, then, trying to partition a negative into those fractions that are functionally critical and those that are superfluous is entirely to misunderstand the basic principle upon which that system of representation operates. So too with language. To try to partition its components into the semantically critical and the semantically redundant is to miss the peculiar genius of its design ... (Reid 199L298-299)22

The fact that semantic skewings with regard to degree of control emerge when one draws up individual lists of verbs occurring with various types of complements, suggests that degree of control is an aspect of the semantics of these verbs that is important to French speakers, and that these verbs are thought of as indicating greater or lesser interaction among participants. The result is a network of lexical oppositions. To illustrate the significance of this network for

200

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

the distribution of forms in texts, we will examine three verbs denoting 'commanding' or 'ordering' : prescrire, a type A verb, and charger and sommer, type C verbs. We have collected all occurrences in the De Gaulle War Memoires which, given its length and subject matter, contains ample material for a study of such verbs. The distribution of pronouns here abuts on actual "government", for in the environment Verb + Non-High Controller + de + Infinitive ('command somebody to do something'), to which the scope of this examination is limited, prescrire occurs with lui- but never with le-, charger and sommer occur with lebui never with lui-. What this demonstration establishes directly is something about these verbs, not about lui- and le-. By looking at the contexts in which the three verbs occur, we will conclude that they are not synonymous, that they are, in fact, used to produce different types of messages. However, based on the nature of these message types, we will further conclude that the patterns of cooccurrence of these verbs with lui- and le- arise from the Control meanings and the semantic content of the verbs together. The test thus ultimately supports the Control hypothesis. Table 4.3 gives the complete collection for sommer, showing High Controller, Non-High Controller, and the nature of the command. Table 4.3. Sommer (a le- verb) + de + Infinitive Vol.

Pg. High Controller

I

91

II

75

Non-High Controller

Nature of the command

French government

De Gaulle

return without delay

German general

French admiral

disarm garrison and turn everything over to Germans

Pétain

obey (heavy pressure used on Pétain)

Gen. Gerow

Gen. Leclerc

keep out of things

Churchill

3 Polish ministers

cooperate with the Rus-

the Japanese Gen. Paget

French Admiral, General submit totally French authorities execute all orders without discussion

II

198 Anatole de Monzie

II

376

III

61

III III

194 226

It emerges that sommer is used when the person receiving the command is given no choice whatever: he is summarily ordered to carry out a command. In I-91, De Gaulle, who, after the French capitulation to the Germans, had gone off on

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

201

his own in defiance of the Pétain government, is ordered by that government to return at once. In 11-376, a French officer is ordered by the American commander-in-chief to mind his own business. In several other cases the command is for capitulation or unconditional surrender. The verb attributing such a low degree of control to the Non-High Controller is predictably a le- verb. As between prescrire and charger, we find the le- verb, charger, used for routine types of commands, where the "commanding" flows naturally from an unequal power relation between the High Controller and the Non-High Controller. Most of these are instances of superiors giving routine orders to their subordinates. There is thus a maximizing of the difference in degree of Control between the two participants, and le- appropriately "resonates" with this. The data are given in Table 4.4. Table 4.4. Charger (a le- Verb) + de + Infinitive Vol.

Pg. High Controller

Non-High Controller

Nature of the command

62 French government

De Gaulle

give message to Churchill

Catroux's son

tell De Gaulle he approves

Gen. Legentilhomme

bring his troops into combat

British diplomat

inform Churchill of his position

293a De Gaulle

Resistance leader

bring cohesion into resistance movements

293b De Gaulle

Resistance leader

see to unity of action of resistance troops

92

Gen. Catroux

170 De Gaulle 261

De Gaulle

295

French communists

Resistance worker

transmit message to De Gaulle

319

Gen. Auchinlek

Gen. Ritchie

command the battle-front (A. was Comm.—in-chief)

II

31a

Sec. of State Hull

U.S. Ambassador

take the matter up with the British

II

31b

Sec. of State Hull

U.S. Consul Gen.

thank De Gaulle

De Gaulle

Resistance worker

take an order to resistance movements

II II

50

151 The national resolve De Gaulle

incarnate and lead the nation

202

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

II

169 National Committee Commissioner of Food

begin negotiations with allied govt's.

II

266

De Gaulle

his ambassador

transmit message to the foreign office

II

268

De Gaulle

his minister

communicate text of letter to British ambassador

II

272 De Gaulle

diplomatic envoy

give an answer to Roosevelt

II

288

Roosevelt

diplomatic envoy

give De Gaulle an answer

II

289

De Gaulle

diplomatic envoy

arrange details of visit

II

376

De Gaulle

Gen. Leclerc

inform allies of arrangement

II

382 De Gaulle

archpriest

transmit De Gaulle's respects to Cardinal

II

386

De Gaulle

Gen. Koenig

dissolve military groups in Paris

II

387

Pétain

governing college

take over function of head of state

III

80

De Gaulle

Gen. d'Astier

make contact with French leaders in Washington

Gen. du Vigier

give message to De Lattre and Devers

III

169 De Gaulle

One interesting point is that De Gaulle himself is Low Controller with this verb only twice. In I-62, he has not yet broken with the French government and is still subordinate to the President, here the High Controller. In 11-151, De Gaulle is an independent leader, openly challenging the government, who views himself as subordinate only to the will of the French people. The High Controller here is, significantly, "the national resolve". De Gaulle's always ranking so high in Control is consistent with the view of himself that he projects throughout the Mémoires. Table 4.5 gives the data for the lui- verb, prescrire.

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

203

Table 4.5. Prescrire (a lui- verb) + de + infinitive Vol. I I I

Non-High Controller Pg. High Controller 73 A government order Gen. Weygand (Comm.-in-chief) 170 De Gaulle Gen. de Larminat 193 British gov't. Gen. Wavell (Comm.-inchief) 209 De Gaulle Gen. Catroux 259 De Gaulle Gen. (unnamed) Comm.in-chief Equatorial Africa 261 De Gaulle Gen's. and heads of state

Nature of the command get ready to go to Africa

prepare to conquer Fezzan undertake military operation I take over Syria & Lebanon I prepare a brigade for Madagascar I inform allies of decision to resist I 320 Allied command Gen. Koenig hold out in battle 6 days longer 41 De Gaulle II Gen. Leclerc take his troops to French W. Africa Adm's. Esteva & Derrien let the Germans pass 56 Admiral Platon II Powerful warships 62 Vichy officials sink themselves II Gen. Legentilhomme take over Djibouti 71 De Gaulle II go on the offensive Gen. Leclerc 77 De Gaulle II form a Nat'l Resistance Jean Moulin *II 112 De Gaulle Council fight De Gaulle French officers (sym*II 167 A certain policy pathetic to DG) refuse tripartite conference 243 Liberation Committee Gen. Catroux II recall a commander Gen. Leclerc 365 Gen. Gerow II set up a command post Gen. Leclerc 367 De Gaulle II lay down their arms German soldiers *II 371 A German general forbid others to go to exYves Farge (resistance *III 15 De Gaulle tremes leader) organize the troops Gen. Chadabec de L. 17 De Gaulle III take over defense of allied Gen. Montgomery III 167 Gen. Eisenhower lines fall back on the Vosges forces under his comGen. Devers *III 169a mand hold out & defend Alsace Gen. Dody III 169b De Gaulle fall back on the Vosges Gen. Juin III 170 Gen. Eisenhower take charge of & defend Gen. Delattre III 171 De Gaulle Strasbourg hold fast in Alsace Gen. Devers III 174 Gen. Eisenhower

204 III

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE 176 Gen. Eisenhower

*III 198 III

Gen. Delattre

199 De Gaulle

*III 226a French gov't *III 226b Gen. Paget III 269 De Gaulle

Gen's. Montgomery & Bradley 2nd Corps Gen. Delattre French soldiers French soldiers Gen. Leclerc

move forward abandon a successful operation maintain French garrison in Stuttgart hold their positions cease combat & retreat get a foothold in SE Asia

This verb, in contrast to the two le- verbs, is used when the author wishes to emphasize a high degree of cooperation and interaction between the High and Non-High Controllers. "Resonating" lui- acknowledges that the latter has a large say in matters. This theme also applies when the High Controller treats the Non-High Controller with special deference. Running the eye down the "NonHigh Controller" column, one sees that most of these are generals or admirals, people equal or nearly equal in power to the High Controller (who is usually De Gaulle or another general). These messages are of one general cooperating with another to bring off a successful military operation. There are some departures from this pattern, marked with an asterisk on the left. In II-112, De Gaulle orders Jean Moulin (a civilian) to form a National Resistance Council. Moulin deserves the lui- verb because De Gaulle was assigning him to a high post that entailed much independent responsibility for making decisions. This is made clear by the subsequent context, translated here: Moulin, who had for a long time been preparing the way, I ordered to form, without delay, the National Resistance Council, which would include representatives from all movements of the two zones, from all political parties and from the two central labor unions. The order of the mission I gave him prescribed this composition, defined the role of the Council and made explicit the nature of the relations which tied it to the national Committee. Jean Moulin would himself preside over the new body. I named him a member of the French National Committee and bestowed upon him, in my home in Hampstead, the cross of the Liberation, during a ceremony more moving than any ceremony ever was.

In III-226a, the Non-High Controller is ordinary soldiers, but here the "cooperation/interaction" theme applies for a special reason. The passage discusses the contention between the French and the British for military supremacy in Syria. The French are the incumbent mandatory power, but the British are attempting to push them out. There have been disturbances involving the French troops, and the British order them to cease combat and withdraw. The De Gaulle government orders them to hold their positions. The British then

LINGUISTIC VALUE: LUI VERSUS LE

205

try a publicity trick, implying in a public announcement that they have the upper hand. At this, De Gaulle makes his own announcement, describing the orders he had given his troops, and he does so with prescrire. In this struggle for control of the French forces, it is important that De Gaulle present, both to the troops and to the public, a picture of harmonious cooperation, solidarity and interaction between the French government and the French troops. De Gaulle has to counteract the notion that his forces are taking orders from the British. In addition, the public image De Gaulle creates of his troops is important; he therefore speaks of them in a way that emphasizes their authority, by using the verb that attributes to them a higher degree of control. The other examples marked with an asterisk, very interestingly, turn out to be cases where a subordinate is asked to perform an extraordinary task, one that is beyond the call of duty or that goes against the person's natural inclination. Use of a lui- verb acknowledges that in order to get these people to cooperate, they could not be merely ordered around; they had to be treated as equals and their assent solicited. This verb ascribes to them a large degree of control over matters. Thus in III-15, Yves Farge, a Resistance leader, is ordered to hold his men in check. In II-167, French officers sympathetic to De Gaulle are ordered by Vichy to fight De Gaulle. In II-371, III-169a, III-198, and III-226b, soldiers are ordered either to retreat or to lay down their arms altogether, something that it is contrary to the nature of a soldier to do. To conclude these two sections we may restate the general point as follows. In explaining cooccurrences of lui- and le- with individual verbs, one must consider (a) the semantic content of the verb, and (b) the network of semantic oppositions into which that verb enters, together with the Control meanings of lui- and le-, while recognizing that speakers attempt to produce coherent messages using textual resonance. We have taken a first step toward resolving the enigma of "government". Before that task can be completed, however, one more strategy of exploitation of the lui-lle- opposition must be introduced and explained. This strategy, having to do with the Control level of the High Controller, requires explaining one of the other semantic substances of the System of Participants. For this reason, the next chapter will begin with a presentation of the entire supersystem of which Degree of Control is one part.

Chapter 5 Networks of Oppositions

1.

The System of Participants

Our investigation of lui- and le- has led deeply into the domain of linguistic value, yet the background of semantic substance is ever present. Far from excluding one another, these two parameters are in fact complementary and provide means for controlling and testing the analysis. The ultimate goal must always be kept in focus: to explain why lui- and le- appear where they do in discourse. The positing of a system of Degree of Control with the meanings MORE and LESS is motivated strictly by this goal. In Chapter 2 it was indicated that Degree of Control is part of a larger grammatical structure, the System of Participants, which provides several types of information about participants in events. The positing of this supersystem too is motivated by a desire to explain the distributions of lui-, le-, and various other forms. It is clear that lui-, leur-, le-, la-, and les-, cannot signal exclusively Degree of Control; their distributions are shaped by additional constraints that are semantic in nature. All are third person; leur- and les- indicate plurality, whereas the others are limited to singular referents; there is a gender distinction between le- "masculine" and la- "feminine". This study will have little to say about person, number, and gender. Although these traditional categories, particularly gender, are not without analytical problems, for present purposes they can be worked with or around. Two other semantic domains, however, beside Degree of Control, are relevant: Focus and Deixis. These terms have certain consistent interpretations in Columbia school work that are different from their denotations in other schools of linguistics and semantics. In each of these two systems, lui- and le-

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

207

share a common meaning but are in opposition to other clitics. These several semantic domains are held together in a single supersystem by the phenomenon of grammatical interlock. Validated analyses of the systems of Focus and Deixis are beyond the scope of this book. It will, however, be necessary to refer to Focus in order to complete discussion of the lui-/le- opposition, since Focus bears on one important strategy of Degree of Control. Before turning to that, we will define the notions of Focus and Deixis and present the complete hypothesized System of Participants. 1.1. The Grammatical Interlock The term "interlock" refers to a familiar phenomenon. For example, of the Latin verb form amant 'they love', one says that the ending -ant simultaneously indicates third person, plural number, present tense, active voice, indicative mood. This clustering of meanings can be understood as a consequence of speakers' constantly having to make choices.1 Each of these meanings represents one in a set of options that speakers have and among which they must choose. Thus (retaining traditional terminology for now), in the domain of Person, speakers have a choice among first, second, and third; with Number, between singular and plural; within Tense, they choose past, present, or future, etc.; within Voice, active or passive; within Mood, indicative or subjunctive. If each of these sets of choices is regarded as a system, since it presents the language user with a closed set of options in one semantic domain, it can be said that all these systems are interlocked in the signalling mechanism of Latin, because a single morpheme, -ant, indicates a choice from all the systems simultaneously. The positing of an interlock is thus part of the attempt to explain the occurrence of that morpheme. The deductive motivation for the interlock lies in the human factor. If one routinely wishes to give five types of information simultaneously, it is a great economy to have one signal giving all five at once, rather than having to use five separate signals every time. Humans typically construct tools so as to achieve in one operation multiple tasks which regularly have to be performed together. The modern washing machine, in which a spin cycle removes water from clothes with the same mechanism that washes the clothes, is considered a great improvement over the obsolete old-style machine with a separate wringer. Computer word-processing programs provide options ("macros") which allow the user to perform with one keystroke an entire routine, that is, several operations which must frequently be performed together, and which the user

208

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

would otherwise have to execute individually each time. The advantage is a great saving of effort. 1.2. Focus The semantic domain of Focus allocates the hearer's attention among participants in an event.2 Focus has two parts: CENTRAL FOCUS, which designates a participant the center of attention, and PERIPHERAL FOCUS for a participant that is not the center of attention.3 Focus is the backbone of the System of Participants in that all members of the interlock signal one of the two Focus meanings. The only member hypothesized to signal Focus without signalling either Deixis or Degree of Control is il. Il signals CENTRAL FOCUS; all other third-person clitics signal PERIPHERAL FOCUS. IL is thus in opposition to everything else in the Focus system. Figure 5.1 represents this system: CENTRAL il

Focus PERIPHERAL

lui-, leur-, le-, la-, les-; se Figure 5.1. The System of Focus

1.3. The Focus-Control Interlock The system of Degree of Control interlocks with the system of Focus in that lui- simultaneously signals MORE CONTROL and PERIPHERAL FOCUS, and lesignals both LESS CONTROL and PERIPHERAL FOCUS. The interlock is thus such that Central Focus is placed on the High Controller, and Peripheral Focus on Non-High Controllers. In the word-order Control system for nouns and non-clitic pronouns, the interlock is complete: the preverbal word order that signals HIGH CONTROL also signals CENTRAL FOCUS, and the postverbal position signalling LOW CONTROL also signals PERIPHERAL FOCUS.4 With the clitic pronouns the interlock is partial because there is no form in this system that signals HIGH CONTROL.

The form of this interlock has a clear communicative rationale. The participant who deserves the most attention is typically the one who makes an event happen, who is at the center of activity, who bears the greatest responsibil-

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

209

ity, i.e., the High Controller. To suggest an extralinguistic analogy, the President's activities generally go on the front page of the newspaper, not the back page. True, there are times when speakers wish to focus attention on a Non-High participant, or when the participant at the center of attention has things done to him. The investment in an interlock means that when speakers want to do something out of the ordinary like this, they cannot use the regular, dedicated mechanism, but must resort to some other, non-dedicated grammatical resource of French.5 1.4. The First and Second Persons Although this study is concerned exclusively with pronouns of the third person, the reader may ask how the first and second persons, which have no morphological distinction like that of lui- and le-, fit into this scheme. We offer here a brief statement of a tentative hypothesis. It seems clear that the clitics of the first and second persons signal Focus, since their use is limited to participants in events, as are lui- and le-, and since these persons have distinct forms ("disjunctives") used when there is no verb. There is, however, a difference in signalling mechanism between the singular and the plural, to be discussed in Chapter 7. Limiting these remarks to the singular, then, one .can hypothesize that je and tu signal CENTRAL FOCUS, and me and te, as well as the third-person se, PERIPHERAL FOCUS. Do these forms signal Degree of Control? Me and te cover the combined range of lui- and le-; je and tu parallel the High Controller of the word-order control system. On this basis, one might posit the meanings HIGH Control for je and tu, NON-HIGH for me and te. Further, me and te cover for their persons the uses of third-person se, the traditional "reflexive". Now, many of these uses, the so-called "straight reflexives", parallel those of lui- and le-: (1)

a. Elle le voit. b. Elle se voit.

'She sees him.' 'She sees herself.'

One might thus posit NON-HIGH CONTROL for se also. However, there is another group of uses, the so-called "Romance reflexive", not parallel to those of luiand le-: (2) Le mur s'écroule. 'The wall crumbles.' Me and te also have these uses. Here one can imagine two different hypotheses. (1) The "Romance reflexives" represent a rejection of the very notion of "degrees of control" over the event and instead result from a blending of

210

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Central and Peripheral Focus, both being attributed (by double mention) to the same participant. In this case, one will assign only the PERIPHERAL FOCUS meaning to me, te, and se, but no Degree of Control meaning. (2) Diver (1987b) has suggested that some or all of the "Romance reflexive" strategies might actually correspond to strategies of the Latin ablative case, which signals the second-highest level of a four-member Degree of Control system. If this is so, then one would presumably assign the meaning NON-HIGH CONTROL to me, te, and se, in addition to the Focus meaning. A decision on this matter can only come after careful examination of a collection of examples, particularly of the "Romance reflexives", with consideration of the contexts in which they occur and of how the choice is made between them and other options available to French speakers and writers. For now, we leave the question open. 1.5. Deixis The semantic domain of Deixis is described here for the sake of completeness. Deixis is what differentiates lui- and le- from se, but it plays no role in the lui-lle- opposition, and will not arise again in this study. Deixis tells the hearer how hard to look to find an antecedent. It enables the hearer to associate a pronoun with its referent.6 There are two degrees of Deixis. Low DEIXIS, signalled by se, tells the hearer not to look too far for the antecedent, because it is something very obvious; typically, this is the item in CENTRAL FOCUS. HIGH DEIXIS, signalled by lui- and le-, instructs the hearer to look farther afield for the antecedent. Se is thus in opposition to the /- forms in the system of Deixis. Se signals a meaning from the Focus system and a meaning from the Deixis system, but, we will assume for now, it does not signal any meaning from the third system, Degree of Control. Figure 5.2 represents the Deixis opposition: LOW

se Deixis HIGH

lui-, leur-, le-, la-, lesFigure 5.2. The System of Deixis

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

211

1.6. Communicative Motivation for Paradigmatic Structure We now present the interlock of Degree of Control, Focus, and Deixis (in the third person). This has hitherto been referred to as the System of Participants. To maintain terminological uniformity, reserving the term "system" for individual semantic domains, we will henceforth designate this structure The Participant Interlock. Figure 5.3 is accompanied by the caveat that it represents a hypothesis, the only portion of which has been fully validated to date being the system of Degree of Control. Future research may lead to modification of the hypothesis. CENTRAL

Focus

il

LOW

se

PERIPHERAL + Deixis

'MORE

lui-, leurHIGH + Degree of Control LESS

le-, la-, lesFigure 5.3. The Participant Interlock The communicative orientation illuminates this diagram, introducing a striking order and simplicity where the eye at first sees complexity. The rationale for this structure is: Extra precision is provided where it is most needed. Beginning at the left, with Focus: when attention is centered, it is centered on one item (or a plurality of the same type of item), whereas diverse items can lie on the periphery of attention, and it is here that Deixis comes in to help differentiate them. Thus, all items with the meaning PERIPHERAL FOCUS also signal a meaning from the Deixis system. Within Deixis, it is with LOW DEIXIS that there will be the least inferential problem, since this meaning is used to find the referent who is the easiest to find, and who is typically already the center of attention.7 The meaning HIGH DEIXIS admits a wider range of possible referents, and it is here that Degree of Control provides a further differentiation. Here, too, are found distinctions of number and gender, absent from the LOW DEIXIS portion of the scale, which also help in finding the referent. Thus, every item which signals HIGH DEIXIS also signals one of the meanings of Degree of Control.8 The communicative orientation, then, and the meanings it motivates provide explanation not only of the syntagmatic side of grammar — the distribution of

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

forms in utterances — but of the paradigmatic side as well — the structure of grammatical systems. It is to be noted that Figure 5.3, representing a hypothesis about the structure of one part of French grammar, does not emerge from any a priori conception about what kind of structure French — or any language — should have. It is not identical, or even essentially similar, to the structure of any other language known to this author.9 It emerges only after the signals and meanings of French are hypothesized. These hypotheses require consideration not only of the contribution to communication of each meaning independently, but also of the ways in which meanings interact with each other. A larger picture emerges only after the smaller pieces are in place. In the same way, theory, for the Columbia school, is not a program of what one expects, preanalytic ally, to find in language, but rather a summary of what one actually has found.10

2.

The High Controller in Two-Participant Messages The significance of the meaning PERIPHERAL FOCUS for Degree of Control

strategies in a two-participant event is seen in a kind of inverse correlation between the lui-/le- choice and the role of the High Controller. This is illustrated by examples (3) and (4). Both contain the verb monter, glossed, roughly, 'go up'. Example (3) refers to a pregnant woman, telling (with an appropriate gesture) how far up on her her baby comes. (3)

Il lui monte jusque là. 'He comes up to here on her.'

Example (4) refers to a child (some years after birth, of course) climbing up its mother as though she were a tree: (4)

Il la monte jusque là. 'He climbs up to here on her.'

The Control level of the High Controller, the child, is higher in (4), where la- is used: he actively "climbs"; he is directly responsible for the activity. In (3), on the other hand, with lui-, the child is less active. His involvement in the "going up" is passive rather than deliberate; it happens to him. The involvement of the mother, however, referent of /-, is of essentially a passive kind in both. Thus the apparent degree of control exerted by the central-focus participant (il, the child) correlates inversely with the Degree of Control signalled for the other participant (the mother). There is, in addition, an effect on the interpretation of the event itself: the

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

213

"going u p " in (4) is a bona fide activity, whereas in (3) it is rather a state of "being at a particular height". The connection between the two effects now becomes clear. The High Controller is the prime mover in the "going u p " . It makes sense that when the High Controller exhibits a more passive involvement in the "going u p " (as indicated by lui-), the "going u p " itself will be less of a deliberate activity, that is, more statelike. When the High Controller is indicated (by la-) to bear a more active responsibility, the "going u p " will appear as a more deliberate activity, that is, more actionlike. A similar pattern, including a shift of gloss, is found with servir. (5)

La bonne lui sert.

T h e maid is useful to him.'

(6)

La bonne le sert.

T h e maid serves him.'

With lui-, a state of "usefulness" is associated with the High Controller ('the maid'), but specific activities are not attributed to her. With le-, the message is an activity the maid performs, e.g. bringing him his meal, etc. The mechanism by which the Degree of Control opposition between NonHigh Controllers can be exploited to indicate the degree of Control of the High Controller can be clarified with the help of Figure 5.4. HIGH

More active High Controller

HIGH

Less active High Controller CENTRAL FOCUS PERIPHERAL FOCUS

MID LOW

(lui-)

lui-

MID

(le-) LOW

le-

Figure 5.4. The Focus-Control Interlock and the High Controller The diagram shows how the Focus interlock expedites this strategy. The signal for H I G H CONTROL in the word-order Control system (as well as il, je, and tu) also signals

CENTRAL FOCUS;

lui-

and

le- signal

PERIPHERAL FOCUS.

The

interlock between Focus and Degree of Control means that a choice in one of these systems has immediate consequences in the other. When a speaker evaluates what degree of Control to attribute to a participant that is not the

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

center of attention, both lui- and le- are available; and moving from one level of Control to the other poses no problem with respect to Focus, because both luiand le- mean PERIPHERAL FOCUS. For the CENTRAL FOCUS participant (i.e. the High Controller), in order to indicate a lesser degree of Control it would seem logical to simply move a step down the scale, to lui-. However, one cannot actually do this, because to do so would simultaneously be to remove this participant from Central Focus. The speaker therefore exploits the only other possibility: moving the Non-High Controller up a notch and indicating it by lui-. Since the Control meanings are relational, this achieves the same overall effect as moving the High Controller down would achieve. The relative distance between the two participants on the Control scale is the same in either case. When lui- is chosen, the distance on the scale between the High and Non-High Controllers — that is, the difference between them in degree of Control — is minimized; and when le- is used, it is maximized. When minimization is indicated by lui-, two inferences are possible. Either a more agentlike Non-High participant is indicated, as seen in previous chapters, or a less agentlike High participant is indicated, as in example (3). This High-Controller strategy is actually foreshadowed by instances seen earlier (most recently with the three verbs of "commanding") where the lui-llechoice depends on the degree of interaction between the High and Non-High Controllers, and the nature of the power relation between them. In those cases too, the nature and role of the High Controller had to be taken into account. If this mechanism is the correct explanation for examples like (3)-(6), a prediction is suggested whereby the hypothesis can be tested; one would predict a skewing that is not apparent intuitively, or even in examples (3)-(6). The lui-/le- choice should correlate with inherent characteristics of the High Controller relating to its potential to control the event. In earlier counts, characteristics of the referents of the /- forms themselves were at issue; in Table 5.1, characteristics of the other participant in the event, the High Controller cooccuring with the /- form, are examined in two randomly selected texts by the same author. The count reveals a strong correlation between le- and a high-potential (human) High Controller, and between lui- and a low-potential (inanimate) High Controller. The examples included in the count are those having two participants, one of which is either lui- or le-.

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

Table 5.1. Potential for Control of High Controller ("subject") containing an l- form.

215 in two-participant

events

Human High Controller

Inanimate High Controller

836 +

306

32 -

122 +

LOW

le-, la-, lesMID lui-, leurText: MBE and MSO d = ±71.1 OR =10.4

N=1296

This correlation of lui- and le- with the activity potential of the High Controller (the traditional Subject) is not generally noticed by grammarians (although some do note the use of lui- for a "state"). Such usage is unmotivated by the categories Direct and Indirect Object. Yet, the figures in Table 5.1 strongly support the hypothesis that lui- and le- are indeed exploited for this purpose. The importance of value relationships in grammar, although implicit in all occurrences of lui- or le-, emerges strikingly in strategies like this and the superagent which directly reflect the relational nature of the meanings in the system of Degree of Control. Value is also predominant, in a more subtle and complex way, in the oppositions between groups of verbs examined in the previous chapter. With the High Controller strategy clearly understood, this approach can now be extended to other groups of verbs so as to thoroughly illuminate the real motivations for apparent relations of "government".

3.

Interaction of the High- and Non-High Controller Strategies

The choice between lui- and le- for a two-participant message, we have seen, effects a minimizing or a maximizing of the distance between the two participants on the scale of Control. This may affect three aspects of the message: (a) Control level of the Non-High Controller; (b) Control level of the High Controller and (c) a statelike versus an actionlike interpretation of the event denoted by the verb. Factors (a) and (b) together can be viewed as a polarizing of participants by means of le-, and a depolarizing by means of lui-. All three factors may occur singly or in combination with each other. In this section we will illustrate how these factors interact.

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

The examples in (7), repeated from Chapter 1, all contain the verb manquer, glossed something like 'fail, lack'. (7)

a. Elle a été rencontrer ses amies à la sortie des classes, 'She went to meet her friends when school let out, b. Après son départ en Amérique du Sud, 'After her departure for South America, c. Ses amies comptaient sur elle, 'Her friends were counting on her,

mais elle les a manquées. but she missed them.' elle leur a manqué. they missed her.' mais elle leur a manqué. but she disappointed them/ she let them down.

When leur- is chosen, the Non-High Controller bears more responsibility for the "missing" or "failing", since it holds an expectation which the High Controller disappoints; the Non-High Controller is thus an expediter, providing conditions necessary for "failing" to take place. When les- is chosen, its referent has no expectation. In example (7a), "they" (the Non-High Controllers) may not even know that "she" was looking for or expecting them; one would also use le- to talk about missing a train, etc., where the train does not expect anything from the one who misses it. This factor of expectation by the Mid Controller with manquer is evident in (8). In a desolate, sparsely populated part of North Africa, there has been a prolonged drought, during which the local schoolmaster has received rations to distribute to families via their children. Suddenly, a heavy snowstorm hits, and for several days, the children are not able to come to school. (8) Chaque jour, Daru distribuait une ration aux petits. Elle leur avait manqué, il le savait bien, pendant ces mauvais jours. CER 85 'Each day, Daru distributed a ration to the children. He knew they had missed it (lit.: it had lacked leur-) during these bad days.' The "missing" is set up by the children's expectation that they would receive a ration, since they had received one every other day. The children thus get leur-. Regarding the High Controller in (7), when les- is chosen, the High Controller bears a more immediate responsibility for the "missing", by failure to get someplace on time or some active negligence; whereas with leur-, it may be

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

217

merely the absence of the High Controller, or some feature of her character that disappoints the expectation. Examples (9) and (10) highlight this effect. Rivière, the director of an airline operation, a demanding man, a perfectionist, intends to fire Roblet, an employee with many years of distinguished service, because of a minor error Roblet has committed, Roblet's protests notwithstanding. While this matter is on his mind, Rivière is notified of an incident (not involving Roblet) in which a plane's lights failed because of a faulty electrical connection. This confirms his intentions with regard to Roblet. (9)

Rivière pensait: "Si l'on n'arrache pas le mal, quand on le rencontre, où qu'il soit, il y a des pannes de lumière: c'est un crime de le manquer quand par hasard il découvre ses instruments: Roblet partira." SVN 35 'Riviere thought: "If you don't uproot trouble, when you find it, wherever it may be, the lights can fail: it's a crime to miss it (le-) when by chance it reveals its instruments: Roblet will have to go." '

The choice is le-. The High Controller of "missing" (not expressed since the verb is an infinitive) is the supervisors of the operation. The theme of active negligence on their part is salient (" ... it's a crime ... "); the High Controller is assigned active responsibility for the "missing". By contrast, (10) has leur-. Two rival artists belong to the same circle of friends. One has just achieved a major coup over the other, getting a big newspaper writeup. All the friends except the rival come to congratulate him. The successful painter, moved by pity for his rival, goes to the latter's home to smooth things over. Finding the rival sad and dejected, he says to him: (10)

— En ce moment, il y a tous les copains qui sont chez moi. J'ai senti que tu leur manquais. AVP 221 ' "Right now, all the friends are at my house. I felt that they missed you (lit.: you lacked leur-).' "

It is the failure to act of the High Controller ('you'), by not being with the others, that brings on the "missing". The third factor associated with minimizing Degree of Control between two participants is a statelike versus an actionlike interpretation of the event. In (7a) and (9), where le-/les- is chosen, a faulty action or failure to perform an action by the High Controller causes the "missing"; whereas in (7b, c) and in (10), with leur-, it is a state associated with the High Controller, his absence or

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

defective character, that causes the failure. This statelike interpretation of manquer is not found with le-. This polarizing/depolarizing has an interesting effect in certain examples with body parts. A. La peau lui brûle. B. La peau le brûle. C. Sa peau brûle.

'His skin burns (him).' 'The skin burns him.' 'His skin burns.'

In A, with lui-, the skin is the referent's own; he feels a burning sensation in it. In B, with le-, there are two distinct entities: perhaps a hot animal hide touching the person scorches him. Example C, with a possessive adjective, is neutral between these two possibilities: it might be his own skin, but this skin might be attached, as in A, or detached from him and burning separately (perhaps in a cannibalistic context); or it might be, say, an animal hide that the person owns, but which is not his own skin. Contrasting A and B brings out the depolarizing effect of lui-: the close natural association between a person and his skin means there will likely be close cooperation and interaction in an event involving both. In A, a person's skin (as long as it is on him in the normal way) cannot produce a burning sensation in the person unless the person feels it. The skin by itself is not capable of much independent action. (Using le- creates a stricter differentiation between the person and the skin that permits such independence.) Thus, although the skin may bear primary responsibility for the "burning", the person, referent of lui-, still maintains a relatively high degree of control. This pair also shows the characteristic shift in interpretation of the event with lui-: the "burning" in A is a less overt, or more stative "burning" than in B. The polarization factor would seem to explain a strange pair of examples cited in Chapter 1, found without references or context in the Grand Larousse dictionary: (11) a. Sa cicatrice lui démange. b. Son eczéma le démange.

'His scar is itching him.' 'His eczema is itching him.'

These examples must be treated with the suspicion and tentativeness always due to examples out of context. They appear, however, to make sense in terms of (de-)polarization: a scar (with lui-) is a permanent part of a person's body, like any feature; eczema (with le-), on the other hand, is an external force, like an infectious disease, that comes and goes. There is consequently a much tighter association in the former case than in the latter.11 Our texts provide other examples. In (12), two farmer brothers plan to mow

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

219

a field. One suggests they take with them an old farm-hand to help. The other replies: (12)

— A nous deux, on y suffira, dit Arsène. Urbain n'est plus l'homme d'un travail comme celui-là. Dans un terrain pareil, avec les mains qui lui tremblent, il aura tôt fait de nous casser une faux. AVO 38 ' "The two of us will be enough," said Arsène. "Urbain is no longer the man for a job like that. On such terrain, with his (lui-) hands that tremble, it won't take him long to break a scythe on us." '

They then discuss retiring Urbain because of his age and inability to do his work. Contrast this to a possible utterance using a verb of similar meaning and le-: (13)

... avec les mains qui le secouent ... ' ... with the hands that shake him (le-) ...'

Le- correlates with an action in which the High Controller ("hands") is more active than with trembler. Here the hands would be somebody else's, not his own; thus, we have two distinct participants. This strongly suggests that lui- in (12) effects depolarizing. The point of the message with lui- is that Urbain is responsible for the trembling (in a way he would not be with le- and secouer). It is Urbain's old age that brings on the trembling of the hands.

4.

Case Study: Verbs of "Asking"

We have seen the impact of characteristics of Non-High and High Controllers on the choice between lui- and le- in a two-participant message. We have further emphasized that this choice is made with reference to a network of semantic oppositions among the verbs of French. We will now illustrate how the High-Controller and Non-High-Controller strategies interact to create this network. Table 5.2 shows a number of verbs having to do with "asking" or "requesting". In column I, on the left, is (using the typology established in the previous chapter) a type A verb; that is, in a two-participant message, a higher potential Non-High Controller is lui-, and a lower-potential one is le-. In column II are verbs of "asking" which do not occur with lui-. (Previously called type C verbs, these will now simply be called "le- verbs".) These are of two kinds. In the upper half of the column are le- verbs whose High Controller exerts a

220

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

relatively high level of Control, compared to the verb in column I, where the same kind of reierent would be denoted by lui-. In the lower half of column II is a le- verb whose Non-High Controller is denoted by le- because it exerts less Control than that of the type A verb. The chart thus includes both the HighController and the Non-High-Controller factors. Let it be again recalled that this demonstration is concerned with the semantic content of these verbs, not (directly) with lui- and le-. The intent is to show the reasonableness of the cooccurrence patterns of verbs and pronouns, in light of the types of messages the verbs are used to produce and the Control meanings of lui- and le-. Recall, too, that we are concerned with the Control level of participants in the activity denoted by the particular verb, not in a more general type of situational control. Table 5.2. Control Level in Relation to Verb-types I.

Type A verb

IL

le- verbs

A. High Controller exerts higher Control than with column I verb

demander 'ask'

supplier implorer

'beg, entreat' 'beg, implore'

presser assaillir

'entreat, urge' 'beset, supplicate'

conjurer adjurer

'implore, beg' 'beseech, adjure'

importuner assiéger

'importune' 'beset, importune'

B.

Non-High Controller exerts lower Control than with column I verb

prier

'ask, request'

The le- verbs of A (upper half of right-hand column) represent a more aggressive, active High Controller in their particular activities than the verb of column I. That these High Controllers make a more overt effort to gain control is apparent from simple inspection of the verbs and their glosses. What is not so apparent is the nature of the opposition between demander (column I) and prier (column II, part B). The crucial factor here is characteristics of the Non-High Controller; but this turns out to be a rather subtle matter that necessitates a close look at examples. Once again we turn to the De Gaulle War Memoires, whose thematic unity provides many useful contrasting pairs. The strategies of these two verbs, briefly, are as follows. Demander (which can occur with lui-) is used when the Non-High Controller in some way

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

221

motivates or expedites the making of the request. Typically, there is a high degree of interaction or cooperation between the two participants. In our text demanderis used, for instance, when allies plan a military operation; also when two participants are presented as plotting or conniving together. Likewise, demander is used when the request is portrayed as being in the Non-High Controller's own interest and there is thus a strong expectation that he will cooperate. With the opposite of any of these motifs, the le- verb, prier, is chosen: when two participants are at odds and not cooperating, or when there is a strong expectation that the Non-High Controller will refuse the request. In such cases the Non-High Controller of course does not motivate or otherwise evoke the request. In general, prier is used when the "asker" simply lays out a request, an act which requires no cooperation from the other participant. Contexts with prier, moreover, often reflect a distancing between participants. This frequently occurs when formality or ceremony is involved, as when one government addresses a formal request to another. Likewise, when one participant is portrayed as submissive to or acknowledging the authority of the other, we find prier. Prier is used when the author wants to avoid suggesting that the Non-High Controller brings on the "asking". The opposite motivates demander, when there is chumminess between participants, when formality is thrown aside, or in any case where it is appropriate to suggest that the Non-High participant brings on or somehow encourages the "asking". Examples from the Mémoires will illustrate these themes. Once the pragmatic facts about the two verbs are established, the connection with lui- and le- is clear: lui- goes with interaction and depolarization of participants, le- with polarization and denial of interaction. 1.

Interaction, cooperation: demander Lack of cooperation, expectation of refusal: prier

In (14), De Gaulle and Eisenhower are discussing whether the allied armies should support the French forces defending Strasbourg. They differ at first, but eventually come to an agreement. De Gaulle says: (14)

"... il serait déplorable qu'il y eût, en cette occasion, dispersion des forces alliées, peut-être même rupture du système de commandement pratiqué par la coalition. C'est pourquoi je vous demande de reconsidérer votre plan et de prescrire vous-même au général Devers de tenir ferme en Alsace." DMS 174

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

' "... it would be deplorable if, on this occasion, there were a dispersion of the allied forces, perhaps even a rupture of the system of command used by the coalition. This is why I ask you to reconsider your plan and to personally order General Devers to hold fast in Alsace." ' Eisenhower's reaction: Avant d'en arriver à ce que je souhaitais, le général Eisenhower me demanda d'examiner ce que serait la situation de la Ire Armée française si elle venait à opérer indépendamment des armées alliées. DMS 174-175 'Before acceding to my wish, General Eisenhower asked me to examine what the situation of the French First Army would be if it were to operate independently of the allied armies.' That the two are cooperating here for a mutual goal (winning the war) is underscored by the fact that each gives the reasons for his request when making the request. Demander is often used for a request that is presented as being in the NonHigh Controller's own interest, leading to a strong expectation that he will cooperate. In (15) De Gaulle is on a tour of the Soviet Union. (15)

Il avait été d'abord convenu avec les Russes que j'irais inspecter le régiment dans la région d'Insterburg où il était en opérations. Mais, ainsi que cela s'était passé pour le voyage Bakou-Moscou, nos alliés me demandèrent de renoncer au déplacement par air en raison du mauvais temps. DMS 87 'At first it had been agreed with the Russians that I would go to inspect the regiment in the region of Insterburg where it was engaged in the operations. But, just as had been the case for the trip from Baku to Moscow, our allies asked me to give up air travel because of the bad weather.'

What De Gaulle is being asked to do is of course for his own good, and there is no doubt he will go along with the request. The "interaction/cooperation" theme is echoed in his calling the High Controller 'our allies'. These examples contrast with (16), where there is disagreement, lack of cooperation, good reason to suppose that a request will be refused, and prier. For a while, the French resistance movement was headed by two "presidents", De Gaulle and General Giraud. De Gaulle eventually elbowed Giraud out; but at one point the allies, through Eisenhower, tried to limit De Gaulle's power and deal only with Giraud,

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

223

who was more inclined to bow to their desires. De Gaulle regarded this as unacceptable meddling in French political affairs. During a discussion of military operations, Eisenhower says: (16)

"Pour la sécurité des arrières au cours de cette opération, j'ai besoin d'une assurance que je vous prie de me donner. Il faut que l'organisation actuelle du commandement français en Afrique du Nord ne subisse aucun changement. En particulier, le général Giraud doit demeurer en place avec toutes ses attributions actuelles et conserver la disposition entière des troupes, des communications, des ports, des aérodromes. Il doit être seul à traiter avec moi de tous les sujets militaires en Afrique du Nord." DMU 141 ' "For the security of the rear lines during the course of this operation, I need an assurance which I ask you to give me. The present organization of the French command in North Africa must undergo no change. In particular, General Giraud must remain in place with all of his present attributes and retain complete charge of the troops, communications, ports and airfields. He must be the only one to deal with me on all military matters in North Africa." '

De Gaulle turns him down flat, telling him politely to mind his own business. Eisenhower could certainly anticipate the refusal, since they were at odds on this issue and he knew De Gaulle's character. Demander would inappropriately imply that Eisenhower was taking for granted De Gaulle's cooperation and his favorable response. 2.

Chumminess, conniving or plotting: Demander Distancing, formality, deference: Prier

The following passage talks about the trial of a minister in the Vichy government who was condemned to death for collaborating with the Nazis. In describing the trial, De Gaulle is naturally interested in bringing out this man's closeness with the enemy. (17)

... tout donne à penser, qu'au moment où les Allemands se disposaient à fusiller un certain nombre des détenus de Châteaubriant en représailles d'attentats dirigés contre leurs soldats, le malheureux a, spontanément, adressé la liste de ceux qu'il leur demandait d'exécuter de préférence. L'ennemi lui a donné cette odieuse satisfaction. DMU 220 '... everything suggests that when the Germans were preparing to execute some of the Châteaubriant detainees in reprisal for attacks

224

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE against their soldiers, the unfortunate man spontaneously submitted a list of those whom he asked them to execute preferentially. The enemy gave him this odious satisfaction.'

A number of phrases here: "gave him this odious satisfaction", "the unfortunate man", "spontaneously" indicate that De Gaulle is trying to give a flavor of chumminess to his portrayal of this man's relations with the Germans. Example (18), by contrast, uses prier — twice — when there is distancing from the enemy. The scene is De Gaulle's triumphal re-entry into Paris when the Germans have been routed, and the ceremony at Notre-Dame. The cardinalarchbishop has been asked to abstain from the ceremony, contrary to usual practice, for the reasons given. (18)

Le cardinal-archevêque ne m'accueillera pas au seuil de la basilique. Non point qu'il ne l'êut désiré. Mais l'autorité nouvelle l'a prié de s'abstenir. En effet, Mgr Suhard a cru devoir, il y a quatre mois, recevoir solennellement ici le maréchal Pétain lors de son passage dans Paris occupé par les Allemands, puis, le mois dernier, présider le service funèbre que Vichy a fait célébrer après la mort de Philippe Henriot. De ce fait, beaucoup de résistants s'indignent à l'idée que le prélat pourrait, dès à présent, introduire dans la cathédrale le général de Gaulle ... l'état de tension d'un grand nombre de combattants au lendemain de la bataille et ma volonté d'éviter toute manifestation désobligeante pour Mgr Suhard m'ont amené à approuver ma délégation qui l'a prié de demeurer à l'archevêché pendant la cérémonie. DMU 381-382 'The cardinal-archbishop would not greet me at the threshold of the basilica. Not that he wouldn't have liked to. But the new authorities asked him to abstain. Msgr. Suhard had seen fit, four months ago, to receive here solemnly Marshal Pétain when he passed through Paris under German occupation, then, last month, to preside over the funeral service that Vichy had made after the death of Philippe Henriot. For this reason many members of the Resistance were indignant at the idea that the prelate could now lead General de Gaulle into the cathedral ... the state of tension of many fighters the day after the battle and my desire to avoid any demonstration unpleasant for Msgr. Suhard led me to go along with my delegation who asked him to remain at the archbishop's residence during the ceremony.'

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

225

The archbishop, in effect, cooperated with the enemy, and the resistance leaders want to avoid any appearance of interacting with him now. Prier, which avoids the implication of cooperation, reinforces the distancing. We often find prier used in a context saturated with formality or ceremony. One important aspect of formality is that each participant keeps his distance from the others, and ceremonies assign distinct places to different participants. In (19) De Gaulle is visiting cities damaged during the war that are beginning to come back to life after the liberation. He describes his visit to Rennes. (19)

On voyait la vie administrative reprendre invinciblement. La tradition faisait de même. J'allai à l'Hôtel de Ville, où le maire Yves Millon, entouré de son conseil, des compagnons de la Résistance et des notabilités, me pria de rouvrir le livre d'or de la capitale bretonne qui renouait la chaîne des temps. DMU 362 'One could see the government invincibly come back to life. Tradition did so also. I went to the City Hall, where the mayor Yves Millon, surrounded by his council, companions of the Resistance and notables, asked me to reopen the book of gold of the Breton capital, which relinked the chain of time.'

Example (20), containing both prier and demander, is particularly revealing of both the ceremony/formality strategy and its opposite. De Gaulle receives the Sultan of Morocco who is on an official visit to Paris. (20)

J'invite le Sultan à se rendre en France et le reçois comme un chef d'Etat qui a droit aux grands honneurs, un féal qui s'est montré fidèle dans les pires circonstances. En dehors des habituelles réceptions, je le prie d'être à mes côtés lors de la grande prise d'armes parisienne du 18 juin et lui décerne, en public, la croix de la Libération. Puis, il est mon compagnon au cours d'un voyage ... Partout, il est acclamé, ce qui crée une ambiance favorable à nos entretiens personnels. Je demande au Sultan de m'indiquer, en toute confiance, quel est le fond de sa pensée quant aux rapports du Maroc et de la France. DMS 261-262 'I invite the Sultan to come to France and I receive him as a chief of state who is entitled to full honors, a trusty friend who has proved himself faithful in the worst circumstances. Aside from the customary receptions, I ask (prier) him to be at my side for the grand Parisian military ceremony of June 18th and publicly bestow upon him the cross of the Liberation. Then, he is my companion

226

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

during a trip ... He is acclaimed everywhere, which creates an atmosphere favorable to our personal relations. I ask {demander) the Sultan to tell me, in complete confidence, what his real thoughts are concerning relations between Morocco and France.' When the request involves a formal invitation to a head of state (with full honors) to participate in a public ceremony, it is with prier. When they have become close friends, taking a trip together, and confidential information about his deep feelings is requested, it is with demander. The above examples with prier contain a distinct nuance of deference on the part of the High Controller. The maker of the request maintains distance to avoid both implying that he takes the addressee's cooperation for granted, and overstating the potential for interaction. In (21) Albert Lebrun, who was President of France before the Nazi occupation, comes after the Liberation to De Gaulle, who is now de facto head of state, to offer his support. (21)

"J'ai toujours été, je suis," me déclara le président, "en plein accord avec ce que vous faites. Sans vous, tout était perdu. Grâce à vous, tout peut être sauvé. Personnellement, je ne saurais me manifester d'aucune manière, sauf toutefois par cette visite que je vous prie de faire publier. Il est vrai que, formellement, je n'ai jamais donné ma démission. A qui, d'ailleurs, l'aurais-je remise, puisqu'il n'existait plus d'Assemblée nationale qualifiée pour me remplacer? Mais je tiens à vous attester que je vous suis tout acquis." DMS 29 ' "I have always been and I am," the president declared to me, "in full agreement with what you are doing. Without you, all would have been lost. Thanks to you, everything can be saved. I, personally, could not manifest myself in any way, except by this visit, which I ask you to publicize. It is true that, formally, I never submitted my resignation. Anyway, to whom would I have submitted it, since there was no more national Assembly qualified to replace me? But I am anxious to assure you that I am entirely won over to you." '

The former president is in effect admitting that he is no longer head of state and that De Gaulle is, and that he submits to the new authority. Use of prier adds to the tone of graciousness and submission with which this is all said. This is the opposite of the "chumminess" for which demander is appropriate. Prier occurs in (22) to suggest formality and deference in diplomacy. The American government of Roosevelt has not yet recognized De Gaulle as head of the French government. Roosevelt nevertheless wishes to meet with De Gaulle

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

227

to discuss various matters, and tries by roundabout means to get him to come to Washington. De Gaulle will have none of it and insists on being treated as a full-fledged head of state. He says so to the liaison person. (22)

Je déclarai à Duff Cooper que cette invitation qui n'en était pas une, succédant à quelques autres qui n'en étaient pas non plus, avait à mes yeux peu d'attraits. Si le président des Etats-Unis souhaitait recevoir le président du Gouvernement français, il ne tenait qu'à lui de le prier de venir. DMU 269 'I declared to Duff Cooper that this invitation which wasn't one, coming after several others which weren't either, held little attraction in my eyes. If the President of the United States wished to receive the President of the French Government, he had only to ask him to come.'

The kind of "asking" De Gaulle has in mind here, of course, is a formal invitation, not merely a chummy suggestion that he drop in sometime, which was all that had been offered hitherto. The use of prier implies that all the initiative must come from Roosevelt and avoids the subtle implication that De Gaulle might be angling for an invitation. Demander, by contrast, occurs when formality is specifically rejected, as when one participant wishes to threaten or intimidate another to whom he should show deference. By throwing aside protocol, he attempts to bring that person to his own level, as it were. In (23), De Gaulle has proposed a system of electing members to the National Assembly which evokes a storm of protest, mainly from the parties of the left. On the initiative of the national labor movement, representatives of these parties form a "Delegation of the Left" led by Léon Jouhaux. (23)

Bien que les membres de la délégation ne fussent nullement d'accord entre eux au sujet du mode de scrutin, ils se trouvèrent unanimes à réprouver la solution adoptée par le gouvernement et convinrent d'effectuer auprès du général de Gaulle une démarche spectaculaire pour marquer leur opposition. Le 1er septembre, Jouhaux me demanda de le recevoir avec plusieurs délégués. DMS 312 'Although the members of the delegation were in no way in agreement among themselves as to the manner of balloting, they were unanimous in disapproving of the solution adopted by the government and agreed to take a spectacular step with General De Gaulle to mark their opposition. On the first of September, Jouhaux asked me to receive him with several delegates.'

228

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

The plan for a "spectacular step" and the involvement of an organized protest movement suggest that demander might well be glossed here by its English cognate. They were indignantly demanding an audience, not respectfully requesting one. They threw aside the usual formality.12 Let us summarize the line of argument so far. We first noted that lui- and le- occur in certain distributional patterns associable with particular groups of verbs (types A, B, and C). These associations are not arbitrary; rather, a certain element of the intended message motivates both the choice of pronoun and the choice of verb. The association between distributional pattern and verb group thus reflects the strategies of lui- and le-, with regard to both the Non-High Controller and the High Controller. This complex of interactions sets up a network of oppositions among lexical items (e.g. verbs of "commanding" and "asking") as well as among groups of lexical items (types A, B, and C). Thus, a choice of one particular combination of lexical and grammatical items is made with an eye to the consequences of using one of the other combinations, and that combination selected which will contribute best to the production of the intended message. What is now clear about the verbs of "asking" is that their distribution with relation to messages follows the same lines as the distribution of lui- and le-, which, we have shown, is a consequence of the meanings MORE and LESS CONTROL. This is of course not to say that demander, prier, etc. in any way themselves directly signal meanings from the system of Degree of Control. Rather, the skewed cooccurrence patterns of lui- and le- with these verbs result from an attempt by speakers and writers to communicate coherent, textually resonating messages. When a pronoun is called for, that pronoun will typically be chosen which best helps pull the overall message in the same direction as other elements chosen, including the verb. Speakers make all choices available to them in such a way as to further the goal of communicating that message. Table 5.2 illustrates part of the network of lexical relationships relating to the choice between lui- and le-. The verbs compared in such a chart are all from the same general area of meaning, the same "portion of semantic terrain". Comparing verbs this way limits the number of variables. If the range of comparison were left open so that additional variables were introduced, it would be difficult to predict how individual verbs would skew with relation to lui- and le-. It is not clear, for instance, how one would make a prediction by comparing verbs of "asking" or "commanding" to verbs of "cooking" or "singing". On the other hand, "commanding" and "asking" are themselves fairly close to each other in the semantic field. Both have to do with one person

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

229

getting another to do something. The two verbs which can coocur with lui-, demander and prescrire, both denote acts in which there is a high degree of interaction between the two participants. Likewise, the two le- verbs charger and prier both involve a distancing of participants; and the le- verbs sommer and prier involve submission to authority. One might carry this to a higher level by observing that the difference between asking and commanding resides in the freedom of choice on the part of the receiver of the command or request, and thus predict that all verbs of "commanding" should take le-, and all verbs of "asking", lui-. This prediction, however, is not borne out. As we take a broad survey of French verbs with "selectional" preferences — as will be done in the pages to follow — we find that across the board it is the lower level of generality — the "micro-level" — that is the locus of exploitation of the lui-/le- distinction. Even though "macro-level" predictions like the above can often be made, this higher level seems not to be exploited.13 Clearly, there must be some consistency in the way speakers make the choice; moving randomly between the macro-level and the micro-level would lead to a complicated state of affairs, with the rationale for the lui-/le- choice obscured and its potential benefit lost. One could imagine speakers of French or some other language opting to exploit the macro-level rather than the micro-level. It is clear, though, that the micro-level represents a fuller, more finely-tuned exploitation of the linguistic resource offered by the lui-/le- opposition. French speakers get a greater return this way for the investment they make in learning lui- and le-. Indeed, exploiting the macro-level would represent a significant reduction of the communicative potential of the language. Comparison with English appears to shed further light on this question. We have noted in several instances that English has multiple lexical items corresponding to a single French verb: éviter, apprendre, monter, servir, manquer, etc.; recall also the examples in which English inserts an "extra" verb compared to French: Elle lui vit un monocle dans l'oeil, 'She saw him wearing a monocle in his eye.' The distinctions made by switching lexical items in English are made in French by exploiting the lui-/le- choice. Note further that the English pronouns do not have a dative/accusative distinction comparable to lui-/le-. Thus, the communicative job done in English by working the lexicon is accomplished in French by working the pronouns, precisely at this micro-level. One more general point that emerges from this discussion of verbs of "commanding" and "asking" concerns the notion of "synonymy". Although the verbs in these two sets can be glossed identically in English, they clearly are

230

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

not synonyms. This conclusion inevitably follows not only from the fact that they are distributed very differently with regard to the contexts in which they occur, but that there is a clear pattern to these differences; and, even more strikingly, the difference in distribution corresponds to the strategies of a completely separate linguistic mechanism — the lui-/le- opposition — even when lui- and le- themselves do not appear. An initial assumption that these words with identical glosses were synonyms would have deprived us of the motivation to concentrate on the differences in their deployments — precisely the data that was needed. We could only have come to the conclusion that their individual patterns of coocurrence with lui- and le- were automatic, arbitrary, and unrelated to any communicative goal. This is exactly what has happened time after time in analyses of the French "dative". From a Columbia-school perspective, it is hard to see why a language would have true synonyms at all. If the semantic content of two different words is really identical, this means that speakers are investing the effort to learn two different signals without getting any communicative advantage in return. The inventory of strategies of Degree of Control is now complete. We are now equipped to turn to the murkiest area of the lui-/le- choice, the problem of "government".

5.

The Pseudo-Phenomenon of "Government"

Clearly the most direct challenge to the traditional categories Direct and Indirect Object comes from the numerous instances of "government".14 As was pointed out in Chapter 1, sentence grammar posits a correlation between the grammatical category Direct Object and the morphological category accusative, and likewise between the Indirect Object and the dative; yet this correlation in fact fails to hold true. Government, then, is a kind of escape clause, invoked when the direct object appears in the dative. For the present analysis, this part of the problem is of the same nature as all other parts, namely: to explain why lui- and le- occur in particular combinations with other forms of French. This analysis, in fact, faces one challenge more than explaining "direct objects" in the dative. Just as some verbs occur with lui- to the complete exclusion of le-, so other verbs occur with le- to the complete exclusion of lui-, and this too requires explanation. That is, just as lecannot be used in:

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

(24)

Je lui obéis.

231

T obey him.'

so lui- cannot be used in: (25)

Je le quitte.

T leave him.'

"Government" is, in fact, simply one step farther along on the spectrum we have followed up to now. With "commanding" and "asking", the restriction to lui- is absolute in one particular environment ("command"/"ask" + lui+ de + infinitive) for type A verbs; for the others, it is absolute everywhere, hence their designation as "le- verbs". Here, the restriction is absolute for all verbs, in all contexts. We thus now refer to "lui- verbs" as well as "le- verbs". The rationale for the skewings is the same here as before, and we again invoke Reid's notion of "textual resonance". Some facet of the lexical meaning of a "governing" verb resonates, for a particular type of message, with the strategies of the pronoun it appears to govern. It is not that one of the two, verb or pronoun, automatically and arbitrarily selects the other; rather, the meanings of the pronoun and the verb work together toward the common goal of producing some message. What appears as "government" is merely a manifestation of coherency in a speaker or writer's intent: the same factor that leads him to pick a particular verb out of all the verbs of French also leads him to choose an appropriate level of Control. Put another way, in certain instances a speaker has two opportunities to pull a message is the direction he wants it to go, once by choosing a particular verb, and once again by choosing a particular pronoun. There is absolutely no reason to be surprised that the speaker will take advantage of both opportunities. Reid l991:301-302), with a reference to Weinreich (1966), makes the point that in instances of apparent "government" or "concord", since more than one element contributes to a particular aspect of the message, the information value of each element may be less than 100%; this, however, is by no means to say that the form loses its meaning in these cases, that it makes no independent contribution to the communicative goal, which is what "government" and "concord" imply. Note also the insistence of Langacker (1991:187) on this point. The Columbia school's communicative orientation thus anticipates and motivates such double signalling of the same type of information as a direct consequence of the meanings of the forms.15 What we will find, then, is that the factors motivating a verb to "govern" are the same as those determining the choice between lui- and le- in all other two-participant messages, as they have been described above. The explanation of the "government" phenomenon is actually very much like that developed above for frapper. Recall the two examples:

232

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

La canne le frappa à la tempe. 'The stick hit him on the temple.' Ses copains lui frappèrent sur l'épaule. 'His friends slapped him on the shoulder.' As with "government", there is no three-participant message corresponding to these two that would relate them directly. Lui- and le- are chosen because each is most appropriate to one of these two different messages. Imagine, now, that different verbs were also chosen because French had a lexical distinction that would spare the necessity of using a less-precise frapper for both of these. This would be "government". Yet the choice of lui- or le- would be no less motivated. We shall thus seek explanations for distributional facts usually treated as "government" in terms of semantic content and textual resonance. Investigation of the network of French verbs interacting with Degree of Control will be broadened and extended. The semantic properties of lui- verbs and le- verbs will be examined in much the same way as were the properties of types A, B and C. Whereas earlier, skewings were found between verbs and complex patterns of cooccurrence, this time the correlations between verbs and pronouns is direct. With all this, we must still address an opposing position: the view that in instances of "government", French speakers and writers "have no choice". According to this view, since Frenchmen never hear a "lui- verb" used with le-, or a "le- verb" with lui-, they cannot be actively choosing the /- form; the choice is rote, automatic, not reasoned. These selections are qualitatively different from other instances of lui- and le- where one can clearly see the option. The best one can say is that "governed" coocurrences of verb and pronoun are a result of historical accident, unimportant "surface phenomena", or due to a capriciousness inherent in language. Let us confront the two positions starkly. The view outlined in the previous paragraph shall be called the "no choice" hypothesis. It directly contradicts the hypothesis of this book, that speakers have the same lui-/le- choice here as elsewhere; that they make the choice rationally, applying the same goal-directed criteria they apply elsewhere. This we call the "motivated choice" hypothesis. We propose to decide between these two hypotheses by means of a rather daring test. This test is based on a prediction arising from the motivated choice hypothesis. If the exclusive association between lui- and some verbs, and between le- and other verbs is motivated by a unified semantic factor, then these two large groups, "lui- verbs" and "le- verbs", should themselves exhibit the

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

233

distributional characteristics of lui- and le-, even in the absence of an /- form. In Tables 4.2 and 5.1, to establish the meanings and strategies of lui- and le-, we examined the animacy properties of referents of lui- and le- and those of High Controllers used with lui- and le- in two-participant messages. If the division between lui- verbs and le- verbs exists because of the Control meanings of luiand le-, the semantic content of these verbs, and speakers' desire to create textual resonance, then the skewings established by those two tests of lui- and le- should be found with the "governing" verbs themselves. In examining individual verbs, verb types, and the network of oppositions among verbs, we identified semantic parameters associated directly with verbs. Guided by the Control hypothesis, we then explained skewed distributions of luiand le- with verbs as the result of the two being equally appropriate for expressing particular types of messages, showing that these verbs themselves help produce messages in ways parallel to the strategies of lui- and le-. Now we shall run a test including all the "governing" verbs. We will attempt to establish quantitatively for these verbs the relevance of the same parameters as have been established for lui- and le-. Tables 5.3 and 5.4 assemble all instances in two-participant messages of all the lui- verbs and most of the le- verbs in the entire De Gaulle War Memoires. (The lists of these verbs are given in Appendix A, at the end of this chapter.) To these "governing" verbs are applied the same tests earlier applied to the pronouns: animacy of High Controller, and animacy of Non-High Controller. That is, for each occurrence of each of these verbs in a two-participant message, both the High and the Non-High Controller were checked for animacy and the results tabulated, as shown. Excluded from the counts are all instances in which the Non-High Controller with the verb was actually lui- or le-, to guarantee that these counts do not merely restate the results of the earlier counts. Thus, the High and Non-High Controllers of verbs in these counts are either nouns, nonclitic pronouns, or clitic pronouns of the first and second persons.1 The "no choice" hypothesis is an assertion that the causative communicative factor tested for by these counts does not exist. It thus leads to the prediction that the counts will be flat. The "motivated choice" hypothesis predicts that they will be skewed. Here are the figures.

234

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Table 5.3. Control Level of High Controllers of "Governing" "Subjects ")

le- verbs lui- verbs

Verbs ("Subjects"

against

Animate High Controller

Inanimate High Controller

536 +

291

52

169 +

-

Text: Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre (3 vols.) d = ±72.0 OR = 6.0 N = 1048

Table 5.4. Control Level of Non-High against "Objects")

Controllers

of "Governing"

Verbs

("Objects"

Animate Non-High Controller

Inanimate Non-High Controller

lui- verbs

122 +

103

le- verbs

258

582 +

Text: Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre (3 vols.) d = ±41.7 OR = 2.7 N=1065

The skewings are there, and they are strong. The counts demonstrate clearly that the semantic parameters relevant to the pronouns are also relevant to the verbs that appear to "govern" these pronouns. Lui- verbs tend to have lower-potential High Controllers and higher-potential Non-High Controllers, in comparison with le- verbs, which have the reverse, just as do lui- and le- themselves. These counts are surely the most revealing data we have seen so far, because they establish definitively that the association between some verbs and the dative and between other verbs and the accusative is not an arbitrary "rule of government". The association with the dative or accusative follows a clear semantic parameter, the same parameter that is used to explain the distributions of luiand le- in all their occurrences. The test demonstrates motivated choice. The fact that speakers always make a certain choice the same way does not mean they do not have a choice; they do have a choice, and the choice is made rationally and consistently with the semantic content and strategies of the verbs and the lforms. The association between verbs and /- forms is itself a skewing, which in this case happens to be a 100% skewing; it is actually only the extreme end of

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

235

a spectrum along which we have been proceeding step by step. The skewing has a cause: both the choice of verb and the choice of /- form respond to some feature of the message to be communicated. The tight association between verb and case has a functional and communicative explanation. Now we will examine this highly skewed distribution at the level of individual verbs. An appeal to value, in the form of networks of oppositions in the semantic field, will provide the basis for a solution to the problem of "governing" verbs, just as it did with verbs of "asking". Taking groups of such verbs that are similar in semantic content and separating the lui- verbs from the le- verbs, we find a pattern that repeats itself every time, and that corresponds to the skewings shown in Tables 5.3 and 5.4. The le- verbs are of two kinds: (a) those with which the Control level of the High Controller is higher than with the corresponding lui- verbs, and (b) those with which the Control level of the NonHigh Controller is lower than with the corresponding lui- verbs. These two motifs, corresponding to the two major strategies of the Control system in twoparticipant messages, confirm that the deployment of lui- and le- with "governing" verbs is due to coherent exploitation of the meanings of the pronoun and the verb. This organization of the lexicon with respect to lui- and le- can be demonstrated with the help of charts similar to Table 5.2, except that now in the lefthand column, instead of Type A verbs, we have verbs that happen not to cooccur with le- at all. 17 In Table 5.5 are verbs having to do, loosely, with obtaining someone's approval or interest. Table 5.5. Control Level in Relation to "Government'1 lui- verbs

II.

le- verbs

A. Control level of High Controller is higher than with lui- verbs

convenir plaire revenir aller

'suit'

'please' 'suit, please' 'suit, fit'

charmer réjouir régaler captiver B.

'charm' enchanter 'gladden' flatter 'treat, entertain' 'captivate'

'enchant' 'flatter' etc.

Control level of Non-High Controller is lower than with lui- verbs intéresser 'interest, concern' concerner, regarder 'involve, concern, be the business of'

236

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Examples: Cette robe lui plaît. 'This dress pleases her.' Sa tête ne lui revient pas. 'She doesn't like his looks.' Demande à Marie; cela la regarde. 'Ask Mary; that's her business.' In the left-hand column of Table 5.5 are verbs that occur only with lui-, signifying 'please' or 'suit'. On the right are le- verbs of similar meaning. In the top half (A) are le- verbs denoting that the High Controller has a relatively high Control level because it seeks or is designed to evoke a favorable response from the Low Controller: charm, flatter, treat, cheer, captivate, enchant. Further, the lui- verbs have more to do with the nature of the High Controller, whereas the le- verbs in A are concerned with what the High Controller does. This reflects the less activity-like interpretation of the verb associated with a lower-Control High Controller. On the lower right (B) are le- verbs denoting a comparatively low Control level of the Non-High Controller. With the lui- verbs, the Non-High Controller has to make a judgment, to decide that he is pleased. With these le- verbs, by contrast, the Non-High Controller has less say in the matter: 'interest', 'involve', 'concern'. Table 5.6 shows verbs having to do with one participant's getting away from another. 18 Table 5.6. Control Level in Relation to "Government" I.

lui- verb

IL

le- verbs

A. High Controller: higher Control than with lui- verb éviter éluder échapper 'escape'

B.

'avoid' 'elude'

fuir

'flee'

Non-High Controller: lower Control than with lui- verb

quitter abandonner laisser

'leave' 'abandon' 'leave'

rejeter lâcher déserter

'reject' 'let go' 'desert'

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

237

The le- verbs in A imply that the High Controller takes more elaborate or vigorous measures to get away than the lui- verb, which is a more neutral term. The le- verbs in B carry no implication that the Non-High Controller does anything to capture or restrain the High Controller, something which échapper does imply. The verbs in Table 5.7 have to do with sufficing or filling up. Table 5.7. Control Level in Relation to "Government" I.

lui- verb

suffire 'suffice'

II.

le- verbs

A. High Controller: higher Control than with lui- verb saturer 'saturate' soûler 'intoxicate' rassasier 'satiate' B.

Non-High Controller: lower Control than with lui- verb

remplir 'fill' compléter 'complete, complement' Examples: Un verre d'eau lui suffit. 'A glass of water is sufficient for him.' Prends ce verre et remplis-le d'eau. 'Take this glass and fill it with water.' The le- verbs in A imply a more potent or aggressive High Controller than the lui- verb. Comparing the le- verbs of B with the lui- verb, we find that the NonHigh Controller in the latter plays a particularly crucial role, in that he must make a judgment and agree that he is satisfied. The le- verbs, oh the other hand, denote more objectively verifiable events. In the above tables, an appeal has been made to the reader's ability to see the relation among various lexical items by merely considering their glosses. Things are not always so transparent, however, and some cases require a data collection. We will continue to draw data from De Gaulle's three-volume War Memoires.19 Table 5.8 contains verbs having to do with some kind of "opposition".

238

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Table 5.8. Control Level in Relation to "Government" I.

II

lui- verb

le- verbs

A. High Controller: higher Control combattre 'fight' résister 'resist'

B.

Non-High Controller: lower Control

contrarier 'thwart, counteract, oppose' It is clear that "fighting" (the le- verb of category A) involves a more active High Controller than "resisting" (the lui- verb); one talks, for instance, about "passive resistance", but one is not likely to talk about "passive fighting". The contrast between the lui- verb and the le- verb of category B, on the other hand, may be less transparent. Table 5.9 contains all examples of résister and contrarier in two-participant messages in the War Memoires, together with the Non-High Controller in each instance. Table 5.9. Verbs of "Opposing" (Data from Charles De Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre. All page references are to Livre de Poche edition.) Volume

Page

Non-High Controller (= that which is opposed) Verb: résister (a lui- verb)

I I I I I I II II II II II II III

21 163 174 176 191 194 17 30 61 67 68 118 153

events disgust the Japanese the British (political) machine the German forces the Free French with the Allies the onrush of the Wehrmacht the abuses which were foreshadowed the German forces American pressure the battering-ram of events allied pressure the rising wave of facileness

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

239

Verb: contrarier (a le- verb) I I I II II II II II II II II II II II III III III III III

250 275 299 23 28 60 90 98 108 230 268 310 313 342 31 178 234 250 291

Mr. Eden the operation the functioning of the services Mr. Casey the functioning of the office a policy unity Roosevelt's intentions a cause someone was attached to the plans of the United States Churchill the initiative and privacy of the maquis decisions repression operations relations with the Americans diplomatic negotiations the French leaders De Gaulle

Now the difference is very apparent. The Non-High Controllers of the lui- verb are more potent entities; they are strongly coercive forces, whereas those of the le- verb are by comparison weak and non-coercive. With the lui- verb we have: great nations and their armies (I-174, I-191, I-194, II-61), forces which are specifically presented as being overwhelming (II-17, II-68), powerful pressures (I-176, II-67, II-118), powerful emotion (I-163). The Non-High Controller of résister thus does more to motivate opposition than that of contrarier. A few examples with résister appear not to suggest the strong coercive force of the others: II-21, II-30, and III-153. When looked at individually, though, these too fit the pattern. "Resisting events" in I-21 refers to the prewar period when France had an outmoded army and Germany was massively arming itself with a modern, mechanized one. De Gaulle campaigned fervently for France to acquire such a mechanized army but French officialdom opposed the idea. De Gaulle characterizes the official position by saying: "To resist events, they feigned to ignore them." These "events" are the powerful, threatening German activities, and the resistance offered — ignoring them — a weak gesture. There is thus double motivation for use of a lui- verb. Example II-30 is in the context of what De Gaulle regarded as British

240

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

interference in France's interests in the Levant. France, under the heel of the Germans, was arguing from a position of weakness. But De Gaulle had just rejected British demands for a compromise. He justifies his action by saying: "... other abuses of the same order were, at that very moment, being committed in Madagascar, would be committed the morrow in North Africa, and risked being committed one day in Paris. We could resist those that were foreshadowed only if we opposed, immediately, those that were underway." That is, De Gaulle saw all these abuses piling up, with more to come. If they were not nipped in the bud, they would have so much momentum that it would be impossible to stop them. To emphasize the overwhelming danger he saw in these actions, De Gaulle appropriately referred to them with a lui- verb. In example III-153, France has been liberated and her enemies defeated. The task now facing De Gaulle is to restore order, and his main concern is that the country not return to the chaotic situation that existed before the war due to party politics. A backslide to this situation would of course be easier than applying the effort necessary to create a new system. De Gaulle regards this as a serious, potent threat. He turns out to be right, since France does in fact return to the old system and gets into a mess. De Gaulle detects the beginnings of this decline even now. This is the "rising wave of facileness" he refers to, and the serious threat it poses justifies its being mentioned with a lui- verb. Table 5.10 contains verbs that denote one person's replacing another in a particular post or job. Table 5.10. Control Level in Relation to "Government" I.

lui- verb

II.

le- verbs

A. High Controller: higher Control supplanter 'supplant' succéder 'succeed'

B.

Non-High Controller: lower Control

remplacer 'replace' suivre 'follow' Once again, the relation between the category A le- verb and the lui- verb is clear: supplanter suggests that the High Controller does something to cause the Low Controller to lose his position, while succéder carries no such suggestion. Less obvious is the relation between succéder and the le- verbs in B. Again, the data collection is illuminating. Table 5.11 contains all two-participant instances

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

241

of succéder and remplacer, used in this particular sense, from the Mémoires. What turns out to be of interest is the office or post in which the Non-High Controller is replaced, and this information is given in the table. Table 5.11. Verbs Denoting one Person's Replacing Another in an Office (Charles De Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre. Livre de Poche.) Volume

Page

Office in Which Person is Replaced Verb: succéder (a lui- verb)

I I I I II II II III III

24 36 298 302 87 254 338 159 201

I I I I I I I I I II II II II III III III

24 151 157 225 232 240 255 276 310 185 235 242 256 27 136 146

Army Chief of Staff Prime Minister De Gaulle's Chief of Staff Director of Armament Service Civil & military commander-in-chief, North Africa Commander-in-chief of Polish forces Commander of Mediterranean fleet Chief of 1st Division Russian Commanding officer Verb: remplacer (a le- verb) War minister, prewar government Governor of Cameroun British Foreign Secretary High Commissioner, Brazaville Administrator of St. Pierre & Miquelon Governor of Pacific islands British Secretary of State Member of National Committee Chief of bombardment group Minister of War Members of a commission Members of a commission Roosevelt's delegate Commissioner of the Republic Members of the French Academy Minister of Colonial Affairs

The skewing is quite striking. With the lui- verb, these posts or offices are all military posts, except for Prime Minister, supreme commander of the military. With the le- verb, they are almost all civilian posts. We recall that De Gaulle was, by training, experience, and temperament, a military man. He credited

242

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

civilian officials with very little capacity for acting decisively and getting important things done, and this attitude oozes from every page of the Mémoires. It is no surprise, then, that he should distribute these verbs in such a way as to attribute to military officials a higher degree of control. Table 5.12 contains verbs of duty or obligation. Some of these appear in Table 5.5, in opposition to a different set of verbs. The interesting point is that individual items are located in the same positions in both tables. Table 5.12. Control Level in Relation to "Government" I.

lui- verbs

II.

le- verbs

A. High Controller: higher Control

incomber appartenir revenir

'be incumbent on' 'behoove' 'devolve'

obliger forcer pousser contraindre B.

'compel, oblige' 'force' 'urge, provoke' 'compel'

Non-High Controller: lower Control

concerner, regarder intéresser

'involve, concern, be the business of' 'interest, concern'

The High Controller of the le- verbs in A exerts a high degree of pressure. Moreover, the Low Controller of these verbs has little inclination to act, which is why the High Controller needs to compel him. In B, the Low Controller is less reluctant, more neutral, than in A. Consequently the outside pressure, while it still exists, is less than with A. Comparing these to the lui- verbs brings a noticeable shift: with the lui- verbs the obligation comes from within the NonHigh Controller himself. This participant possesses some marked, even institutionalized characteristic which strongly sets up the state of "being incumbent", hence the expediter strategy. To confirm these points we again turn to the data. This time, even viewing the entire collection (as in Tables 5.5 and 5.7) does not make things entirely clear, and we must go to individual examples. Let us first look at Non-High Controllers with the lui- verb incomber. Example (26) comes not from the De Gaulle text, but from a novel.

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

(26)

243

Dans le choeur, devant l'autel, étaient agenouillés les enfants, garçons et filles se faisaient face de part et d'autre de l'allée, et le curé se sentait fort de la charge de ces âmes innocentes qui lui incombait. AVO 136 'In the choir, in front of the altar, were kneeling the children; boys and girls were facing each other from both sides of the aisle, and the priest felt keenly the burden of these innocent souls which was incumbent upon him (lui-).'

The obligation incumbent on this man arises from his institutional character: he is a priest. He is thus an expediter, bringing on incumbency in a specific way. In the Mémoires de Guerre, the Non-High Controller with incomber is either (a) a nation, a government, or a government agency — thus, entities of a strongly institutionalized character, or (b) a person holding office, whose responsibility arises from his position. We first illustrate the former. Example (27) concerns the interbellum period when Germany was returning to its ambitions and rebuilding its forces. De Gaulle felt that France had a special obligation to stop it. (27)

Tandis que la Russie s'isolait dans sa révolution; que l'Amérique se tenait éloignée de l'Europe; que l'Angleterre ménageait Berlin pour que Paris eût besoin d'elle; que les Etats nouveaux restaient faibles et désaccordés, c'est à la France seule qu'il incombait de contenir le Reich. DMA 8 'While Russia was isolating itself in its revolution; America was keeping its distance from Europe; England was humoring Berlin so that Paris would need her; the new states remained weak and in disagreement, it was incumbent upon France alone to contain the Reich.'

France is seen as towering over these other nations who are occupied with essentially trivial matters. Her special characteristics, special status, and special mission impose this obligation. Example (28) explicitly mentions the institutional characteristic that sets up an incumbency. (28)

... sous les vagues des manifestations populaires, se découvraient les charges qui incombaient à la France mandataire. DMU 27 '... underneath the waves of popular demonstrations, one detected the burdens incumbent on mandatory France.'

It is the specific characteristic of France's being a mandatory power that sets up these obligations. This same type of Non-High Controller also occurs with the le- verbs in Table 5.12, but in this case the "institutional" theme is not as marked; the

244

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

obligation doesn't arise from the institutional characteristic in as well-focused a way as with incomber. In example (29), where De Gaulle discusses the distribution of French forces over the world battle-scene, it is essentially a question of what is or is not France's business; intéresser is used. (29) Cependant, si le caractère mondial de la guerre me déterminait à faire en sorte que des forces françaises soient engagées sur tous les théâtres d'opérations, c'est sur celui qui intéressait le plus directement la France, à savoir l'Afrique du Nord, que je m'appliquais à concentrer l'effort principal. DMA 310-311 'Nevertheless, if the world-wide nature of the war fixed my resolve to have French forces engaged on all fronts, it is on the one which concerned France most directly — North Africa — that I endeavored to concentrate the main effort.' Compared to (27), this is a much more neutral allocating of responsibility; things are more relative here, as evidenced by phrases like "concerned France most directly" and "the main effort". This same neutral effect is seen in (30). De Gaulle expresses his disapproval of the Yalta Conference, at which the postwar fate of Central Europe had been decided by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, without France's participation or approval. (30)

Encore soupçonnais-je que, sur certaines questions: Syrie, Liban, Indochine, intéressant directement la France, les "Trois" avaient conclu entre eux quelque arrangement incompatible avec nos intérêts. DMS 105 'Moreover, I suspected that, regarding certain questions — Syria, Lebanon, Indochina — which concerned France directly, the "Three" had concluded among themselves some agreement incompatible with our interests.'

Here again is the word "directly", and the message is: "this is our business, not theirs". Example (31) illustrates incomber with a person holding office whose responsibility arises from his position. De Gaulle speaks of himself. (31)

M'appuyant sur la loi d'organisation de la nation pour le temps de guerre, je portais, en tant que Chef de l'Etat, le titre de chef des armées et, comme Président du gouvernement, la charge de diriger la Défense nationale. Ce qui concernait l'emploi de nos forces et, par là même, la coopération stratégique avec les alliés m'incombait nécessairement. DMU 321

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

245

'Relying on the law of the nation's organization in wartime, I bore, as Head of State, the title of Head of the armies and, as President of the government, the responsibility of directing the national defense. Everything concerning the use of our forces, and by virtue of this, strategic cooperation with our allies, necessarily devolved upon me.' There is an explicit listing of the qualities that impose this obligation on him. Thus far we have examined the verbs in Table 5.12 in terms of inherent characteristics of their Non-High Controllers. Another important factor defines the opposition among these verb groups: what the Non-High Controller is expected to do, or whether he is expected to do anything at all. With the luiverbs, that which is incumbent upon the Non-High Controller tends to include a verb or verbal notion; thus, a relatively high degree of activity is expected. Example (27) above is typical; the "subject" is il whose referent in this case is a verbal phrase: contenir le Reich 'contain the Reich'. In (32) the incumbency clearly carries the expectation of a high degree of activity. De Gaulle speaks about the fact that the United States had become the leading member of the Allied coalition. (32)

En fait, c'est aux Etats-Unis qu'appartenait la décision, puisque DMU 7 l'effort principal leur incombait maintenant. 'Indeed, the decision rested with the United States, because the main effort was incumbent upon them now.'

The High Controller, "main effort", implies expectation of much action from the referent of leur-, "the United States". By contrast, the le- verbs of Table 5.12 imply no such expectation. Example (33) contains two: regarder and concerner. De Gaulle has had a dispute with the British over what he views as their unwarranted interference in the affairs of Syria, then under French mandate. De Gaulle happens to encounter Churchill at Cairo, and Churchill explains the purpose of his trip. "I have come", he says, "to reorganize the command. At the same time, I'll see where we are in our disagreement about Syria. Afterwards, I'll go to Moscow. You can see that my trip has great importance, and it causes me some concern." De Gaulle answers: (33)

"Il est de fait, répondis-je, que ce sont là trois graves sujets. Le premier ne regarde que vous. Pour le deuxième, qui me concerne, et pour le troisième, qui touche surtout Staline à qui vous allez sans doute annoncer que le second front ne s'ouvrira pas cette année, je comprends vos appréhensions." DMU 22

246

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE ' '''It is a fact", I answered, "that those are three serious subjects. The first concerns only you. For the second, which is my business, and for the third which concerns mainly Stalin, to whom you will undoubtedly announce that the second front will not open up this year, I understand your misgivings." '

The High Controllers are "serious subjects". They are not verbs or verbal notions; they do not imply any direct expectation that the Non-High Controller will do something. There is rather a more passive concern, a neutral apportioning of domains of responsibility. This type of message is more appropriately expressed with le- verbs. Table 5.13 shows an opposition based entirely on the Control level of the High Controller. These verbs have to do with "harming" or "injuring". Table 5.13. Control Level in Relation to "Government" I.

lui- verb

II.

le- verbs

A. High Controller: higher Control

nuire

'harm'

blesser anéantir détruire abîmer

'wound' 'annihilate, destroy' 'destroy' 'spoil, ruin, damage'

The le- verbs suggest more overt activity by the High Controller, whereas the luiverb, nuire, represents something more subtle, as illustrated in (34). De Gaulle, in the early stages of putting together his Free French, tries to rally French soldiers who found themselves stationed in England at the time Germany invaded France. (34)

Le lendemain, je voulus visiter les camps d'Aintree et de Haydock où se trouvaient rassemblés plusieurs milliers de marins français. Dès mon arrivée, l'amiral anglais commandant à Liverpool me déclara qu'il s'opposait à ce que je voie les hommes parce que cela pourrait nuire au bon ordre. Il me fallut partir bredouille. DMA 96 'The next day I tried to visit the camps at Aintree and Haydock where several thousand French sailors were assembled. As soon as I arrived, the English admiral commanding at Liverpool announced to me that he opposed my seeing the men because it might be detrimental to discipline. I was forced to leave empty-handed.'

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

247

The gloss that seems most appropriate here with this lui- verb is a stative one: 'be detrimental'. The relatively non-aggressive, inert type of harm it suggests emerges on comparison to an example with a le- verb, blesser. (35)

Au mois d'octobre 1941, j'appris la présence à Lisbonne de Jean Moulin, arrivé de France et qui cherchait à venir à Londres. Je savais qui il était. Je savais, en particulier, que préfet d'Eure-et-Loir lors de l'entrée des Allemands à Chartres il s'était montré exemplaire de fermeté et de dignité, que l'ennemi, après l'avoir malmené, blessé, mis en prison, l'avait finalement libéré ... DMA 290 'During the month of October 1941 I learned of the presence in Lisbon of Jean Moulin, who had arrived from France and who was seeking to come to London. I knew who he was. In particular, I knew that, being the prefect of the department of Eure-et-Loir when the Germans entered Chartres he had been a model of firmness and dignity; that the enemy, after having maltreated him, wounded him, put him in prison, had finally freed him ...'

There is nothing subtle or stative about this "harming". One correlate of the relatively more active High Controller associated with this verb is that the High Controller is typically presented as performing more than one action at the same time, as here ("maltreated ... wounded ... put in prison"; a typical combination is "killed and wounded"). 2 0 Table 5.14 has to do with "following orders". Here, the same le- verb appears in both parts of column II. Table 5.14. Control Level in Relation to "Government" I.

lui- verb

II.

le- verbs

A. High Controller: higher Control suivre obéir

'follow'

'obey' B. Non-High Controller: lower Control suivre

'follow'

Suivre can be associated with many types of messages: to follow a road, to follow temporally, etc. Here we are concerned only with messages whose content is comparable to those with obéir, having to do with following orders or obeying commands. Suivre is used with both the High-Control and the Non-

248

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

High-Control strategies, and there is consequently a double motivation for it to be a le- verb. The rationale of the opposition is as follows. With obéir, (a) the High Controller exhibits lowered Control because he subjugates his will to that of the Non-High Controller, who (b) is really quite a powerful Non-High Controller since he can accomplish this. In addition to messages of simple obedience, we find an intriguing variation where the author apparently wishes to portray the High Controller as stupid for obeying orders, implying that he lowers his Control level to the point where he no longer thinks for himself. Suivre is neutral to the above motifs; either these elements are simply not at issue, or the opposite of what would be conveyed by obéir is intended. Example (36) comes from a novel. There have been labor disturbances and shootings in Paris. There is also a crisis in the police department: the second-incommand to the chief of security, Jouin, has resigned, unable to get along with his superior. Here, the chief talks about the affair. (36)

"Il ne suffit pas, pour être chef-adjoint de la Sûreté, de se montrer bon policier, — qualité qui appartient à M. Jouin, — il faut aussi être bon fonctionnaire, c'est-à-dire respecter les ordres du chef, et fonctionnaire discipliné comme il convient à un subordonné ... Je suis et resterai chef de la Sûreté et j'entends que dans les services mes subordonnés m'obéissent." ACB 391-392 ' "It is not enough, to be deputy chief of Security, to prove oneself a good policeman, — a quality which Mr. Jouin possesses, — one must also be a good functionary, that is, one must respect the orders of the chief, and a disciplined functionary as is proper for a subordinate ... I am and will remain chief of Security and I expect my rank-and-file subordinates to obey me." '

This is a typical theme with obéir: a conflict of loyalties. The fact that Jouin was a "good policeman" means he was inclined to do things on his own. But this will had to be subjugated if he was to be a "good functionary", who "respects the orders of the chief", is "disciplined", and is "subordinate". This is the lowering of Control of the High Controller implied by obéir. The NonHigh Controller, the chief, asserts his own power by emphasizing that the title "chief of Security" both "is" and "will remain" his. Example (37) contains both suivre and obéir. It comes from another De Gaulle work: memoirs of his return to power at the time of the Algerian crisis in the 1950s. De Gaulle discusses various attitudes among the French military in Algeria as to how the crisis should be handled.

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS (37)

249

Pour certains, chez qui domine par-dessus tout la confiance qu'ils me portent, il n'est que de me suivre à présent comme autrefois. Pour d'autres enfin, et sans doute est-ce le plus grand nombre, du moment qu'à la tête du pays il y a maintenant un gouvernement qui en est un et qui gouverne, c'est à lui qu'il appartient de trancher; l'armée, quoi que l'on puisse désirer dans ses rangs, n'ayant dès lors qu'à obéir. DER 65 'For some, who are dominated above all by the confidence they have in me, it is simply a matter of following me, now as in the past. For others, and these are without doubt the greatest number, since there is now at the head of the country a government which deserves the name and which governs, it is the one whose responsibility it is to decide; the army, whatever might be desired in its ranks, having then only to obey.'

For those to whom suivre is applied, there is no conflict of loyalties; their "confidence" in De Gaulle applies "now as in the past". For those to whom obéir is applied, there is a suggestion of such a conflict: "whatever might be desired in its ranks". For the latter, then, there would have to be some subjugating of the will. The remaining examples come from the War Memoires. Since De Gaulle was a strong leader (according to some, dictatorial) who in the Mémoires portrays himself as always being right, one might imagine that he rarely, if ever, presents himself as subjugating his will. Thus, we might predict that he would never be High Controller of obéir. There is in fact one such example; but when we see what he subjugates his will to, the paradox disappears. De Gaulle has refused an invitation to meet with Roosevelt, because Roosevelt wanted the meeting to take place in Algeria, and De Gaulle considered it an affront to be invited by a foreign head of state to meet him on French territory. This refusal naturally evoked much criticism, and De Gaulle discusses how he justifies his action. (38)

Nombre de "politiques", faisant profession de voir en Roosevelt l'infaillible champion de la démocratie et vivant dans un univers passablement éloigné des motifs d'intérêt supérieur et de dignité nationale auxquels j'avais obéi, s'offusquaient de mon attitude. DMS 106 'A number of politicians, professing to see in Roosevelt the infallible champion of democracy and living in a world rather removed from the motives of higher interest and national dignity which I had obeyed, took offense at my attitude.'

250

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

It would not be fitting for De Gaulle, who sees himself as incarnating the French national ideal, to be bent by any mortal force or any motive less than "higher interest and national dignity". There is the further implication that, given this constraint, De Gaulle had no choice of action. This recalls an example seen above with charger, where De Gaulle was subordinate only to "the national resolve".21 Example (39) illustrates suivre. The topic is the organization of the clandestine French resistance movement under the Nazi occupation, and how the ordinary fighter did not know the identity of the movement's top leaders. (39)

Pour la masse de ceux-là, les organismes divers qui s'occupaient de les inspirer étaient quasi inconnus et les hommes qui en faisaient partie le plus souvent anonymes. Moralement, dans la lutte clandestine, c'est à de Gaulle qu'on se rattachait, tandis que pratiquement pour la vie au maquis, le coup de main, le sabotage, le coltinage des armes, la transmission du renseignement — toutes affaires menées forcément à petite échelle—on ne suivait que des chefs DMU 201 d'équipe. 'For the masses of fighters, the various bodies which were responsible for inspiring them were more or less unknown and the men who belonged to them most often anonymous. Morally, in the clandestine struggle, they were attached to De Gaulle, while in practical terms, for life in the maquis, the sneak attack, for sabotage, transporting weapons, transmission of information — all matters necessarily carried out on a small scale — they followed only team leaders.'

Regarding the High Controller, there is no question of subjugating one's will or division of loyalties, because these men and their leaders were working together as a team; the context does not suggest that loyalty is an issue. As for the NonHigh Controllers, the team leaders, they were not particularly powerful individuals; they were just there as a practical necessity. The real moral leader and influential power was De Gaulle. Our last examples illustrate use of obéir to imply stupidity on the part of the High Controller. In (40), De Gaulle comments on the failure of most of the French navy to join the Free French. (40)

Le même parti pris de renoncement enlissait l'escadre française d'Alexandrie. Depuis que l'amiral Godfroy avait conclu avec Andrew Cunningham l'accord qui neutralisait ses navires, le cuirassé Lorraine, les croiseurs: Duguay-Trouin, Duquesne, Suffren,

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

251

Tourville, les contre-torpilleurs: Basque, Forbin, Fortuné, le sousmarin Protée, restaient à l'ancre dans le port. Quelques éléments des états-majors et des équipages nous rejoignaient, par intervalles. Mais les autres, obéissant aux consignes de Vichy, employaient ce temps de guerre à se prouver mutuellement que la meilleure manière de servir la France envahie consistait à ne pas combattre. DMA 187 'The same spirit of defeatism engulfed the French squadron of Alexandria. Since Admiral Godfroy had concluded with Andrew Cunningham the agreement neutralizing his ships, the battleship Lorraine, the cruisers: Duguay-Trouin, Duquesne, Suffern, Tourville, the torpedo-boat destroyers: Basque, Forbin, Fortuné, the submarine Protée, remained at anchor in the port. Some elements of the command and the crews joined us from time to time. But the others, obeying the instructions of Vichy, used this time of war to prove to each other that the best way to serve invaded France was by not fighting.' The High Controller (those who didn't join De Gaulle) is, to begin with, inactive ("the best way ... was by not fighting"). But they are also introduced with a sarcastic tone ("used this time of war to prove to each other ..."). By using a verb which indicates a relatively low-Control High Controller, the author makes the comment that this participant has subjugated himself to the point where he no longer thinks for himself; that he is being slavishly obedient to the point of doing something stupid. When this type of message is to be avoided, we find suivre. Example (41) is from a radio address De Gaulle made to the French people at the beginning of the allied landing in Normandy. (41)

Pour les fils de France, où qu'ils soient, quels qu'ils soient, le devoir simple et sacré est de combattre l'ennemi par tous les moyens dont ils disposent ... Les consignes données par le Gouvernement français et par les chefs français qu'il a qualifiés pour le faire doivent être exactement suivies ... DMU 278 'For the sons of France, wherever they may be, whoever they may be, the simple and sacred duty is to fight the enemy by all means at their disposal ... The instructions given by the French Government and by the French leaders whom it has qualified to do so must be followed exactly ...'

De Gaulle treats the French as compatriots and co-combatants; he solicits their aid. He demands their strict obedience, but elevates them to "sons of France"

252

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

with a "sacred duty". He uses suivre. (The Non-High participant here is the same as in (40), consignes 'instructions'.) Example (42) should be compared to (40), because there Vichy's orders were obeyed with obéir, whereas here they are disobeyed with suivre. De Gaulle discusses a plan of Giraud's to recapture France by invading it from the south (the so-called "free" zone, controlled by Vichy), relying on support from resistance units there who would presumably join the liberation army as it advanced. (42)

Mais, à mon sens, ce projet n'avait pas de chances de réussir. Si l'on pouvait, à la rigueur, imaginer que quelques unités de la zone "libre" suivraient, ici et là, Giraud malgré les injonctions et les malédictions que lancerait le Maréchal, il était plus que douteux que ... ces fractions dispersées pourraient résister à la ruée de la WehrDMU 17 macht et aux coups de la Luftwaffe. 'But, in my view, this plan had no chance of success. If, at very best, one could imagine that a few units of the "free" zone, here and there, would follow Giraud in spite of the injunctions and curses which the Marshal [Pétain] would issue, it was more than doubtful that ... these dispersed fragments would be able to resist the onrush of the Wehrmacht and the blows of the Luftwaffe.'

De Gaulle certainly doesn't want to portray these rebels as stupid, since they would be fighters for his own cause. Neither are they slavishly obedient, since they act of their own free will; in fact, they disobey. By the same token, the Non-High Controller, Giraud, is presented as not very powerful, particularly in comparison to the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, whose power leads to their being mentioned with a lui- verb {résister). All of these factors, then, point to the appropriateness of the le- verb, suivre. Appendix B gives several other verb charts like the ones offered in this chapter. Although sufficient data are not at hand to demonstrate these relationships as was done for those above, they are plausible hypotheses based on the glosses of the verbs, and fill in more of the lexical network whose investigation we have begun. That which has here been revealed about the way French speakers exploit the resources of their language may perhaps be regarded as the ultimate manifestation of linguistic value, at least with regard to lui- and le-. We have observed an intricate interaction between a grammatical system and a farbranching network of oppositions in the lexicon, mediated by the active efforts

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS

253

of speakers to communicate messages coherently. These value relationships exist only within a matrix of semantic substance, specifically: the grammatical domain of Degree of Control and the semantic content of individual verbs, which the data and analysis in this section have aimed to identify. A synthesis of linguistic substance and value has thus led to solution of a complex linguistic problem. It has been demonstrated that the pseudo-phenomenon of "government" is merely an extension of familiar strategies of lui- and le-. The broader implications of this demonstration relate to the traditional sentence-based categories, and the notion of "syntax" itself. The weaknesses of the categories in terms of which lui- and le- have traditionally been analyzed were outlined in Chapter 1 and will be discussed further in the following pages. Our purpose here has been to offer an alternative view of the structure of French that removes the temptation to fall back on those categories. Whether or not it ultimately proves to be the case that language has a "central core" of phenomena that reflect formally determined relations within the sentence — i.e. "syntax" — it is now clear that "case government", at least for French, does not fall within that putative core. This analysis has shown that even the most prototypically syntactic phenomena can yield to a consistently applied semantic hypothesis. It has been demonstrated that speakers exploit the meanings of lui- and le- and the lexical content of verbs with the goal of producing coherent and appropriate messages.

254

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Appendix A: Verbs Included in Counts of Tables 5.3 and 5.4

I. lui- verbs

IL le- verbs

appartenir arriver convenir déplaire échapper importer incomber nuire obéir parvenir plaire profiter résister ressembler revenir succéder suffire venir

abîmer adjurer anéantir approuver arranger atteindre autoriser blesser charger combattre concerner condamner conquérir contrarier convaincre détruire dominer empêcher employer éviter exiger

frapper intéresser maîtriser ménager nommer nourrir obliger occuper passionner pousser précipiter presser prier priver quitter réjouir remplacer sommer soutenir suivre vaincre

NETWORKS OF OPPOSITIONS Appendix B:

Additional Charts Showing Control Level in Relation to "Government"

1.

Verbs denoting 'displeasing'

I.

lui- verbs

déplaire répugner

'displease' 'be repugnant'

II.

'disgust' 'revolt, disgust'

B. incommoder ennuyer

inconvenience 'annoy'

Verbs denoting 'benefiting'

I.

lui- verb

'benefit' 'be useful'

A. avantager aider guérir

'give an advantage' 'help' soigner 'care for' 'cure'

B. étayer soutenir

'support, shore up' 'support'

Verbs denoting 'allowing'

I.

lui- verb

'permit'

fâcher 'anger'

II. le- verbs

3.

permettre

le- verbs

A. dégoûter révolter

2.

profiter servir

255

II. le- verbs A. autoriser

'authorize' (High Ctrlr. has authority)

B. laisser

'let' (Non-H. C. is not asking)

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4.

Verbs meaning 'to be like another'

I.

lui- verb

ressembler 'resemble'

II.

le- verbs

A. imiter simuler

'imitate' 'simulate' etc.

5.

Verbs meaning 'to stop someone from doing something'

I.

lui- verbs

interdire défendre

'forbid' 'forbid'

II.

le- verbs

A. empêcher

'stop, hinder'

6.

Verbs denoting 'happening, coming to, occurring'

I.

lui- verbs

arriver venir parvenir

'happen' 'come' 'arrive'

II.

le- verbs

A. atteindre frapper

'attain, reach' 'strike'

Chapter 6 The Theory of the Sentence and the Traditional Canon

1.

Lui- and le- as a Linguistic Problem

Aside from its unorthodox view of the functions of lui- and le-, the present study is unusual in another way. Lui- and le- do not constitute a topic in their own right in other grammars of French. The question of their functions arises only obliquely, as a result of asking how universal categories of grammar, e.g. Direct and Indirect Object, or underlying categories such as "dative", are manifested in French. These categories are assumed in advance by those grammars, and the question of their realization yields analyses based on truth value, logic, and features of messages and of the real world. The present approach, by contrast, represents an attempt to discover categories of grammar. It reveals a principe de classification through determination of what the signals and meanings of French are. The impetus and guide in this search for categories is overt distributions of the morphemes lui and le. This study thereby aims to uncover the inner workings of French on their own terms, rather than seeking manifestations of universal categories of thought, communication, or cognition in French. This approach, in short, has defined a new problem in the grammar of French and has developed a solution to that problem consistent with the factors which motivated posing the problem. We now wish to explain why the problem has been defined this way rather than in the traditional way. The purpose of this chapter is to examine in some depth the philosophical underpinnings of traditional sentence grammar and compare them with those of a Columbia-school analysis, in order to arrive at an understanding of why each approach defines its problems in the way it does.

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The Theory of the Sentence

The conceptual foundation of universal grammar, touched on in Chapter 1, is the premise of an intimate and necessary connection between language and thought. This view goes back to the Aristotelian thinking of antiquity. ... the study of language was seen as being an essential philosophical preliminary (at the very least) to understanding the system of thought which Aristotelian logic revealed. From this position it is no more than a small step to assuming that regularity in thought patterns (of which the Aristotelian syllogism is the classic example) must or ought to be reflected in regularity of language patterns. (Harris & Taylor 1989:49)

This idea was propounded by the authors of the Port Royal grammar of 1660, whose influence upon grammarians both prescriptive and theoretical was profound and lasting. [Universal grammar] was based on the simple consideration that if discourse is the image of thought and if thought is subject to the laws of reason, then discourse itself must reveal and illustrate the laws of reason. This view was summed up in the popular and suggestive metaphor which said that language or speech is a painting or a copy of the mind — "la parole est une peinture de l'esprit." The original being the same to all people regardless of the language they speak, it follows that their individual copies must of necessity reproduce the same form or structure of this original, though the colors, the actual words and expressions, may differ. This kind of grammar is universal; it comprises all the general principles which no particular grammar can fail to illustrate. (Aarsleff 1967:14-15)

These ideas and their origins are well known. What is less well understood is the conceptual mechanism by which universal grammar relates an analysis of rational thought to the postulation of actual units and functions in grammar. For an explicit tracing of this mechanism we are greatly indebted to William Diver, whose illuminating lectures at Columbia University in the 1970s and '80s shed invaluable light on the philosophical basis of both classical and modern grammatical practice. We draw upon these lectures, as well as a short published sketch in Diver (1977) for the following very abbreviated discussion. Although universal grammar was not intended to be a testable scientific hypothesis about language, and in fact evolved mainly before the era of the scientific revolution, its categories and constructs have nonetheless been taken for granted by grammarians of every school and used by them to explain the workings of language. Diver maintained that a critical scrutiny of this grammar as a theory of language, equivalent to the kind of scrutiny that every modern scientific theory undergoes as a matter of course, is long overdue. It is imperative to assess whether the categories of this theory — which may be dubbed the

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Theory of the Sentence, in recognition of its most salient category — achieve a relation of fit between theory and phenomena, such fit being the criterion by which any scientific theory is judged successful. The categories of the theory, in turn, can be considered valid entries in a grammar of natural language only if the theory as a whole is valid. 2.1. Deductively Motivated Categories The premise that the structure of language mirrors the structure of rational thought contains two elements that deductively motivate the positing of two sets of categories. The element of rationality implies organization, and this leads to organizational categories. The basic organizational unit of thought is the complete thought; the unit of language that mirrors the complete thought is the Complete Sentence. Thoughts have parts: every complete thought has a subject of the thought and a predication about that subject; correspondingly, the Complete Sentence has a Subject and a Predicate. To quote Smyth's (1920) Greek Grammar, from the beginning of the section on Syntax: 900.

901. 902.

A sentence expresses a thought. Syntax (syntaxis, 'arranging together') shows how the different parts of speech and their different inflectional forms are employed to form sentences. Sentences are either complete or incomplete. Every complete sentence must contain two members; 1. The Subject: the person or thing about which something is said. 2. The Predicate: what is said about the subject.

A thought may be made more complete by the addition of complements; correspondingly, the Complete Sentence may have various kinds of Complements. In the Predicate, the Complements of the Predicator (i.e. the "verb") are the Objects. Objects are of different kinds, depending on the nature of the predication; they may be Direct or Indirect (more about this later). Complements themselves may be made more complete by the addition of other Complements. The organizational aspect of the Theory of the Sentence is represented in the traditional sentence diagram. Turning to the second element of rational thought, thought implies notional content, and this yields conceptual categories. The linguistic counterparts of these categories are the familiar "parts of speech", corresponding to the different kinds of things that people think and talk about. The Noun (or Substantive) is the name of a person, place or thing; the Verb is the name of an action, etc. It is worth noting that the content of thought can, of course, embrace an

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infinity of different notions, yet the grammars recognize only a small handful of "parts of speech". We do not find that e.g. names of "abstractions" or "emotions" can rank as parts of speech. The ancients were very much concerned with determining the "correct" number of parts of speech,1 and early on a canon was established, which has survived with little variation. These two sets of deductively motivated categories dovetail neatly in an interrelation of organization and content: the conceptual categories fill slots in the structure of the Complete Sentence. Smyth: 907. 909. 919.

The subject of a sentence is a substantive or one of its equivalents. The predicate of a sentence is always a verb. The object [of a verb] is a substantive.

The complement of a Noun is an Adjective; the complement of a Verb is an Adverb, and so on. As a self-contained analysis of the structure of thought, this part of the theory is well motivated and consistent. Cracks in the edifice do, however, appear even at this stage. In the small print following § 907 in Smyth, we learn regarding the "equivalents" mentioned there that the function of the substantive may be assumed by, among other things, a pronoun, adjective, participle or infinitive (i.e. forms of the verb), numeral, relative clause, or prepositional phrase. A more widespread breakdown becomes apparent in a language like English where any number of common words like 'book' can function as nouns (T bought a book.'), verbs ('Please book me a room.'), or adjectives (T need some book covers.'). 2.2. The Tripartite Relationship Whatever its virtues as an analysis of thought, this scheme does not become an analysis of language until linguistic forms are explicitly taken into consideration. This provides the inductive side of the problem, and here the scheme begins to function as a real theory of language. Smyth once again: 938.

The nominative is the case of the subject; the oblique cases are complements of the predicate. 1553. The accusative is the case of the direct object.

Similarly for Latin (Greenough et al 1931): 339. 361. 387.

The Subject of a finite verb is in the Nominative. The Dative is used to denote the object indirectly affected by an action. This is called the Indirect Object. The Direct Object of a transitive verb is put in the Accusative.

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What we see posited here is a neat, tripartite structure specifying the relationship between the structure of thought and the structure of language. The three vertices of this triangle are: 1) The structure of thought, represented in language by the categories Sentence, Subject, Direct Object, and Indirect Object; 2) The content of thought, represented in language by the category Noun; and 3) The morphological categories of an actual language, in this instance the Nominative, Accusative and Dative case endings of Greek and Latin. This tripartite arrangement is indeed a theory of language because, by uniting the deductive and inductive sides of the problem, it offers an explanation for the occurrences of the nominative, dative, and accusative case forms. It posits a motivated correlation between categories of logical structure, of conception, and of form. To illustrate how the tripartite relationship functions in another area of grammar: The Theory of the Sentence postulates different kinds of sentences corresponding to different kinds of thoughts. A Main Clause corresponds to a more important thought, a Subordinate Clause to a less important thought. The Predicator of a Main Clause will be selected from the conceptual category Verb, and its morphology will, in theory, be the Indicative Mood. The Predicator of a Subordinate Clause will be a Verb whose form is the Subjunctive Mood.2 2.3. Testing the Theory of the Sentence: The Appendix Like all theories, this theory must be tested. As with all theories, tests will be of two kinds: a) The deductive derivation of the categories of the theory must be consistent and appropriate, b) On the inductive side, there must be a relation of fit between the categories of the theory and the phenomena they are intended to explain.3 Once again, the purpose of our discussion is not to present readers with facts about traditional grammar that they don't already know. What is new here is the suggestion that this grammar be regarded as a testable — and therefore falsifiable — theory of the structure of language. In the grammars themselves, things are not always stated exactly as we state them here. The grammarians were well aware of the problems that arise almost immediately with this scheme, and took an approach which headed off some of the more glaring ones at the outset, rather than being faced with open contradictions. To fairly test the theory,

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though, it is necessary to state it clearly in its purest form, and face the contradictions squarely. What we actually find in grammars is a statement of the theory, as above, together with an extensive Appendix cataloguing the instances in which the theory fails to fit the phenomena.4 Thus in Smyth, along with the statement of the dative as case of the Indirect Object, we find a list of no fewer than ninetynine uses of the dative which are not the Indirect Object. This includes an entire page of instances of the dative as Direct Object. 1460. The dative may be used as the sole complement of many verbs [such as:] 1461. To benefit, help, injure, please, displease, be friendly or hostile, blame, be angry, threaten, envy. 1463. To meet, approach, yield. 1464. To obey, serve, pardon, trust, advise, command, etc. 1466. To be like or unlike, compare, befit.

This is, of course, the famous phenomenon of "government". The list is heterogeneous, open-ended (note the "etc." in 1464), and includes many verbs that take either the accusative or the dative, seemingly indiscriminately. Greenough presents a similar situation for Latin: 360.

The uses of the Dative are the following: 1. Indirect Object (general use) 2. Special or Idiomatic Uses.

Under the rubric "Indirect Object", however, are included many cases which are clearly Direct Objects, and thus constitute a separate class of "Indirect Object with Special Verbs": 367.

Many verbs signifying to favor, help, please, trust, and their contraries; also to believe, persuade, command, obey, serve, resist, envy, threaten, pardon and spare, take the Dative. a. Some verbs apparently of the same meanings take the Accusative. Such are iuvo, adiuvo 'help'; laedo 'injure'; iubeo 'order'; deficio 'fail; delecto 'please'. b. Some verbs are used transitively with the Accusative or intransitively with the Dative without perceptible difference of meaning.

What we see here is that the categories Direct and Indirect Object in fact do not account for the distribution of the accusative and dative cases. To describe those distributions, it is necessary to set up new categories like "government" and "idiom". However, these new categories, unlike Direct and Indirect Object, are not motivated deductively by the Rational Thought premise. There is nothing in

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the structure of rational thought that motivates "government" or "idioms"; these are purely descriptive categories that have no deductive motivation at all and function merely as escape clauses when the theory proper fails.5 Another major difficulty is the genitive case, whose function is not specified by the theory, yet which constantly intrudes on the functions of the other three cases. Smyth: 928.

The subject nominative may be replaced ... by a genitive of the divided whole: en khorai epipton hekateron '[some of] both (gen.) fell on the spot' X. H. 4.2.20

There are no fewer than twelve pages, in small print (pp. 320-332), of verbs that take an Object in the genitive. The list is again very heterogeneous and includes verbs which also take the accusative (§ 1358); the genitive can also be used where the dative seems to be required (§ 1328a). Indeed, the following set of examples from the Iliad and Odyssey reminds us very much of the French situation.6 Holding a spear [acc] with the left hand, with the other he seized a rock [acc.] XVII 734 With both hands, clinging, he seized the rock [gen.] Groaning, he held it [gen.], along came a great wave v 428-429 Whether he should supplicate the maiden, grasping her knees [gen.] Or whether, standing apart, he should supplicate with soft words That she might show him to the city and give him raiment. It seemed to him to be better, pondering, To supplicate from a distance with soft words, Lest the maiden be angry in her heart at him, grasping her knees [acc.] vi 142-147 Until I see her [ace] coming XVIII 190 Thus he spoke, weeping, and his mother heard him [gen.] I 357 He (Zeus) bade him [ace] (Agamemnon) arm the long-haired Achaeans. II 28 He (Agamemnon) bade the clear-voiced heralds [dat.] Assemble the long-haired Achaeans at the meeting place. II 50-51 Let us remember that Greek and Latin were the languages for which the categories of Theory of the Sentence were originally devised. If it fails in those languages, we can hardly expect it to succeed in others. What we find, then, is that although the original categories of the Theory of the Sentence — Sentence, Subject, Object, etc. — are motivated in a

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consistent way by the rational thought premise, confrontation with actual linguistic phenomena reveals a lack of fit with these categories. In response to this lack of fit, other categories are introduced — government, etc. — that are not motivated deductively. The resulting package fails as a theory on two counts: a lack of fit on the inductive side, and lack of consistency and appropriateness on the deductive side. It may be objected that what we have done here is not fair. Traditional grammar was never viewed by its practitioners as a theory to be tested in the modern sense. Its roots lie in the Aristotelian common-sense approach to natural phenomena. The grammatical tradition evolved as a convenient conceptual framework within which to deal with a philological problem: the understanding of ancient cultures through their texts.7 Its categories were rough-and-ready devices for clarifying the thoughts contained in those texts, and became sanctified by tradition and a certain conceptual plausibility. If the grammarians never did what we are doing here, it is because they never intended this to be done with their conceptual framework. Nonetheless, these categories have played such a fundamental role in modern thinking about language that it would be irresponsible and unacceptable for us who view language as an object of scientific study to adopt such basic categories uncritically and without the same scrupulous empirical testing we apply to our own constructs.

3.

Traditional Grammar and Generative Grammar

Up to this point in our discussion we have examined older, more traditional sources because these are the ones that best illuminate the original explanatory intent of the categories Direct and Indirect Object. Modern grammarians, to be sure, employ a very different idiom, and to modern ears the foregoing may sound a trifle dated, perhaps even simplistic, the thinking of a bygone era. But the conceptual framework underlying grammatical practice has changed remarkably little since classical times. If the word "proposition" is substituted for "complete thought" and the distinction rephrased in terms of "logical structure", the discussion takes on a decidedly modern tone. Indeed, in regard to the centrality of the Sentence and its analysis into constituent parts, modern grammatical theory has departed very little from traditional grammars. Generative grammar, while offering a very different type of presentation, does not disagree with traditional grammars at the fundamental level we are discussing here, nor has this position changed throughout its history.

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Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis. (Chomsky 1957:11) ... let us consider what a traditional grammar has to say about a simple English sentence such as the following: (1) sincerity may frighten the boy Concerning this sentence, a traditional grammar might provide information of the following sort: (2) (i) the string (1) is a Sentence (S); frighten the boy is a Verb Phrase (VP) consisting of the Verb (V) frighten and the Noun Phrase (NP) the boy; sincerity is also an NP ... (ii) the NP sincerity functions as the Subject of the sentence (1), whereas the VP frighten the boy functions as the Predicate of this sentence; the NP the boy functions as the Object of the VP, and the V frighten as its Main Verb; the grammatical relation Subject-Verb holds of the pair {sincerity, frighten), and the grammatical relation Verb-Object holds of the pair (frighten, the boy) ... It seems to me that the information presented in (2) is, without question, substantially correct and is essential to any account of how the language is used or acquired. (Chomsky 1965:63-64) Whatever evidence is available today seems to me to show that by and large the traditional views are basically correct, so far as they go ... (Chomsky 1965:194) The chief contrast between traditional grammar statements and the rules of generative grammar lay not in their content so much as their expression ... (Cook 1988: 24)

To be sure, the focus of interest of grammatical analysis has shifted dramatically. Most notably, there has been an attempt to replace the original notional definitions of the categories of sentence structure with formal definitions. This route was taken, in their own way, by traditional grammarians as well, as we shall see. But there has been no fundamental reevaluation of the categories themselves; there has been no serious challenge to the notion that language comes in pretheoretical units called sentences, however these may be defined, and that the sentence consists of parts which correspond largely to the traditional logic-derived categories. Modern linguistics, certainly, concerns itself less with how language relates to logic and reality, and more with its arbitrary properties. That is, it takes for granted the Theory of the Sentence and concentrates on that which corresponds to the Appendix to the Theory in the classical grammars. However, the initial determination as to what is arbitrary is still made on the basis of departure from the structural organization of language predicted by the rational thought premise. If that premise is removed, then the whole enterprise of determining what, if anything, in language is arbitrary must begin completely afresh. Further, since

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it can be shown that some aspects of linguistic structure are not arbitrary, then it makes sense to start with an assumption of non-arbitrariness and resort to arbitrariness only if the former cannot be demonstrated. Otherwise, linguistics amounts to a process of attempting to prove negatives. Since there has in fact been no attempt to offer a new and different justification for the categories "sentence" and "parts of the sentence", it seems fair to conclude that the strongest deductive support for these categories remains that offered by traditional grammar, namely, the logical analysis of the conceptual structure of a complete thought. The Columbia-school approach, then, challenges generative grammar at the level of its most basic conceptual assumptions. At this level, there is little difference between generative grammar and traditional grammar, and there has been no significant scrutiny of these assumptions since Chomsky's early endorsement of them.

4.

Direct and Indirect Object in the Grammar of French

In the present context, our main concern is to see how the attempt to maintain the categories Direct and Indirect Object plays itself out in the grammar of French. As shown in Chapter 1, French has another morphological means of indicating direct and indirect object, besides the clitic pronouns. A noun is made a direct object by placing it after the verb, and an indirect object by placing it after à. However, à is a preposition which in other contexts has a locative/temporal interpretation: 'to, at'. Moreover, pronouns too can be made indirect objects with à, using the non-clitic pronoun forms. This multiple, crisscrossing morphology thus represents a complication, rather than a motivation, for these categories in French. The necessity for two kinds of object, direct and indirect, stems deductively from the fact that different predicates, being conceptually different, can require different types of complements. Grevisse (1969) puts it thus: 190.

191.

The object complement expresses the person or thing onto which the action of the subject passes; this person or thing is presented as undergoing the action, as being the object of the action, as indicating the end-point, the completion of the process ... The direct object complement (also called simply direct object) ... expresses, either the object of the action itself, or the result of this action; with some verbs, it expresses the content: Raboter une planche 'Plane a board.' Enterrer un trésor 'Bury a treasure.' Graver une inscription 'Engrave an inscription.' Enseigner la grammaire 'Teach grammar.' ...

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192. The indirect object complement (also called simply indirect object) ... expresses, in general, the person or thing toward which the action is directed: La paresse nuit à la santé 'Laziness injures the health.' Il lègue ses biens à un hospice 'He bequeathes his possessions to an asylum.' Cet enfant obéit à ses parents 'This child obeys his parents.' J'indique le chemin à ce voyageur 'I point out the way to this traveler.' On doute de sa sincérité 'One doubts his sincerity.'

(Note that Grevisse recognizes an indirect object with de as well as with à.) This is substantively the same definition of these categories as found in the classical grammars of Latin and Greek, often in a somewhat starker form (Greenough et al 1931): 274.

The person or thing immediately affected by the action of a verb is called the Direct Object. A person or thing indirectly affected by the action of a verb is called the Indirect Object.

The explanatory power of direct and indirect object is to be sought at the point at which the deductive and inductive sides of the problem meet. That is, the conceptually derived categories direct and indirect object are to correlate with the morphological categories accusative and dative. Grevisse's own examples, however, raise doubts. Why, for instance, does the criterion of "person or thing toward which the action is directed" apply to Cet enfant obéit à ses parents This child obeys his parents', but not to Cet enfant écoute ses parents This child listens to his parents', which employs the postverbal position of a direct object? On what basis does one say that On comprend sa sincérité 'One understands his sincerity' fulfills the criterion of being "the object or result of the action itself", and is therefore justifiably a direct object, but that On doute de sa sincérité 'One doubts his sincerity' does not? Our discussion in Chapter 1 advanced many examples that raise the same kind of question. Since Grevisse does not make direct and indirect object mutually defining, there is a large area of potential ambiguity between them. The conceptual basis for the distinction between these categories is, in actuality, not clear.

5.

Notional or Formal Categories?

One may be tempted to wonder whether Grevisse's presentation isn't a bit ex post facto: Cet enfant obéit à ses parents is offered as representing an indirect object because it has the formal characteristics of an indirect object, and then it is simply asserted, against common sense, to have the notional characteristics of one

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too. Grevisse is clearly aware of the problem, for at this point he introduces a radical redefinition of direct and indirect object, one that shifts the very basis for definition. The expressions direct complement, indirect complement relate not to the nature of the complement, but simply to its construction. A complement is direct when it is joined directly, that is, without a helping-word, to the complemented word ... The indirect object complement ... is ordinarily attached to the verb indirectly, by means of a preposition ... (loc. cit.)

What is intended here, of course, is a formal definition of the two categories, independent of notional criteria. This idea is, in fact, the working definition adopted by most French grammarians, including Grevisse's predecessors.8 The long grammatical introduction to the Dictionnaire Général de la Langue Française (Hatzfeld et al 1895: §667) says: "The transitive verb expresses an action whose object (when it has an object) is expressed by a noun or a pronoun joined directly to the verb without the help of a preposition"; and (§668): "It is only linguistic habit, and not habits of thought, which cause the object of the action to be attached to the verb with the help of a preposition". A corollary to this position, hinted at in the latter quotation, is that the preposition used to introduce the indirect object does not itself have any meaning; it is a mere "grammatical marker". Grevisse (§§ 894; 191) refers to these prepositions as "empty" prepositions, which have abandoned their "precise value" and "emptied themselves" of their meaning to become simple "syntactic tools". The assertion that a form has no meaning is, of course, difficult to test, since one must prove a negative. This idea can be disproved, however, if it is shown that a constant semantic value is associable with all uses of the form. Further, recall that Grevisse allows both à and de as indirect object markers; other grammarians include even more prepositions in this list. If these "markers" are indeed empty of semantic content, why should there be more than one of them? Wouldn't just one do the job? And if they are semantically empty, then what is the difference between them? In fact, in the absence of a semantic distinction, what sort of difference could there be between them? There appears to be a relation of indeterminacy rather than one of fit between grammatical categories and the facts they are supposed to account for. The usual format of a traditional grammar of French was either a textbook for learners of the language, or a handbook of correct usage. The writers of these grammars were faced with the urgent necessity of providing a framework for translating into and out of French, or a set of prescriptive rules. Since the Theory of the Sentence clearly does not apply to French in any straightforward way, most traditional grammarians simply do not try to work out all the niceties of a philosophically coherent presentation. The result is a grammar consisting of

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two parts. These two parts may not actually be presented separately; the finished product is likely to be a blending of the two components, so that separating out the various strands for any particular grammar may be a complex task. One component is the notional component. It deals with the question of "how to express idea X in French". This part of the grammar is responsible to notions only, not to forms, and there will typically be a plurality of morphological devices available for expressing any given idea. The second component is based on linguistic forms, and provides a "list of uses" for each form. Holding the form constant in this way almost invariably results in heterogeneity among the members of the list. In most cases, this state of affairs is accepted as a matter of fact and as a natural consequence of the nature of language. In an ideal language ... the same sound ... would always have the same meaning, and the same signification or function would always be expressed in the same formal way. This is the case already to a great extent in the grammar of such artificial languages as Ido ... But our natural languages are otherwise constructed, they cannot be mapped out by means of straight lines intersecting one another at right angles like most of the United States, but are more like Europe with its irregularly curved and crooked boundaries ... We must never lose sight of the fact that one form may have two or more significations, or no signification at all, and that one and the same signification or function may be denoted now by this and now by that formal means, and sometimes by no form at all. (Jespersen 1934:41)

With the formal definition of direct and indirect object, we have of course lost the original deductive motivation for these categories, and what we actually find in all of the grammarians cited is a mingling of formal and notional criteria. Grevisse, as seen above, gives both sets of definitions without seeming to find any inconsistency in doing so. The Dictionnaire Général (loc. cit.), after giving the formal definition of a direct object ("noun or pronoun joined directly to the verb"), adds: "The action passes {transit) immediately onto the object: Pierre frappe Paul 'Peter hits Paul' ". This formulation carries a bizarre implication of iconicity, as though the directness of transfer of action on the scene should correspond to the "directness" in the sequence of words on the page. Brunot (1936:319-320) notes a semantic distinction between direct and indirect object with verbs taking both (e.g. commander ses hommes = les diriger vraiment, vs. commander à des hommes), but makes no general statement as to what this distinction is. If, however, the distinction between direct and indirect object is purely formal, then it is unclear why grammarians, themselves speakers of French, find semantic distinctions between the two. The very idea that the difference between two constructions could be simultaneously meaning-based and not meaning-based seems a self-contradiction.

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In fact, the problems of the formal approach are no less serious than those of the notional approach. The first and most obvious problem is that of the clitic pronouns themselves: the indirect object pronouns are used without any preposition, and are therefore attached to the verb as "directly" as are direct objects. Grevisse (§§ 190; 192, rem. 3) acknowledges this, and suggests that rather than referring to an "indirect complement", which could designate any kind of complement (circumstantial, etc.) joined to the verb by a preposition, one should speak of an "indirect object complement". This, of course, begs the question, because it is not clear how we know that this complement is an object in the first place. To make the contradiction complete, Grevisse points out (§191) that there are direct object complements attached to the verb by a helping preposition: 77 aime à jouer. Il essaie de fuir. The formal criteria thus fail to differentiate either the direct or the indirect object in many cases.

6.

A Morpho-syntactic Approach: Blinkenberg

Blinkenberg (1960) represents a major attempt to pursue the syntactic route in supporting the categories direct and indirect object. In addition to à and de, Blinkenberg has pour and sur as indirect object markers, and is tempted to admit others. These, however, he situates in a "bande indécise"; we shall examine this "gray area" presently. All these indirect object markers, he says, have no semantic content. He supports his view with arguments like the following. We have pairs, he notes, where the same marker appears in both, yet the sense is opposite: (1)

a. apporter quelque chose à quelqu'un 'bring something to somebody' b. enlever quelque chose à quelqu'un 'take something away from somebody'

Moreover, we can have pairs meaning the same thing, using different indirect object markers: (2)

a. prendre quelque chose de quelqu'un b. prendre quelque chose à quelqu'un 'take something from somebody'

In addition, there are instances in which a verb will take a direct object when its object is a noun, but an indirect object when the object is an infinitive (of semantic content comparable to that of the noun):

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a. apprendre la danse 'learn dance' b. apprendre à danser 'learn to dance'

Hence, according to Blinkenberg, the semantic contribution of the indirect object marker, for all practical purposes, is zero; and we have a "morpho-syntactic" phenomenon rather than a "semanto-syntactic" one.10 (As we argued earlier in relation to similar examples with lui- and le-, the reversal of message in cases like (1) is due to the opposite meanings of the two verbs, not to the content of à; in Chapter 7 we will suggest that à makes a constant semantic contribution which has nothing to do with either a positive or a negative effect.) On the other hand, all of the authors we have been discussing admit that there are other uses of these prepositions in which they do have semantic content: they may be used to introduce circumstantial complements (time, place, manner, etc.), or indicate notions such as "partitive". Analytically, then, these latter would presumably be homonyms of the indirect object marker. Now, if a clear line of demarcation can be established between the categories indirect object and circumstantial complement, then we can say that the two sets of forms listed above are homonymous but distinct; and we will have a tight categorization. However, instead of tight, clear distinctions, we find a shading off of the formally defined categories indirect object and circumstantial complement into each other, with a broad area of indeterminacy in between. In Blinkenberg's own words (p. 87): "Il faudra donc reconnaître qu'autour du domaine nettement caractérisé de la transitivité indirecte il existe une large bande indécise." Blinkenberg in fact does not suggest that we have homonymous a'S, de's, etc.; he speaks rather of varying degrees of "emptying out" of the semantic content of these forms; that is, there is no clear dividing line, but rather a shading off. We are left, then, with indeterminacy both in regard to the identity of the forms, and in the relationship between the grammatical categories themselves. Here are some examples, based on Blinkenberg's own. In (4), we have a locative circumstantial complement, introduced by de. (4)

Il a reçu cet argent de son père. 'He received this money from his father.'

In (5), the same phrase is an indirect object: (5)

Il tient de son père. 'He takes after his father.'

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How Blinkenberg decides whether a given phrase is indirect object or circumstantial seems to be largely a subjective matter; but a favorite test is to see whether the phrase is "equivalent" to something that is clearly an object. In this case, the object status of (5) is assured by its "synonymy" with: 77 ressemble à son père 'He resembles his father.' However, with the following (again containing the same phrase): (6)

Il tient cette qualité de son père. 'He gets this character trait from his father.'

we are somewhere in the middle; the locative value of de is still present, but with a figurative sense. Blinkenberg suggests that this last example would be situated closer to the circumstantial complement side of the gray area. But an example like se piquer au jeu 'to persist in playing', he admits, defies categorical syntactic analysis (he compares this to the expression se piquer de noblesse 'to pride oneself on one's nobility', which he says is transitive "beyond any doubt"). We mentioned above that Blinkenberg admits sur and pour, as well as à and de, to the list of indirect object markers, at least in certain cases. But these cases, in which the "circumstantial" message is obscured, almost all lie within the gray area bordering on indirect object: (7)

a. Clearly circumstantial: Il s'est penché sur le plan. 'He bent over the map.' b. Bordering on indirect object: Le comité va se pencher demain sur ce problème. 'The committee is going to devote its attention to this problem tomorrow.' (lit: "bend over this problem")

(8)

a. Clearly circumstantial ("instrumental"): faire quelque chose pour rien 'to do something for nothing' b. Bordering on indirect object: répondre pour quelqu'un 'to answer/be responsible for somebody' l'achat d'un jouet pour le bébé 'the purchase of a toy for the baby' l'amour du peuple pour son souverain 'the love of the people for its monarch' c. Somewhere in between: avoir du goût pour les femmes 'to have taste for women'

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This is only one of a number of gray areas found as we study the theoretical basis of the notion "indirect object". In a situation where categories are given in advance, a gray area may not pose a problem as long as each category contains at least something. Everybody is certain of the categories "day" and "night", for example, and the existence of dawn and dusk doesn't call the usefulness of these categories into question. If, however, categories must be discovered and justified, data that fall between categories pose a problem. Fit is the criterion of successful categorization, and lack of fit indicates a breakdown. If boundaries between categories cannot be maintained this is a sign that the categories are not appropriate. For the approach taken in this book, Blinkenberg's gray areas constitute a reason for rejecting his analysis, because Blinkenberg's categories cannot be accepted on an a priori basis, without empirical validation. Once again, then, there is trouble on the inductive side. Taking a morphosyntactic rather than a notional approach fails to produce a definition of indirect object that fits the morphological facts of French. Its appearance in the grammar seems to be motivated entirely by deference to the grammatical tradition. What we have, then, is a grammar of messages, using preexisting, canonical categories, with little concern for the relationship of form to function.

7.

The Notion of "Transitivity"

As seen above, the direct/indirect object distinction stems deductively from the fact that different predicates, being conceptually different, require different types of complements. This conceptual difference is encapsulated in the notion of "transitivity": 273.

274.

Verbs are either Transitive or Intransitive. 1. A Transitive Verb has or requires a direct object to complete its sense: as, — fratrem cecidit 'he slew his brother.' 2. An Intransitive Verb admits of no direct object to complete its sense: — cado 'I fall', sol lucet 'the sun shines.' The person or thing immediately affected by the action of a verb is called the Direct Object. A person or thing indirectly affected by the action of a verb is called the Indirect Object. Only transitive verbs can have a Direct Object; but an Indirect Object may be used with both transitive and intransitive verbs. (Greenough et al. 1931)

Transitivity is thus a property of the verb and arises from the conceptual content of individual verbs. Transitivity is a crucial link in the deductive chain that

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posits the catégories Direct and Indirect Object. It relates the content of the verb to the type of object selected. It is therefore essential that the transitive/ intransitive distinction be sustained analytically. To rephrase Greenough's formulation: A transitive verb may have either a direct object alone, or both a direct and an indirect object; it may apparently have an indirect object alone, if its sense is not complete; an intransitive verb may have an indirect object, or no object, but no direct object. One thus infers that only a transitive verb may have two objects, one direct and one indirect. The following example illustrates: (9)

J'écris la lettre à Jean./Je la lui écris. 'I write the letter to John./I write it to him.'

The inclusion of two objects here and the distribution of dative and accusative morphology implies that écrire is a transitive verb, and that 'the letter'/'it' is affected directly and 'John'/'him' is affected indirectly. Now let us see what happens when there is only one object: (10)

J'écris la lettre./Je l'écris. 'I write the letter./I write it.'

(11)

J'écris à Jean./Je lui écris. T write to John./I write to him.'

Formally, these examples might fulfill the requirement for direct and indirect objects, still assuming that écrire is a transitive verb; recall that a transitive verb "has or requires a direct object to complete its sense." In (10) there is a direct object, and all is well. In (11) there is an indirect object alone, which is fine provided that we assume that the sense is not complete in this instance. Yet it is difficult to see why the sense is not complete. "Completeness" apparently cannot mean that all possible participants in the action are actually mentioned, because in (10) one of the participants has likewise been left out. This being the case, (11) appears no less complete than (10). There is thus a problem here on the formal side, since it is unclear why indirect object morphology is chosen for the second example. Let us now see how this works with a different verb. (12)

Je paye son salaire à Jean./Je le lui paye. 'I pay John his salary./I pay it to him.'

This example with payer 'pay' looks initially just like the example with écrire. There are both a direct and an indirect object, and we therefore assume that payer is a transitive verb. Now let us see what happens when there is only one object:

THE THEORY OF THE SENTENCE (13)

Je paye Jean./Je le paye. 'I pay John./I pay him.'

(14)

Je paye le salaire./Je le paye. 'I pay the salary./I pay it.'

275

Formally, there is clearly no problem here, since payer is a transitive verb and both examples have a direct object. Conceptually, however, there is a problem. Example (12) implies that 'John'/'him', being the indirect object, is indirectly affected; and that 'salary'/'it', being the direct object, is directly affected. When we include only one object, each plays substantively the same role as in the example with two objects; yet 'Jean'/'him', formerly an indirect object, is now a direct object! There is no reason to suppose that he is any more directly affected simply because 'salary' is not mentioned. The status of servir at first appears to be analogous to that of payer. An example with both direct and indirect objects shows servir to be a transitive verb: (15)

La serveuse lui sert son dîner. 'The waitress serves him his supper.'

When there is only one object, whether 'him' or 'supper', it is direct: (16)

La serveuse le sert. 'The waitress serves him/it.'

However, there is another option with servir, not available with payer. (17)

La serveuse lui sert. 'The waitress is useful to him.' The role played by the indirect object is substantively very different depending on whether there is a direct object. Seen from this angle, servir represents the reverse of payer: with payer, as we move from one to two objects, the role remains constant as the (direct/indirect) object status shifts; with servir, the object status remains the same as the substantive role shifts. How is one to handle servir analytically? An easy solution would be to posit homonymous verbs: servir 1 a transitive verb glossed 'serve', and servir2, an intransitive verb glossed 'be useful'. Yet, because of the common element here of "helpfulness" or "usefulness", this is certainly not homonymy of the clear-cut kind one finds, say, with the English form bear "The bear defended its cub" and "I cannot bear to hear him sing" give little hesitation; likewise "raise a barn" and "raze a barn". Furthermore, consider the consequences of invoking homonymy at every opportunity to solve the problem of transitivity. By these standards, one would

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be obliged to posit two verbs écrire to account for examples (10) and (11): a transitive one and an intransitive one. One would also, presumably, have to posit two homonymous verbs payer to account for examples (13) and (14), since these two examples seem to represent two different definitions of what it means to be "directly affected". The instrumental-meaning approach of the present work has taken a different route, assuming that the contribution of servir is constant, and that the considerable shift in message perceived as one switches from lui to le is due to the contribution of those two forms, which is not the notion "directly/indirectly affected". This approach has been borne out analytically. Syntactic behavior of the kind discussed here, then, is not sufficient justification for the positing of homonyms; the contributions of all other forms involved must be thoroughly understood first. In the present approach, then, the invocation of homonymy is much more frugal than in traditional approaches. An identity of morphology is taken as prima facie evidence for a non-homonym analysis. Taking this stringent line, however, places a heavy burden on the analyst. For languages do indeed have homonyms in both grammar and lexicon; the human factor makes this possible. If one looks only at the phonological side, one will overlook bona fide instances of homonymy. The methodological response to this danger is to insist on a very tight fit between any proposed category and the distributional properties of its associated signal. The category must account for syntactic and semantic facts in much greater detail than is normally demanded. This is a consequence of raising the theoretical status of a linguistic category to that of an explanatory construct. If such an explanatory fit cannot be achieved, then either the proposed category is discarded and another one tried, or the possibility of homonyms is entertained. One important contrast between Columbia school and traditional grammar, then, is that homonymy is established neither by casual introspection nor by application of purely formal principles of segmentation and permutation like those developed by American structuralism. A homonym analysis must always be preceded by the explanatory failure of a seriously attempted non-homonym analysis.

8.

Transitivity as an Explanatory Construct

The notion of transitivity has generated an extensive literature, which it would be impossible to summarize comprehensively here. It is, however, important to examine what grammarians say about transitivity to the extent that

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the viability of the categories direct and- indirect object is affected. We again look first at older sources, whose basic positions survive in more modern treatments. As in the case of direct and indirect object, positions on transitivity align themselves on a spectrum ranging from the notional to the formal. Bréal (1897) is close to the notional extreme. Bréal recognizes two classes of verbs, transitive and "neutral". The criterion for transitivity is notional: a "transitive force", a connection in speakers' minds — arising from consistent and habitual association — whereby the verb appears incomplete without an object. The "neutral" verbs are self-sufficient. Bréal assigns transitivity to dative and genitive complements, although in a stricter sense, he says, it applies only to the accusative object. Bréal does not speak of a separate "indirect object". Thus, distinctions of form are apparently of little importance to him. Grevisse (1969: § 597ff.) likewise partitions verbs into transitive and intransitive. Rather than appealing to intuitions about completeness, he speaks of action coming from the subject and passing (transire) onto an object. Verbs expressing an action limited to the subject and carrying over to no object are "intransitive". At this point no form of "indirect object" is yet introduced. Blinkenberg (1960) draws heavily on Bréal but adds a syntactic element, explicitly introducing the sentence and its parts. In his conception of transitivity, something in the sentence can't stand by itself and needs a complement. This can apply to parts of speech other than the verb. Transitivity is a measure of the cohesion between parts of the sentence and is consequently a feature of the sentence as a whole, not merely of the verb. Where there is strong cohesion among these elements, the sentence is transitive. Blinkenberg has thus taken a step away from the original deductive motivation for transitivity by removing the direct connection between it and the verb. Nonetheless, Blinkenberg still has a classification of verbs. He calls this a classification by sense; but it is in reality a classification by combinatory possibilities, so that he is actually applying a formal criterion. The Dictionnaire Général (Hatzfeld et al 1895:259-261) adopts the formal approach explicitly and wholeheartedly. According to the Dictionnaire Général, the only consideration is whether the object is attached directly to the verb, or by means of a preposition; in the former case the verb is transitive, in the latter it is intransitive. Consider the implications of this criterion. The original motivation for the transitive/intransitive distinction is to provide a conceptual categorizing of verbs, thus motivating different types of objects: direct and indirect. These different types of objects would then correspond to different morphologies, dative and

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accusative. If, however, we start with the morphology, saying "class A verbs are transitive because they occur with a direct object, and class B verbs are intransitive because they occur only with an indirect object or with no object", the line of reasoning becomes circular. The notion of transitivity can no longer motivate the direct/indirect object distinction, because this distinction has become the basis for defining transitivity in the first place. In other words, the deductive connection has been lost. Blinkenberg's classification has a class of absolute intransitives (such as exister, dormir, marcher), and one of absolute transitives (such as fabriquer, prendre, découvrir). Then there is a third class, called "bivalent" verbs because they may occur either with or without an object complement, such as manger. Il a mangé 'He has eaten', or Il a mangé du pain 'He has eaten bread' (others are boire, chanter, écrire). Blinkenberg estimates that about fifty percent of French verbs fall into this 'bivalent' category. (There is another category or quasicategory, the copulas.) The Dictionnaire Général draws attention to a further wrinkle in this ambivalence. The formal definition has its own problem, because some verbs can take both a directly attached complement, and one attached by a preposition: décider une question, décider d'une question', aider quelqu 'un, aider à quelqu 'un. Even grammarians who distinguish transitive from intransitive on a genuinely notional basis will have to deal somehow with these "bivalent" verbs, for they represent a major indeterminacy, a set that resist categorization whether one appeals to their distributional characteristics or to their notional content. Grevisse (§ 599) says that in 77 a mangé, we do indeed have a transitive verb, whose complement is merely not expressed because it is clearly indicated by the circumstances. But then he goes on to make a significant statement: There are no absolute boundaries between transitive and intransitive verbs. Most intransitive verbs, he says, can, with or without a change of meaning, be used as transitive and take an object complement. In this case, the action is "thought of as transitive": INTRANSITIVE

TRANSITIVE

Le temps passe. Time passes.'

Passer les déserts. 'Pass (through) the deserts.'

Laissez-moi réfléchir. 'Let me reflect.'

Le miroir réfléchit la lumière.' 'The mirror reflects the light.'

Thus, the (am)bivalence exists on both the notional and the formal sides of the transitivity problem.

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In summary: whether one approaches transitivity from the notional or the formal angle, it is apparently impossible to establish a watertight classification of verbs into "transitive" and "intransitive". There always remains a large indeterminate category of verbs that can be either. In practicality, the decision whether a given verb in a given instance is transitive or intransitive is made on the basis of cooccurring morphology — direct or indirect object — and not on the basis of sense. This, however, is not legitimate because a determination of transitivity is prerequisite to introduction of the categories direct and indirect object. In view of this fact, one may fairly question whether the categories transitive and intransitive provide any motivated basis for classifying French verbs. Moreover, since so many verbs fall into the "bivalent" class, one may conclude that the breakdown of the categories "transitive" and "intransitive" is a massive one. Yet, whatever the difficulties, grammars do retain both distinctions: transitive/intransitive, and direct/indirect. We may ask how, in practice, they relate the two distinctions. Many grammarians are apparently not happy with the classical definition; this, one assumes, is because of the "bivalent" verbs and uncertainty about the extent to which formal criteria should be mixed with conceptual criteria. Grevisse says (§§598-599) that when the verb marks the passing of action onto the object without a preposition, the verb is a direct transitive', when a preposition is used, it is an indirect transitive (e.g. obéir, nuire). That is, Grevisse considers intransitive only verbs that occur with no object at all; he includes as transitive, albeit indirectly, those verbs that take a preposition before the object and in the older approach were considered intransitive, as shown in Figure 6.1. Traditional Designation

Grevisse's Designation

Transitive verbs

Directly transitive verbs

Intransitive verbs

Indirectly transitive verbs Intransitive verbs

Figure 6.1. Transitivity/Directness in Grevisse What Grevisse has done, in effect, is to sever the question of transitivity from that of directness. Transitivity is decided on a notional basis, and directness on a formal basis. In other words, he posits no connection between the two distinctions.

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The foregoing leads to the following conclusions. No notional definition of transitivity seems to correspond to anything in the morphology of French; that is, the notion of "transitivity" has no inductive support. Yet, if we adopt a purely formal definition, we lose the deductive justification for transitivity. Transitivity cannot be severed from direct and indirect object because it is what motivates these categories deductively. Grevisse's solution is in effect a denial of any connection between the inductive and the deductive sides of the problem. This in turn means that the goal of explanation is abandoned.

9.

The Traditional Canon of Categories

With all the difficulties encountered in applying the notion of "transitivity" to French — and the grammarians are clearly aware of these difficulties — the notion itself, its presence as a category in the grammar of French, remains unquestioned. The same is true of other categories of the Theory of the Sentence, and this in spite of the fact that the attempt to preserve these categories exacts a heavy toll on the overall character of the grammar. Blinkenberg (1960:63), for example, insists that the category "object" must be in the grammar, regardless of the consequences: ... [we will discuss] the problem of the delimitation of the concept and the criteria to which the grammarian may have recourse in order to decide the question, in specific cases, of whether or not one is faced with an object of the verb in question ... It will be seen immediately that... the problem of criteria can hardly find a completely simple and precise solution, given the imprecision of principle which we believe is necessarily inherent in the very concept of transitivity.

Brunot (1936:227) makes the following statement with relation to the category "subject", which, as a statement of principle, could apply just as well to the "object": The reader will perhaps be surprised that I preserve this purely grammatical category. To which I answer that my purpose is not at all to abolish the old method, but to create one ... Now, the Subject is not a product of analysis; it is a reality of speech, a living reality which analogy has even extended step by step to forms which didn't need it for the expression of the idea. To attempt to replace or do away with it would be vain and deceptive.

This is as clear a statement as one could wish that the category "subject of the sentence" is a pretheoretical notion, not a category of explanation, not one which needs independent justification. The goal of analysis is to find manifesta-

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tions of this universal-grammar category in French, not to devise a new category which might achieve a more successful fit between data and hypothesis. Chomsky's "Aspects" model (1965:148) insists on a strict subcategorization of verbs into transitive and intransitive. In the "Government and Binding" model (Chomsky 1981, 1986; Cook 1988:9-11), this position is maintained and is in fact very crucial, since the properties of lexical items are held to "project" onto the syntax (the "Projection Principle"); the lexicon thus bears much of the burden formerly borne by the syntactic component. The severe analytical difficulties with "transitivity" are again glossed over in favor of an a priori deductive model. To be sure, the expedient of multiple lexical entries (or multiple "subcategorization frameworks") is always available; but, as noted above with servir, the claim of homonymy, in addition to its implausibility, overlooks the possibility that the combinatory effects traditionally attributed to "transitivity" may in fact be due to some other factor relating not to verbs but to complements. The implication of the status "pretheoretical" is that such categories are in fact categories of observation', that they are themselves the explanandum of grammatical analysis rather than the explanans.11 Traditional grammars defined their own task as identifying the morphological correlates of these (preexisting) categories. This same view is strongly implicit in generative grammar, where the task of analysis is held to be explaining speakers' (pretheoretical) intuitions about the (pretheoretical) category Sentence and its (pretheoretical) parts: ... the pretheoretic intuition behind the study of grammar is that the central problem is to explain how features of the systematic relation between sound and meaning in a language account for the phonological, syntactic, and semantic properties of each of its sentences. The construction of grammars thus begins with pretheoretic intuitions about three classes of grammatical properties and relations; phonological, syntactic, and semantic ... Moreover, we also have pretheoretic intuitions that... the phenomena judged to be syntactic are related to each other by virtue of their having to do with how sentences are built up out of their constituents, and that the phenomena judged to be semantic are related to each other by virtue of their having to do with the meaning of sentences and its compositional relations to the meanings of the sentence's constituents ... this theory seeks to explicate these sets of intuitions in tandem with the construction of particular grammars. (Katz & Bever 1976:47). The object of study is the sentence, intuitively understood, and the theory of competence is a theory about the principles that explain the intuitions we as speakers have about sentence structure. (ibid:32)

With all the major changes that have transformed the generative and Chomskyan schools over the years, one thing has remained constant. The status as fundamental categories of language attributed to the Sentence and its constituent parts

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— however these may be characterized — has never been challenged. At the very least we must admit that there appears to be a canon of categories whose absence from the analytical process would be unthinkable. Even when grammarians add categories to the grammar, they do not discard the old ones, and in fact they usually dare not step very far away from them even when innovating. The attributing of the status "pretheoretical" to these canonical categories reflects the degree to which the identity of categories constitutes an analytical problem. Within sentence-based theory the identity of the categories in a particular language is scarcely a problem at all, for they are supplied in advance by its universal component. This is certainly the case for such basic categories as Subject, Predicate, Direct and Indirect Object, as well as notions relating to transitivity. But even such later additions to the theory as "thematic roles" like Agent and Patient have become part of the canon. For the Columbia school, the identity of categories is the central analytical problem to be solved. Any proposed category must earn its way into an analysis by virtue of its ability to explain speakers' use of an associated linguistic form. Philosophically speaking, it seems fair to characterize this difference of approach in terms of a priorism: the categories of sentence-based grammar are a priori (with respect to the analysis of a given language) whereas the categories offered here — the signals lui-, le- and their associated meanings, are a posteriori.

10. A Functionalist View: Hopper & Thompson The notion of transitivity is very much alive in contemporary linguistic analysis of the Functionalist variety as well. In Hopper & Thompson (1980), a major study of transitivity, the pretheoretical status of the notion "transitivity" is asserted, and speakers' intuitions about it are made the motivation for further study: Transitivity is traditionally understood as a global property of an entire clause, such that an activity is 'carried-over' or 'transferred' from an agent to a patient. Transitivity in the traditional view thus necessarily involves at least two participants ... and an action which is typically EFFECTIVE in some way. This intuitive understanding is the one which we shall attempt to characterize explicitly and in universal terms. (251)

For Hopper & Thompson, then, as for Blinkenberg, the sentence/clause — as opposed to the verb — is the locus of transitivity. The justification for studying "transitivity" at all is that it constitutes an "intuition", that is, an observation,

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and the authors wish to concretize this intuition in terms of familiar categories. They offer a list of sentence-level parameters associated with transitivity which they claim can be used to measure the degree of transitivity of clauses: number of participants, kinesis, aspect, punctuality, volitionality, etc. They assert that a greater or lesser degree of each of these parameters represents a corresponding degree of the transfer of an action from an agent to a patient. Then they offer an extensive examination of how these parameters manifest themselves in a variety of languages. They of course do not seek, nor do they find, any consistent morphological manifestation of transitivity; the approach is, like that of Blinkenberg, a morpho-syntactic one. They claim, however, on anecdotal evidence, that the parameters co-vary systematically: those indicating a greater degree of transitivity will occur together, as will those indicating a lesser degree. Thus, the intuitions they set out to explain would seem to be accounted for. This, however, is not the end. Even after the various "devices of transitivity" are found to be pervasive across languages, another explanation is still needed: ... we assume that a linguistic universal originates in a general pragmatic function, and that the universal is not explained until this function has been isolated and related to the universal. Without the connection to a communicative function, the separate components of the Transitivity relationship have only an arbitrary relationship to each other; we lack a reason why these semantic-grammatical components, rather than others, should be selected. (280)

Hopper & Thompson then offer another factor, a discourse-level factor: foregrounding/backgrounding. They go on to show that the same set of parameters in terms of which they measured transitivity (number of participants, kinesis, aspect, etc.) can also be used to measure "grounding", and that foregrounding correlates with higher degrees of transitivity, and backgrounding with lower degrees.12 This poses a logical puzzle. Hopper & Thompson set out to explain what they hold to be observations: people's intuitions about something that is characterized with the sentence-level notion of "transitivity". They identify sentence-level parameters each of which they can relate to the "carry-over" of an activity, which they define as the essence of transitivity. Further, they claim that these parameters co-vary, and that they do so across languages. If all this is true, then the "intuitions", the original object of explanation, are apparently explained. It is not clear why explanation at another level and definition in terms of another parameter are required.

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By the same token, if these same parameters are shown to produce foregrounding and backgrounding at the discourse level, why can't this "grounding" be recognized at the sentence level as well? One could then simply dispense with the notion of "transitivity", which would seem methodologically desirable, since this part of the Hopper & Thompson analysis has the weaker empirical support. If it can be shown that the same factor is operative at both levels, why insist on maintaining two separate levels? The motivation for this again seems to lie in a priori commitments. Hopper & Thompson have a general bias in favor of "functional" — i.e. communicative — motivation for linguistic structure. This predisposes them to look for factors at the discourse level. But, then, if these factors work perfectly well at the sentence level, why maintain a problematic notion like transitivity? Because the canonical categories Sentence, Parts of the Sentence, and Transitivity simply cannot be dispensed with, whatever the analytical advantages of doing so might be.13 The consequence of this dual loyalty is that two different — and not necessarily compatible — deductive views of language are held simultaneously: (1) the view that the structure of language reflects the structure of thought, and (2) the view that the structure of language reflects the communicative function of language. Each view motivates its own set of categories. The first view motivates categories like subject, predicate, object, sentence, clause, and transitivity. The second motivates categories like agent, patient, aspect, punctuality, volitionality, foregrounding and backgrounding. Since, however, these two views represent different postulations of the nature of language, there is no guarantee that they are compatible, that they can legitimately be held simultaneously. To establish this would require extensive consideration and demonstration, none of which Hopper & Thompson provide. As a result, the grammar is once again rendered inconsistent by a failure on the deductive side. The insistence on preserving sentence-based categories has produced a hypothesis with two conflicting deductive premises, and an incoherent mixture of analytical categories.

11. Linguistic Resources vs. Linguistic Products The analysis of lui- and le- offered in this book posits only one set of explanatory constructs, which unifies explanation at the sentential and the supersentential levels. But why, in principle, is this better? If two sets of factors can be found, what is wrong with that?

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Here we must return to the fundamental point: Each set of categories poses its own analytical difficulties. We have already said a great deal about the difficulty of maintaining sentence-based categories analytically. Communicationbased "functional" categories of the kind proposed by Hopper & Thompson present an indeterminacy of their own. Let us illustrate with this example. (18)

— Donne-moi ta bague, me dit-elle. Je la lui ai donnée. ' "Give me your ring", she said to me. I gave it to her.'

The question is: to what category are we to assign lui in this example? In light of the message being communicated, how are we to characterize the role associated with lui's referent? There are in fact a great many roles one could see here. It is undoubtedly possible (with the training in traditional grammar that nearly everyone has had) to see in this lui an "indirectly affected object" of the action. One could also see a "recipient", the characterization of many standard grammars. Other standard categories are "beneficiary" and "goal", also undoubtedly true. But how about some more exotic roles: "causer", "motivator", or "interactor"? All of these characterizations of the message, and many more that one could surely think of with a little effort, are equally true. The list seems open-ended. How is one to choose? Which one is the "right" category? What is lacking is an analytical control In the absence of a motivated control, there is no way to decide which is the "right" categorization. Certain favorite categories of the canon like Agent, Patient, Beneficiary, and Goal are more or less automatically invoked. The problem that must be solved here is that of determining what is actually encoded by the language. There has been a failure to distinguish between linguistic resources and linguistic products, between input and output. If the task is to catalogue what people say, the different messages they express by means of language, then we are indeed confronted with a list of unlimited length. If we take a morpho-syntactic approach and allow ourselves to see linguistic units in syntax, in constructions and idioms, in meaningless morphemes, and generally anywhere we feel we can characterize an element of the message in a concrete way, then we will not solve the problem of the openended list. What will happen instead is that an essentially arbitrary list — the canon — will gain authority, simply because in the absence of some set of categories we will be at a loss to say anything about language. The control adopted in this book is to begin with the observable outward face of language, with the morpheme. This control is motivated deductively by the view that the structure of language reflects its use as an instrument of communication. This implies a set of signal — meaning pairs, which in turn

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dictates that if there is to be a meaning, there must be an identifiable signal. If we are held strictly responsible for the signal in this way, then the problem of the open-ended list can be solved, because the number of identifiable signals sets an upper limit on what is encoded by the language. Demonstrating that this approach holds up inductively is what this book has been about. Signals and meanings have been made to work by an instrumental view of linguistic meaning. A meaning is not simply some fraction of the linguistic output, the message. Rather, there is an acknowledgement that the user of the language plays an active role in the implementing and interpreting of the meaning. Output does not equal input. In the present analysis, then, the postulated categories are evaluated only in terms of their deductive consistency and their inductive fit, not in terms of their ability to accommodate long-held notions about language. As it turns out, these new categories do not require the positing of a distinct Sentence level of explanation. A superficial evaluation might tempt a reader to judge our categories mere notational variants of traditional categories: Focus corresponding to Subject, and Degrees of Control to Direct and Indirect Object (or the broader modern conceptions of Dative and Accusative). This is not so for the following reasons. 1) The notions of Focus and Degree of Control are not derived from the structure of the logical proposition. Their deductive justification is their communicative usefulness. Similarly, the relation among the members of each of the two systems is one of degrees within a particular communicative parameter, not that of filling preestablished slots in some other type of structure. 2) The interpretation of the Focus and Control meanings by the hearer can depend upon factors beyond the sentence, whereas Subject and Object are properly interpreted only within the framework of the sentence. 14 3) The traditional notion of Subject has the indeterminacy that it has to be understood in two different ways: the "logical subject", (i.e. the "agent"), and the "grammatical subject" (i.e. that with which the verb agrees). The present hypothesis recognizes that two distinct mechanisms are operative, one having to do with control over the activity, and one with focus of attention, and that the point of junction of these two parameters is not at the level of the notion itself ("two different kinds of Subject"), but at the level of the morphology, whereby both are signalled simultaneously (the interlock). 4) The Focus and Control hypothesis does not depend upon a division of verbs into classes (such as "transitive" and "intransitive", an unsupported distinction). Rather, the Focus and Control meanings interact with the semantic

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content of individual "verbs" in particular situations, the results of the interaction depending upon the communicative possibilities of the particular verb and the context. 5) The categories of Focus and Control do not transcend morphology, as the notions of Subject and Object often do. Rather, the morphology is taken as a guide to what categories the language possesses. In contemporary linguistics, the terms Direct and Indirect Object themselves are by no means defunct, in spite of the shift of attention to universals and speaker intuitions.15 They are central to Relational Grammar16 and to Keenan & Comrie's (1977) "Accessibility Hierarchy", in which the categories Subject, (Direct) Object, and Indirect Object figure as explicit levels. But again, Indirect Object has no morphological correlate; whatever can be viewed "intuitively" as an indirect object — now cross-linguistically — is fair game for this category. The problem with this approach is that the "universal" thus established has no deductively-motivated explanation; it remains at best a mere observation. If indeed there is some hierarchy lurking in this observation, its real motivation will remain hidden because of the failure to identify the operative linguistic category. Traditional grammars often speak of the "morphological reflex" of a universal grammatical category in a particular language. From our point of view, this is putting things backwards; it has the tail wagging the dog. Rather than seeing morphology as a reflex of a universal analysis of language, the present framework holds that the morphology of a particular language creates the grammatical analysis of that language. The goal of fit does the wagging; and analytical categories — the "tail" — wag in whatever direction they must in order for a fit to be achieved. In summary, linguistic analysis cannot remain beholden to the inherited categories of the traditional canon. The goal of analysis is explanation, and such categories are not explanatory; they do not successfully join the inductive and the deductive sides of the linguistic problem. This reservation extends even to two traditional categories that have so far been mentioned freely in the present work, but which will now require more critical scrutiny: the categories "clitic" and "pronoun".

Chapter 7 A New Perspective on the Notions "Pronominalization" and "Cliticity"

1.

The "Pronoun" as a Grammatical Category

The category "pronoun" has a peculiar status within the Theory of the Sentence. The traditional parts of speech are deductively motivated by the premise that the structure of language reflects the structure of rational thought, the element of "thought" motivating categories that reflect the content of thought — hence, the noun, which serves to name an entity, the verb which denotes an action, the adjective which denotes a quality, and so forth. The pronoun, on the other hand, defined as a word which replaces a noun or noun phrase, does not correspond to any category of the content of thought. The idea that language would have, as a universal category, words whose function is to replace other words does not seem to derive from the view of language as representation of thought. Why, after all, should the structure of thought require a category to replace another category? The main motivation for the category "pronoun" is thus inductive: the brute fact that words having particular anaphoric properties exist in languages. They have, however, found their niche in sentence-based analysis in the following way. When construed in an individual sentence, a pronoun carries with it a precision of reference which cannot be attributed to the systemic value of the pronoun alone. Of course there is no mystery about the source of that precision; through its inflection for gender, number and person a pronoun directs the language user to information in the surrounding context. But when the basic unit of analysis is a single sentence, there is an obstacle to formalizing the link between a pronoun and its antecedent when the two occur in different sentences. The solution is to treat a sentence containing a pronoun as a transformed version

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of another sentence in which the pronoun is lexically specified. By this stratagem, information that in actual language use appears in the surrounding context can be formally linked to the pronoun so as to explain both its inflection and its interpretation. In Columbia-school theory, on the other hand, sentence boundaries are of no theoretical significance. The choice and interpretation of any grammatical unit is affected, to be sure, by its surrounding context; but whether the relevant contextual features occur in close proximity or at a distance of several sentences is immaterial. Thus there is no need to create a process by which information critical to the inflection and interpretation of pronouns can be portrayed as covertly present. So long as the information can be identified and its role articulated, the analytical problem is solved. The pronoun-antecedent relation is, then, no different in principle from the relation between words like latter or yesterday, or a phrase like do so, and the contextual information that allows them to be chosen and interpreted. Pronouns may thus be treated as words that differ from nouns only in the amount and kind of information they contribute. They are selected by speakers precisely for their reduced information content; they do not arise from a process of "pronominalization". 1.1. The Problem of Pronominalization Almost every French grammar assigns a central role to pronominalization. In Chapter 1 we outlined the obstacle to analysis of lui- and le- created by the notion of pronominalization. Since a pronoun is held to be derived from a noun construction, the search for manifestations of the category Indirect Object in French always begins with noun phrases, specifically, with the à-phrases that represent the prototypical indirect object.1 This, however, results in a head-on conflict with morphology. On the one hand, à-phrases can pronominalize in at least three ways: (1)

a. Il obéit à ses parents. b. Il leur obéit.

(2)

a. Il pense à ses parents. b. Il pense à eux.

'He 'He 'He 'He

obeys his parents.' obeys them.' thinks about his parents.' thinks about them.'

'He thinks about his problems.' a. Il pense à ses problèmes. 'He thinks about them.' b. Il y pense. The existence of the second option is particularly problematic for the claim that the underlying category Indirect Object manifests itself as an à-phrase with (3)

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nouns and as lui- with pronouns, since it shows that the à-phrase option in fact exists for both pronouns and nouns. On the other hand, the noun-phrase correspondent of lui- is not always an à-phrase, as illustrated in Chapter 1. Beginning with a priori syntactic categories creates similar problems of indeterminacy for the analysis of à itself. In Chapter 6 we saw the difficulty of fitting instances of à and various other "indirect object markers" into the categories "indirect object" and "circumstantial complement". Attempting to do so requires having a "meaningless" à alongside the "meaningful" one; this entails the difficult problems of deciding which à one has in individual instances and of stating just what the meaning of à is when it is "meaningful". Syntactic rules in any case fail to control the problem of pronominalization. For example, pronominalization with à + disjunctive, as in (2), versus y, as in (3) usually runs along human/inanimate lines; but there are examples for which both methods are possible (with, of course, a slight difference in message, often too subtle to be picked up by an English translation): (4)

OR:

a.

Il pense tout le temps à cette fille. 'He's always thinking about that girl.'

b'. Il pense tout le temps à elle. b". Il y pense tout le temps. 'He's always thinking about her.'

This opens the possibility of a third à. Moreover, it remains to be seen whether more homonymous à's will be necessary for such things as the straight locative (Je suis à la maison T am at home'), the "complementizer" with infinitives (J'hésite à parler T hesitate to speak'), etc. As a corollary, there will probably have to be numerous y's to cover this whole situation; we refrain from speculating how many. In any case, it is apparent that this proliferation of homonyms is a result not of the failure of a serious attempt to explain à's appearances in discourse, but rather of the failure of the category Indirect Object. 2 1.2. Taking the Morphemes

Seriously

The Columbia-school view is that the overt morphological manifestations of a language provide the best hint as to its underlying grammatical categories. There is no morphological constant in French that suggests a category "pronoun". There are many different morphemes, all traditionally classified as "pronouns", each of which requires its own explanation. Likewise the problem

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of à. The goal is not to find manifestations of the category Indirect Object; it is rather to explain appearances of the morpheme à. Homonymy is a last resort, invoked only when every attempt to establish a non-homonym analysis fails. This is not to say that Columbia-school theory denies the reality of homonymy or never admits homonyms.3 It does not embrace an "invariance principle" which insists a priori on a one-to-one pairing of morpheme with meaning. The Columbia school position is that neither meanings nor signals are given in advance of analysis; both must be solved for simultaneously. Until especially the meaning side of a signal-meaning hypothesis is validated, we do not know how many signals a given morpheme represents. Since the goal is to explain occurrences of morphemes, the morpheme is taken as the initial guiding light to grammatical categories, though not as an infallible one. The initial working hypothesis will generally be that a morpheme represents a signal, with the burden of proof on the analysis that postulates homonymous signals. If we begin by taking seriously distributions of morphemes in French, what is suggested is the following. We have two linguistic mechanisms. The à mechanism is used with both nouns and pronouns. It contributes to a wide range of messages, some of which fall under what has traditionally been called "indirect object" or "dative", but others of the locative or other circumstantial type. An analysis of à will start with the hypothesis that there is only one à in French.4 To unite all the uses of à under one roof without positing a meaning so vague as to be untestable or indistinguishable from the meanings of other forms is, of course, a tall order. But one is encouraged to attempt this by the numerous "gray areas" that always crop up between the allegedly different incarnations of à. That is, even prior to hypothesizing á's specific meaning, it is possible to envision here a continuity of function rather than discrete homonyms. The second mechanism is clitic lui-/leur-. This mechanism is available only when a speaker chooses to operate at the reduced information-content level these words represent. This means that at this level there is an extra device, an additional option which is not available with nouns. Our initial puzzlement at this may be tempered somewhat when we recall that the Latin case system evolved differently with respect to nouns and pronouns in the development of French. Unlike nouns, these particular pronouns preserve morphological remains of the Latin cases. As will be seen below, it is possible to discern a synchronic reason as well for the extra "pronoun" option. Since pronouns do not arise from a process of pronominalization, the absence of a nominalized version of lui- in French is no more problematic or noteworthy than, say, the absence in English of a single-word equivalent for the

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French word chez. The relation between Je donne le livre à Jean and Je lui donne le livre is that óf identity of reference, not that of constructional synonymy. If there are two linguistic devices, they can be studied separately, since each represents a distinct problem of morphemic distribution. To be sure, the two mechanisms may interact at some level as French speakers manipulate the various tools available to them to produce messages. But as objects of linguistic study, they represent two different problems, each of which calls for its own analysis. The idea of lui- representing an "extra" option unavailable with nouns will undoubtedly raise some eyebrows. Within generative grammar, the derivational source of pronouns, their correct noun phrase analogs, is a major problem to be solved and thus one important criterion by which a new analysis is evaluated. But here that criterion does not apply for the simple reason that the clitic pronouns have no such source. The appearance of lui- and le- is accounted for directly by their unique grammatical meanings rather than by a pronominalization process. 1.3. The Term "Dative" and the Problem of the Dative As stated in Chapter 6, our exclusive attention to lui- and le- is a consequence of the our having posed a different problem from that posed in sentence grammar. An attempt has been made to explain occurrences of the morphemes lui and le, the second mechanism stated above. This goal has been accomplished by the positing of signals, lui- and le-, having the meanings MORE and LESS CONTROL (as well as Focus, Deixis, "Person", "Gender", and Number meanings). Nouns have hardly entered the picture; it has not been necessary to appeal to some device whereby nouns are transformed into pronouns in order to solve the problem of lui and le. The analysis has provided an explanation for the range of phenomena defined as its area of responsibility — the distribution of these morphemes — and it need not be held responsible for anything more. Concluding the presentation here, however, may strike scholars of French grammar as leaving an unsatisfactory incompleteness. True, we have discredited the notions Indirect and Direct Object as far as lui- and le- are concerned. But traditional grammar has sensitized analysts to the à-phrase. The posing of the question in terms of a "problem of the dative" has created a forced marriage between lui- and à-phrases. The present analysis has not undertaken to solve "the problem of the dative" in French, except in a very narrow sense. The term "dative", in grammars of Greek and Latin, had a precise sense: it referred to morphology, a particular set of case endings attached to nouns. To

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be sure, the choice of the name "dative" implied the association of a particular type of message with this morphology: it was the case of "giving". Nowadays, however, the term "dative" has grown to represent a whole complex of semantic, syntactic, and morphological factors. "Dative" has largely superseded the term "indirect object" in contemporary grammatical treatises. The "problem of the dative" has, in effect, come to refer to the whole tangle of difficulties inherited from the traditional indirect object. This includes the deductively motivated but inductively unsuccessful categories of Logical Structure as well as other, deductively unmotivated categories introduced to rescue them. In the modern conception, consequently, "the problem of the dative" is far from being simply a problem of distribution of morphemes. It has become a bloated complex of semantic, morphological, syntactic, morpho-syntactic, and even psychological questions. In the modern conception of "dative", the statement of the problem has actually swelled to encompass many failed solutions to the problem.

2.

A Columbia-school approach to à phrases

It will not be possible here to provide a definitive, fully validated hypothesis for à. Many readers, however, will undoubtedly wonder how à-phrases could be handled in the present framework. The question is seemingly made stronger by the sharp dichotomy set up in Chapter 2 between messages of control and messages of circumstance. The traditional "prepositions", like à, seem to indicate that what follows them is to be regarded not as a controlling participant in the event, but as a circumstance. How, then, can an à-phrase "substitute" for lui-, whose function is to indicate a controlling Participant? What we will do is offer a suggestion as to where an analysis of à might start. We will attempt to give an inkling of how the same principles that solved the problem of lui- might be brought to bear on the problem of à. We suggest that French has a unitary signal à whose contribution is constant across its whole distribution. The semantic content of à makes it ideally suited for a wide range of messages. The overall analytical line, then, will be as follows: 1) With nouns, French does not provide a meaning to cover the range of Degree of Control covered by lui-. 2) The heavy investment speakers have made in strategies of the meaning MORE CONTROL with lui- leads them to seek a way to communicate such messages when a pronoun is not appropriate (but a noun is), even in the absence of a dedicated mechanism for doing so.

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

3) The word à is often — though not always — the best device available for this purpose. A's relative appropriateness stems from semantic factors, specifically: a) its semantic content, and b) its relative imprecision. Once again, the following discussion is merely a sketch of a possible line of analysis; it is in no sense presented as definitive. A number of interesting questions raised by this approach must be left unanswered for the present. 2.1. Degree of Control with Nouns French appears to have a system of Degree of Control that can be used with nouns and non-clitic pronouns.5 The signals of this system are particular orderings of words, and its meanings are two: HIGH and LOW. 6 It is exemplified by the following examples: (5)

Pierre a brûlé la soupe. 'Pierre burned the soup.'

(6)

La soupe a brûlé Pierre. 'The soup burned Pierre.'

High and low degrees of control over the activity of "burning" are assigned to the two participants, 'Pierre' and 'soupe', depending on their position before or after the event. When the positions are reversed, the roles are reversed.7 To this extent, the situation in French resembles that of English. The two languages diverge, however, when one attempts to include a third participant: (7)

John sent Mary a ring. *Jean a envoyé Marie une bague.

English can accommodate three levels of Control, HIGH, MID, and LOW, signalled by preverbal, first postverbal, and second postverbal positions respectively. French cannot do this. Moreover, in English, when only two participants are included, the postverbal participant can actually be playing a Mid role, whereas in French this is not possible: (8)

Mary told John the story. Mary told John. *Marie a raconté Jean.

although it is possible to include only the Low Controller:

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295

Mary told the story. Marie a raconté l'histoire.

With the word-order-signalled Control system, then, French is limited to the meanings HIGH and LOW, and Mid roles are excluded. We know what would constitute a Mid role for French because of the messages associated with lui-; yet it is rare for such a message — when a noun is involved rather than a pronoun — to be communicated by simple postverbal positioning of the word naming the participant. The word-order signalled Control system appears to be a scale with a "hole in the middle".8 Why does French not "go the extra step" and include a third level of Control in its word-order Control system, like English? The answer may lie in the word-order nature of the signal. A word-order signal is perceptually difficult, more so than a morphological signal.9 Before a hearer can determine that the signal is present, he has to first determine that mention has been made of a potential controlling participant, and this in a position whose existence can be determined only when the event ("verb") and other information have been processed. Thus, a much greater portion of the message has to be processed to identify a word-order signal than for a morphological signal, and consequently the meaning of the word-order signal itself contributes relatively little toward the final output. In English, the Control system with three participants is used comparatively rarely, and the strategies of the meaning MID Degree of Control are markedly less extensive than those of French lui-. Given the great investment in strategies of MORE CONTROL already10 made by French speakers with lui-, the use of a word-order signal to express an equally broad range of messages might well not be a viable mechanism. Of course, one can always entertain the possibility that the meaning MID Degree of Control does exist for nouns in French, and that its signal is something other than word order. The obvious candidate is à. The reasons for rejecting this hypothesis, some of which have already been alluded to, are as follows: 1) If à signalled for nouns the same thing that lui- signals for pronouns, we would expect a more or less automatic commute, the choice depending only on whether a noun or a pronoun was required. In fact, there is no automatic commute, in either direction. In addition to there being three options for pronouns corresponding to an à + noun phrase (lui-, à + disjunctive pronoun, and y), there are several different ways of "nominalizing" lui-, in addition to the à phrase:

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(10) a. Il lui court après. 'He's chasing her.' b. I1 court après cette fille. 'He's chasing that girl.' (11) a. Il lui tire dessus. 'He's shooting at her.' b. Il tire sur la dame. 'He's shooting at the lady.' (12) a. Je lui frappe sur l'épaule. 'I slap him on the shoulder.' b. Je frappe mon copain sur l'épaule. 'I slap my friend on the shoulder.' (13) a. La fantaisie lui a pris de coucher à l'hôtel. 'The idea got into him to sleep in a hotel.' b. La fantaisie a pris Michou de coucher à l'hôtel. 'The idea got into Michou to sleep in a hotel.' (14) a. L'eau lui ruisselait le long des joues. 'The water trickled down his cheeks.' b. L'eau ruisselait le long des joues de Louis. 'The water trickled down Louis's cheeks.' 2) One cannot in any case argue that lui- is simply a form whose function is to represent a "pronominalized" à-phrase, because one can have à with pronouns as well as with nouns. (15)

Faites attention à lui. 'Watch out for him.' Je l'ai envoyé à lui, pas à elle. T sent it to him, not her.'

Since pronouns have both options, and they are not in any sense interchangeable: (16)

Faites attention à elle. 'Watch out for her.' Faites-lui confiance. 'Trust her.'

then it seems clear that the two options represent two different mechanisms. Thus, if lui- means MORE CONTROL, the prima facie case is that à does not.

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3) Since there are many instances of the morpheme à which indicate a circumstance of an event and not a controller, there would presumably have to be at least two homophonous signals à. However, rather than a clear line of demarcation between the putative Mid-Control à and circumstantial à, we find a large area of indeterminacy: we can not be sure which à we have in a given example. (17)

— Surtout, dit-elle, prenez garde aux tramways! ' "Above all," she said, "watch out for streetcars!" '

PGM 82

Faites attention aux voitures. 'Watch out for the cars.' Faites attention à Marie. 'Watch out for Marie.' Faites confiance à Marie. 'Trust Marie.' [Object of à: motivator? place?] If one takes the position that à does not signal MID Degree of Control, then it follows necessarily that lui- has no noun phrase analog. In other words, when using a pronoun, French speakers have at their disposal an additional choice, an extra mechanism — the meaning MORE CONTROL — which is not available when they use a noun. One may venture an explanation for this state of affairs — availability of a dedicated mechanism for Mid Control with pronouns and lack of same for nouns — with the communicative orientation. The communicative value of a pronoun is that it carries less inherent precision of reference than a noun. (In context, it may be given an equivalent degree of precision of reference through hearer inference.) A speaker is free to use a pronoun when identity of reference has already been established. That is, once a referent has been brought onto a scene and identified, typically with a noun, the pronoun — the less precise form — can be used. Now, it has been seen throughout this study that the strategies of lui- in general reflect a good deal of subtlety. More often than not, lui- represents not a factual description of a scene, but a speaker's evaluation of, comment on, or attitude toward a scene. Sometimes the aspect of a scene a speaker wishes to bring out with lui- is so subtle that pinpointing it requires an appeal to an entire text. This kind of subtlety is generally not appropriate when a character's presence on a scene is first being established, for which purpose a noun is likely

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to be used. Lui-'s subtlety is usually appropriate only when a character's identity and presence on the scene have been established, by previous mention, and when enough information has been given about him that the reader can grasp the nuance intended by lui-. Otherwise the additional specification provided by preposition and noun is called for. The meaning MORE CONTROL, then, given its diversity of strategies in French, is a more appropriate meaning for a pronoun than for a noun. In summary, the grammatical structure of French is such that the semantic substance of Mid Degree of Control is well known to speakers but cannot always be signalled. Only with clitic pronouns is there a dedicated mechanism for doing so. With nouns and nonclitic pronouns, word-order can explicitly signal the meanings HIGH and LOW Degree of Control. But when a participant whose role is like one of those regularly associated with lui- must be included as one of these, French speakers are faced with a problem: Under what guise should this one be included? Since it is in fact neither High nor Low Controller, there remains only one option: to include it not as a controller, but as a circumstance, introduced by a preposition. 2.2. Choice of Preposition Now the question arises: which preposition will be selected? As discussed in Chapter 2, including an entity with a preposition is a regular way French speakers have of indicating that the entity is not to be regarded as a controlling participant. Clearly, the necessity of using this mechanism to include something having the characteristics of a controlling participant is something of an awkward arrangement, and one expects certain consequences. In the first place, one expects that preposition to be selected which corresponds most closely to the scene; which, as it were, does least violence to the intended message. Thus, if some locative or "adverbial" element would be present in the lui- version, this same element will usually be good enough when lui- is not available. (18)

Il lui court après./Il court après Marie. Il lui tire dessus./I1 tire sur Henri.

In some cases, the lexicon contains a word which fits well enough with one of the scenes typically associated with MORE CONTROL; e.g. pour for a "beneficiary": (19)

Je lui fais un gâteau./Je fais un gâteau pour Jean. 'I make him a cake.'/'I make a cake for John.'

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In a few cases, there apparently just isn't any acceptable prepositional option at all. In these few cases, the participant will be made a Low Controller when it is a noun: (20)

Lemordant lui frappa sur l'épaule. Lemordant frappa Lucien sur l'épaule. 'Lemordant slapped Lucien on the shoulder.'

SMU 236

(21)

Daniel avait envie de ... lui cogner dans la figure. Daniel avait envie de cogner Ralph dans la figure. 'Daniel felt like smashing Ralph in the face.'

SAR 389

Apparently the subtlety of nuance communicated here by lui- (since le- could appear in these situations, as seen in earlier chapters) simply cannot be communicated appropriately by any preposition; it must be sacrificed. Using LOW Degree of Control, then, appears to be a last resource; nothing else is available. In a fuller study, one would want to explore more fully why these particular examples exploit the Low Control meaning with nouns. In the majority of cases, however, when speakers need a noun and wish to do what can be done with lui-, they will opt for à. Why á? 2.3. The Contribution of à It is the semantic characteristics of à, we suggest, that make it the best available tool for the job in so many cases. Let us hypothesize the meaning CIRCUMSTANCE for à. Further, let us note that of all the devices French has to indicate circumstance, à is probably the least precise. We will build a working hypothesis on these two factors. A appears with a wide range of times and places. (22)

Jean va à Paris.

'John is going to Paris.'

Marie travaille à la maison.

'Mary works at home.'

Elle travaille à Sarcelles.

'She works in Sarcelles.'

Ils sont venus à deux heures.

They came at two o'clock.'

Il était là à Pâque.

'He was here on Passover.'

Note that à translates several different English circumstantial prepositions: 'to', 'at', 'in', 'on'. This suggests that its meaning is less precise than any of these.11 It is not necessary to build the notions of "time" or "place" into the meaning of ó, because the presence of these notions in the message can be attributed to some other word in the context: maison 'house' = a place; deux heures 'two

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o'clock' = a time, etc. Similarly, there is no reason to say that à has the combined meaning of, say, 'to' and 'at' — that is, 'place to or at which' — because this message difference can clearly be attributed to information conveyed by the verb: aller implies motion, whereas travailler does not. "Time" and "place" are prototypical circumstances, but a circumstance can be anything else that happens to be on the scene; and just as the temporal and spatial elements in the above messages are inferred from various elements of the context — but not communicated by à — so can other types of involvement be associated with an "accompanying circumstance". For instance, a message of "means" or "instrument" is common: (23) peindre à l'huile 'paint in oil' couper au rasoir 'cut with a razor' attaquer à la baïonette 'attack with a bayonet' Often such messages overlap with "place": (24)

se déplacer à vélo 'get around by bicycle' taper à la machine 'type(write)'

True, the bicycle and the machine are the means by which one gets around or types; but they are also, quite literally, the place where the "getting around" and the "typing" occur. This is true of the first three examples as well: the oil is where the painting is, the razor is where the cutting is, and the bayonet is where the attacking is. The "instrument" in the message comes from the hearer's knowledge that the entity mentioned can be used as an instrument to accomplish the action mentioned. This is similar to English 'with' : He cut the cake with the bride. He cut the cake with the knife. Our knowledge of the difference between a bride and a knife, and of the type of role each might be playing in an act of cake-cutting — the fact that a knife can be used as an instrument for this, but not a bride — lead to the inference of different scenes for the two utterances; yet one would not be justified in attributing this difference to the word 'with', whose apparent contribution — accompanying circumstance — is equally true of both scenes.

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Messages of "means" shade off quite naturally into messages of "manner": (25) parler à haute voix 'speak in a loud voice' chanter à la mode 'sing stylishly' Here too, the "loud voice" and the "style" are circumstances accompanying the "singing" or "speaking", just as much as they are a manner of doing these things, or — at least in the case of the "loud voice" — a means. These in turn shade off into messages of pure accompanying circumstance: (26)

un gâteau à la noisette 'a hazelnut-flavored cake' une maison à deux étages 'a two-story house'

But these messages, again, could also be viewed as messages of "place", since the cake's place is actually the same as that of the hazelnut flavor, and likewise for the house and the two stories. Given these multiple overlapping types of messages, the best hypothesis to entertain for à is like that posited for lui-: its semantic value is identical to none of these messages', it is something different from, and much more sparse than, any of them. The very scanty element of CIRCUMSTANCE added to the input works together with the hearer's understanding of other elements of the context and makes à an appropriate tool for all the above tasks. 2.4. From Circumstance to Control How does one get from à's meaning of CIRCUMSTANCE to the Control-type messages in which it appears to substitute for lui-? We are already quite far into the realm of Control with the "instrumental" examples cited above. The instrument with which an action is performed exerts a high degree of control over the action, just below the degree of control of the one who wields the instrument. In an analysis of the Latin case system, Diver (1982, 1989) posits a four-member Degree of Control scale for Latin, in which the members are (ranking from the top down) the Nominative, Ablative, Dative, and Accusative cases. The Ablative, second from the top, is regularly used to indicate the "means" or "instrument". The jump from a message of "place or circumstance" of an event to one of responsibility for the event is not large. In examples like those cited above, the entities — razor, bayonet, bicycle, machine, etc. — tend to be objects whose

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main purpose is to serve as some kind of tool. Yet other entities whose nature is not exclusively or primarily that of a tool may also be assigned a controlling role in an event. Once any entity is asserted to be a circumstance of an event, the possibility exists that it may come to have some responsibility for the event attributed to it. The strategy is one of "guilt by association", as it were. This connection between circumstance and control is seen as a mechanism of linguistic change in an (unpublished) analysis by Diver of the evolution of the Greek case system. According to this analysis, the Indo-European Dative case was a member of a system of Place, and had the meaning PLACE AT WHICH. Often, an entity associated with the Dative could be equally well interpreted as a "means". For example: they came ships-dative 'They came on ships.' The 'ships' are both the place they were when they came and the instrument by which they came. The spanning of the opposition between the semantic domains of Place and Control by such examples, according to Diver, was one important factor which led the Dative to branch off into a system of Degree of Control, attested in Homeric Greek. Responsibility for an event is thus a legitimate strategy of à, with its meaning circumstance. Why, now, should this be specifically a Mid level of responsibility? Because High or Low would be signalled directly by pre- or postverbal word order. What we see, then, is that the semantic territory occupied by à is at least minimally appropriate for doing the job done by lui-. How may one reconcile this use of à with the strategy of using a preposition to deny Controlling Participant status? With pronouns, the speaker has a choice: he can use lui-, or he can use a preposition with a disjunctive pronoun. With nouns, short of abandoning any attempt to convey a Mid Control nuance, the speaker has no other option. In these instances, à must be viewed as a least inappropriate choice, rather than as an attempt to specifically deny Controlling Participant status. 2.5. The Precision Factor We have still not fully explained the frequent choice of à to do for nouns what lui- does for pronouns, since there are many other prepositions beside à that indicate some sort of circumstance. What seems clear about à is that in comparison to all these others, à is by far the least precise indicator of circumstance. This is the second factor in its being chosen to do lui-'s work.

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In the examples seen earlier, it was noted that à translates several different English prepositions: 'to', 'at', 'in', 'on', 'with', 'by'. By the same token, there are other French glosses for each of these English prepositions, such as dans for 'in'. A broad look at French prepositions shows that there are several that can be used for presenting a scene for which à might also be appropriate: à versus: dans: Il était perdu à Paris. Il était perdu dans Paris. 'He was lost in Paris.' en: A raconter ses maux, souvent on les soulage. En racontant ses maux, souvent on les soulage. 'By telling one's troubles one often calms them.' vers:

Il levait la tête au ciel. Il levait la tête vers le ciel. 'He lifted his head to the sky.'

contre:

On se heurtait au mur. On se heurtait contre le mur. 'One bumped against the wall.'

pour:

C'est une tasse à thé. C'est une tasse pour le thé. 'It's a cup for tea/a teacup.'

avec:

Ils se sont preparés à attaquer à la baïonette. Ils se sont preparés à attaquer avec des baïonettes. 'They prepared to attack with bayonets.'

par:

Ils passaient deux à deux. Ils passaient deux par deux. 'They passed two by two.'

chez:

Viens à papa. Viens chez papa. 'Come to daddy.'

de:

Au point de vue morale, elle a raison. Du point de vue morale, elle a raison. 'From a moral standpoint, she is right.'

sur:

On a tapé cette lettre à la machine. On a tapé cette lettre sur la machine. 'This letter was typewritten.'

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The purpose of these pairings is not to imply that the two messages in each case are identical, which they surely are not, although an English gloss may not pick up the difference. What emerges from the comparison is that à deals with generally the same semantic area — Circumstance — as these other prepositions, but that it offers in each case a less precise indication of what sort of circumstance is intended. The identity of English gloss in many cases may well indicate, as suggested above, that English does not have an indicator of Circumstance whose degree of imprecision corresponds to that of à. Vandeloise (1991:157-185, 199-204) has recognized the precision factor as relevant to á. It is unfortunate that Vandeloise does not reach for a holistic view of the function of à; his treatment is limited to spatial uses and posits two functions — localization, and association in a routine or ritual — without specifically seeking to unite the two under a common motivating factor. Nonetheless, the examples Vandeloise cites and his discussion of them seem quite consistent with our characterization of à as the least precise indicator of Circumstance. Let us illustrate the precision factor as it appears in some of Vandeloise's examples. If we have two identical pieces of paper and two points superposed, thus an extremely precise place relationship, à is inappropriate: (27)

Le point est sur le (*au) point. 'The point is on (at) the point.'

A general disfavoring of à with the indefinite article, reflecting less precise knowledge of the identity of the referent, is noted, in contrast to a favoring with the definite article: (28)

L'empereur est à la maison. 'The emperor is at home.' ??L'empereur est à une maison. The emperor is at a house.'

The likelihood of à increases, however, when more identifying information is supplied: (29) L'empereur est à une maison que tout le monde connaît. 'The emperor is at a house everyone knows.' The explanation for this is as follows. One can afford to use the least precise indicator of circumstance, à, only when enough information is supplied elsewhere that a coherent message can be inferred. By raising questions as to the identity of its noun's referent, un(e) indicates an insufficiency of information, and thus disfavors increasing the inferential burden on the hearer by use of à.

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Any additional information that decreases this insufficiency, however, will render à more usable: (30) (31)

??L'empereur est à une table. 'The emperor is at a table.' L'empereur est assis à une table dans un café. 'The emperor is seated at a table in a café.'

The theme of "ritual" or "routine" noted by Vandeloise is formulated somewhat too narrowly; in general, à is usable in a situation where significant knowledge on the part of the hearer as to what is going on can be assumed: (32)

??La princesse est à l'auto. 'The princess is at the car.'

(33)

La princesse est au volant. 'The princess is at the wheel.'

(34)

Le tableau est au mur. 'The painting is on the wall.'

(35)

??Le tableau est au plafond. 'The painting is on the ceiling.'

We know what the princess would be doing at the wheel, or the painting on the wall; without further information, though, it is hard to figure out what the princess is doing at the car or the painting on the ceiling. A, then, does not encode the ideas of "ritual" or "routine"; these are simply elements of a scene that encourage a move to less precision because of relative ease of inference.12 How, now, does this relative imprecision of à help make it (usually) the most useful tool for doing the work of lui-?. In two ways: 1) French, we have argued, does not provide the meaning MID Degree of Control with nouns, and speakers are obliged to use the meaning CIRCUMSTANCE even when the semantic substance of Control, if available, would be applicable. It therefore makes sense that the Circumstance meaning chosen will be the least precise indicator of circumstance, that is, the one which is most non-committal as to type of circumstance. It is a way of downplaying the discrepancy between the two semantic domains. 2) Our study of clitic lui- has underscored strongly the imprecision of lui-'s meaning MORE CONTROL. Lui-, it was shown, does not indicate any specific role, or type of involvement in an event; that must be inferred by the hearer. This imprecision is what makes lui- so useful: it can be put together with all different sorts of events, and the speaker does not have to bother to decide exactly what

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lexical item will best characterize the role of this participant (and in fact it may even be that none will really do the job); the speaker relies on the hearer to figure it out. A is thus almost a perfect replacement for lui- in this respect. The maximal imprecision of à (in the domain of Circumstance) corresponds to the maximal imprecision of lui- (in the domain of Control). Just as lui- doesn't force a precise role on the message, so à doesn't force a precise role. Having à suggest "responsibility" (through its meaning CIRCUMSTANCE) is enough; the hearer will figure out just what the responsibility is. In summary, à is often appropriate for doing the work of lui- because à, like lui-, can imply responsibility in a very imprecise way, although the two words represent totally different mechanisms for doing this. 2.6. A vs. par: An Exploitation of Relative Precision This analysis of à as an imprecise indicator of circumstance seems to shed light on another classic problem of French grammar: the choice between à and par in what is traditionally called the "faire causative construction". These examples were discussed in Chapter 4 with regard to lui-'s strategy of "agent" in the presence of a "superagent". When a noun is used instead of lui-, the situation is as follows. The agent may be indicated with à: (36)

J'ai fait écrire une dictée à mes élèves. T had my pupils write a dictation.'

However, there are cases where the role of the noun following à might be ambiguous: (37)

J'ai fait écrire une lettre à ma secrétaire.

The usual message would be: T had my secretary write a letter', with 'secretary' as agent. This is a plausible interpretation because it is the function of secretaries to write letters. However, it is also possible, under appropriate circumstances, to write a letter to one's secretary; and in fact the above could mean: T had a letter written to my secretary.' Thus, the imprecision of à results in a potential ambiguity of message. To better bring out this ambiguity as a function of à's imprecision, we can rephrase the first message so as to gloss à with 'by'. A thus leaves ambiguity between a 'by' message and a 'to' message: (38)

J'ai fait écrire une lettre à ma secrétaire. T had a letter written by my secretary.' T had a letter written to my secretary.'

The indeterminacy here is thus parallel to examples of à seen above:

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(39)

Jean se déplace à vélo.

'John gets around by bicycle.'

Jean va à Paris.

'John is going to Paris.'

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If context allows both interpretations, the ambiguity may be resolved by using a more precise lexical item. Thus, (40)

J'ai fait écrire une lettre par ma secrétaire.

will easily be interpreted as 'by my secretary'. Grammars present par as the alternate to à in this case; but it is worth pointing out that another preposition would resolve the ambiguity equally well, in favor of the other message: (41)

J'ai fait écrire une lettre pour ma secrétaire.

In other words, while à can be used both for a message of "agent" and for one of "beneficiary" as long as context decides between the two, par is a more direct (i.e. precise) indicator of "agency" and pour a more precise indicator of "benefit". It is à which is potentially ambiguous here, not par or pour, and this is a consequence of the relative imprecision of à as compared to these other two items. The question of à versus par has been studied by Cannings & Moody (1978), who offer a semantically-based alternative to the generative treatment in Kayne (1975). Like the present analysis, Cannings & Moody view à in the "causative construction" as identical to à elsewhere with faire. We certainly agree with their conclusion that ... the particular interpretation of dative ... is a function of the meaning of the verb and of the object — in general, contextually induced. (347)

However, the notion of "Goal" which Cannings & Moody offer as (part of) the semantic contribution of à is highly problematic, even by their own admission. This notion applies straightforwardly only with simple verbs of movement, and in many other cases it is stretched to the point where virtually anything can be called a "goal". 13 Much of the data offered by Cannings & Moody strongly suggests relative precision as a crucial factor in the choice between à and par, yet this factor plays no role in their analysis.14 Let us reexamine the problem in light of the precision factor, with consideration of some of the types of examples cited by Cannings & Moody. Our hypothesis is: par provides a more precise indication of agency than à.15 Speakers exploit the difference between à and par, broadly speaking, in three partially overlapping ways: 1) to resolve ambiguity of the type illustrated

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in (38); 2) in what we may call a "reserving" strategy; and 3) to distinguish between interest in who performs the action versus interest in what the action is. Resolution of ambiguity. Surprisingly, Cannings & Moody ignore à's potential for ambiguity as a factor in the choice of par, although this factor is stated explicitly by most reference and pedagogical grammars of French16 and is certainly the key to a large part of the problem. Cannings & Moody, however, overlook it in (42): (42)

Elle a fait obtenir le tableau à Jean-Jacques. 'She had the painting obtained by/for Jean-Jacques.'

They dismiss as pragmatically deviant what is actually a perfectly good reading in (43): (43)

Je lui ai fait diffuser la nouvelle à la télé. T had the news broadcast for him on television.'

They declare irrelevant examples having good readings which are other than the reading they are looking for: (44)

Je lui fais donner un cadeau à Jean. T have him give Jean a gift.'

As is so often the case, it is precisely these rejected or ignored examples that are ultimately the most useful, because they reveal a new angle from which to approach the problem. Thus, for example, both Kayne and Cannings & Moody reject (44) because it does not have the reading: T have Jean give him a gift.' Yet the nonexistence of this reading cannot be separated from the existence of the reading given in the translation above, as we shall see. The "Reserving" Strategy. When à, because of its relative imprecision, could result in two different messages, A and B, and par could lead to only one of these messages, B, then par will regularly be used for B, and à will be reserved for A and not used for B. Thus: (45)

Il l'a fait dire à Jacques.

could be interpreted as either: 'He had it said to Jacques' or 'He had it said by Jacques'. But since par can be used unambiguously for the 'by' message, à will, in any context which would not strongly encourage the 'by' message, be used only for the 'to' message. This reserving effect is particularly salient in two cases. One case reflects the indeterminacy between à as an indicator of "agent", on the one hand, or some other mid-control type role (like the roles associated with lui-) on the other hand. The second case stems from indeterminacy between an "agent" role or a "place" role for à.

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Consider example (44) again: (44)

Je lui fais donner un cadeau à Jean.

Cannings & Moody ask why this string does not produce the reading 'I have Jean give him a gift./I have him given a gift by Jean.' Let us begin by listing the participants in this event and the possible roles that may be associated with them, based on the grammatical information they signal. There are four participants. 1) Je : This will be the highest controller, by virtue of its "subject" morphology. 2) un cadeau : This will be Low Controller, since this meaning is signalled by its postverbal position. 3) lui- : This signals MORE CONTROL. However, the imprecision of this meaning leaves open two possible roles: "agent" of the "giving", or "motivator/recipient". That is, it might contribute either 'to him' or 'by him' to the translation. This constitutes one potential ambiguity. 4) Jean : Preceded by à, this participant can likewise be associated with two roles. Like lui-, it could be either the "agent" or the "motivator/recipient" of the "giving". It might come out as either 'to Jean' or 'by Jean' in the message, and this constitutes a second ambiguity. Note that these two ambiguities are independent of one another, each ambiguity would potentially exist even if this message had three participants rather than four, with either lui- or Jean being left out. In other words, there are two potential readings for this string: a) T have him give a gift to Jean.' and b) T have a gift given to him by Jean.'/'T have Jean give him a gift.' We can diagram the situation as follows to bring out the relationship among the participants, and to highlight the potential ambiguity and its source. ROLE

LEVEL

superagent agent recipient patient

1 2 3 4 Je lui fais donner un cadeau à Jean.

ASSIGNMENT OF ROLES 1 2/3

4

2/3

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There is potential ambiguity at both the 2 and 3 levels, and this same ambiguity is associated with two different participants: lui and Jean. Now, par can help resolve this ambiguity. It will unambiguously indicate the "agent". If par is used instead of the imprecise ó, this will make Jean the agent. With Jean clearly at the 2 level, then lui will naturally assume the 3 level. Thus: Je lui fais donner un cadeau par Jean. 1 3 4 2 will be read: T have a gift given to him by Jean./I have Jean give him a gift.' Since this is so, the other message, T have him give Jean a gift' is left for the other string, with à; and this is indeed its normal reading. Je lui fais donner un cadeau à Jean. 1 2 4 3 The potential ambiguity of lui- here plays an important role in determining the message. The choice of à or par to resolve the other ambiguity produces a resolution of lui-'s ambiguity as a secondary effect. This is because a sensible message would not be derived by putting both participants — lui- and Jean — at the same level. This would have both playing the same role, an unlikely situation without some word such as et 'and'. Therefore, once a level has been determined for one of them, the other will assume the remaining level by default. And since par can resolve the ambiguity at one point, the other pieces of the message fall into place by chain reaction. Let us note that one could also resolve this ambiguity by putting par with the other participant: (46)

Je fais donner un cadeau à Jean par lui.

The chain-reaction effect now works the other way: Jean is at level 3 since (non-clitic) lui has been placed at level 2. This message is: T have a gift given to Jean by him.' Cannings & Moody maintain that reflexivity is a significant parameter in the choice between à and par. As they state it, par is obligatory when faire is reflexive and the reflexive pronoun is an indirect object. They use this constraint to explain the choice of par in: (47) Je me suis fait apporter du café par Jean. T had coffee brought to me by Jean.' Examples like this, however, seem to be merely further illustration of the "reserving" strategy, and reflexivity, in fact, appears not to be a relevant parameter. With à, we would again have a potentially doubly ambiguous message:

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Je me suis fait apporter du café à Jean. 1 2/3 4 2/3 Again, potential ambiguity is resolved by using par to assign level 2 to Jean. The mechanism is the same as in (44). To be sure, there is one difference here which does have to do with reflexivity, but nothing to do with the choice of à versus par for the agent. If à were used, it would assign the 3 level to Jean and the 2 level to the reflexive pronoun, as in the example with lui-. This, however, would result in a strange message: "I had myself take Jean some coffee." That is, it is fairly implausible that the superagent would also be the agent, since one does not ordinarily make oneself do something; one just does it. If in fact the message is: "I had to force myself to do it", then this would very likely be made clear by using a more lexically precise verb, such as forcer. (48)

Je me suis forcé d'apporter du café à Jean.

Nevertheless, if one had to force an interpretation on an example, decontextualized, with faire and à, the interpretation would indeed be that me is the "agent" (level 2) and à Jean indicates the "recipient" (level 3). Such examples, though rare, undoubtedly can be found in texts. Their rarity is simply due to the low degree of usefulness of this message.17 The reserving strategy is also applicable when à might be ambiguous between a message of "control" and one of "place". Again, an example from Cannings & Moody: (49)

Je lui ai fait diffuser la nouvelle par la télévision. T had the news spread to him by television.' T got television to spread the news to him.'

A, in addition to being agent, might also indicate where the news was spread: (50)

Je lui ai fait diffuser la nouvelle à la télévision. T had the news spread to him on television.'

Since the "agency" message can be communicated clearly by par, à is reserved for the "place" message. This example actually contains an additional degree of complexity. Both with par and with à, the lui- in the example could be either a "beneficiary/ motivator/recipient", as glossed above, or an agent: (51) Je lui ai fait diffuser la nouvelle à la télévision. T had the news spread by him on television.' T had him spread the news on television.' Now see what happens when lui- is the agent and par is chosen:

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(52)

Je lui ai fait diffuser la nouvelle par la télévision. 'I had him spread the news by television.' It appears that two different participants — lui- and télévision — are occupying level 2. Yet, in the example Je lui fais donner un cadeau par Jean, we said that lui- is inferred to be at level 3 precisely because par puts Jean at level 2 and it would not make sense to have both lui- and Jean at the same level. Why, now, is exactly this apparently happening in the present example? The answer lies in the difference between "Jean" and "television". Being very different types of entities — one a human being, and the other an institution or electronic device — it is possible for the speaker to put them both at level 2 and still count on the hearer to distinguish their roles: the human, "Jean" is an agent, and the non-human, "television" is a means. On the other hand, if two human beings were to be put at this same level — such as lui- and Jean in the "gift" example — it would be difficult for the hearer to infer distinct roles for them. Note, however, that even this is not out of the question. In an appropriate context, with plenty of help available to differentiate the roles, it might even be possible to have two distinct human agents: (53) Je lui fais donner un cadeau par Jean. T have him give a gift through Jean.' The upshot of this discussion is the impossibility of dealing with the à/par choice in any algorithmic fashion. The meanings of all elements of the utterance enter the picture at every step, and the choice of grammatical device results from the balancing of the potential of the various elements against the background of the message to be communicated. Analytically, to ignore potential "readings" of the various strings is to risk missing the larger picture of what is going on. Interest in Actor versus Interest in Action. The third strategy of choice between à and par is to distinguish between interest in who performs the action versus interest in what the action is, and this too stems from the relative precision of à and par. Speakers will allocate more precision to that part of the message which is of more interest.18 Par provides a more precise indication of agency than à, and it is used when the question of who is the agent is at issue. When there is no significant question as to who the agent is, and the action itself is the center of attention, à is the choice. Again, several examples from Cannings & Moody illustrate this strategy clearly, although these authors do not recognize it as such. Although these are invented examples, they appear to represent accurately what is found in actual texts.

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(54)

Je n'ai pas fait manger la soupe à Pierre, je lui ai fait faire autre chose. 'I didn't have Pierre eat the soup, I had him do something else.'

(55)

Je n'ai pas fait manger la soupe par Pierre, je l'ai fait manger par Jacqueline. 'I didn't have the soup eaten by Pierre, I had it eaten by Jacqueline.'

When there are alternative activities, and the issue is which one will be carried out, the choice is à. When there are alternative agents, and the question is which one will perform the action, the choice is par. Another pair from the same source: (56)

L'entraîneur fait courir le 100 mètres à son fils pour que ses muscles se développent bien. 'The coach has his son run the 100 yard dash so that his muscles develop properly.'

(57)

L'entraîneur fait courir le 100 mètres par son fils parce que son meilleur coureur s'est tordu la cheville. 'The coach is having his son run the 100 yard dash because his best runner twisted his ankle.'

Here too, when attention is centered on the activity itself, à is chosen; when it is a question of who does it, par is the choice. One example of Cannings & Moody's which seems at first glance to be a counterexample to this strategy turns out not to be one when both options are considered. (58)

On ne va pas faire enseigner ce cours-là par Pierre; on va lui faire faire le 302. 'We're not going to have that course taught by Pierre; we'll have him teach 302.'

Even though alternative actions are mentioned here, not alternative agents, the point really seems to be Pierre's unsuitability for that course (as opposed to the better suitability of somebody else). This is implicit in Cannings & Moody's translation. The point emerges much more clearly when we consider the alternative with à, which would be glossed differently: (59)

On ne va pas faire enseigner ce cours-là à Pierre; on va lui faire faire le 302. 'We're not going to have Pierre teach that course; we'll have him teach 302.'

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This time it really is a question of alternative things that Pierre might do. The mention of an alternative activity in the first example with par, then, is not really a direct contrast to the first activity; it is simply a kind of afterthought as to what to do with Pierre since he is unsuitable for that course. The two activities do present a direct contrast in the second version with à. One more pair of invented examples from these authors suggests a skewing that appears to result from this strategy, as well as a test. (60)

J'ai fait écrire une dissertation à mes étudiants. T had my students write a composition.'

(61)

J'ai fait écrire la dissertation par un copain. T had a friend write the composition.'

The first of these examples is uttered by a teacher. The agent is obvious, since if a teacher has a composition written, the obvious inference is that it is done by that teacher's students. It is thus a question here of which of many possible activities the teacher had the students engage in. By contrast, the second example is presumably not uttered by a teacher, but perhaps by a student who is looking for someone to perform a task which has already been mentioned. In this case, it is the activity that is known or obvious, and the agent that is not obvious. Of special interest is the use of determiners in these two examples. In the first (with à: action not obvious, agent obvious), the Low Controller {dissertation) has an indefinite article and the agent {étudiants) a definite determiner {mes). In the second (with par. action obvious, agent not obvious) there is a definite article with the Low Controller, and an indefinite article with the agent. This makes sense: the new element in the context is the one that is of immediate importance. We thus expect par to favor an agent who is being mentioned for the first time, who is unknown, and whose identity is thus of interest; and à to favor an agent who has already been established and who is not being mentioned for the first time. The same rationale could apply to the event, and one measure of its "newness" would be the definiteness or indefiniteness of the determiner going with the Low Controller. In a full treatment of this topic one would want to predict and test the prediction that with a large enough collection of examples, the overall distributions would be as here: with par, a definite Low Controller and an indefinite agent; and with à, an indefinite Low Controller and a definite agent.

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2.7. Summary From this discussion of à + noun phrases it is apparent that à is not a semantically "empty" syntactic marker, as maintained by several of the analysts discussed in Chapters 1 and 6. Moreover, the analysis offered here differs in a fundamental way even from others that do assign semantic content to à. Analyses like that of Cannings & Moody are, in our view, unsuccessful because they look for the wrong kind of meaning to assign à. Such analyses try to establish the difference between signalling units (such as à and par) on the basis of a purely substantive difference in meaning. But analyses which posit for à meanings like "Goal", "Directionality", "Deictic Orientation" and the like, work only up to a point, and then must be stretched beyond the limits of testability to achieve a semblance of fit with the data. What the present analysis has suggested is that the value side of meaning must also be invoked. In this case, value is represented by a difference in degree of precision of elements which cover a similar substantive semantic terrain — the domain of Circumstance. It is the maximal imprecision of à in this field which makes it the appropriate tool for so many apparently different jobs.

3.

The Function of Cliticity

From the communicative perspective, the ordering of elements in the stream of discourse has at least two functions. 1) It can be a signal of a meaning. We have seen this use of word order in the French and English word-order-based Control systems. 2) It can aid in processing the stream of speech. One obvious example of this is the grouping together of items that go together in the processing of the message, adjectives with their nouns, relative clauses with their antecedents, etc. But word order can be used to aid processing in more subtle ways as well. Clitic word order in French, represented by our hyphenation of lui- and le-, helps to establish a satellite relationship and thereby serves to resolve homonymy between some of these signals and certain other signals of French. French has a word lellalles which occurs before nouns, traditionally called the "definite article". (62)

Le vent souffle. 'The wind is blowing.'

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This le, of course, does not signal LESS CONTROL over an event; it has to do with identification of the referent of the noun, and can occur with a High Controller, a Mid Controller, a Low Controller, or a non-Controller. If le- could occur postverbally, as nouns do when they are Low Controller, then ambiguity might arise in an example like the following: (63)

Je vois le mal. T see the evil.'

which might mean: T see him/it badly'. This latter message is in fact expressed as follows: (64)

Je le vois mal.

and the ambiguity does not arise. Likewise, French has a word leur 'their', which occurs before nouns, and which is called a "possessive adjective". (65)

Leur mère est partie. 'Their mother has left.'

This leur does not indicate MORE CONTROL, but rather, like the "definite article" le, it occurs freely before nouns and has to do with identification of the referent of the noun. Without clitic word order, ambiguity might arise in a case like the following: (66)

Je porte leur envie. T bear their envy/desire.'

If leur- were not limited to preverbal position, (66) might mean T bear them envy', T envy them', a message which is in fact expressed by: (67)

Je leur porte envie.

Finally, there is a word lui 'he, him', called a "disjunctive" pronoun (i.e. "disjoined" from, not in clitic order with, the verb; note that it is masculine only, whereas clitic lui- is both masculine and feminine). This word can occur at almost any point in a sentence; it is used as the object of prepositions, or to emphasize some noun or pronoun. The clitic word order of lui- avoids ambiguity which could arise in cases like the following: (68)

Lui, il a donné de l'argent. 'As for him, he gave some money.'

If lui- could occur without clitic order, (68) might mean 'He gave him some money', which is in fact expressed by: (69)

Il lui a donné de l'argent.

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The fact that clitic lui- has its place reserved immediately before the verb (and normally after the "subject" noun or pronoun) ensures that any morpheme /lui/ which occurs in that location will be inferred to be satellite to the verb and will be the signal of MORE CONTROL. Thus, by occurring exclusively in a predictable position, before the item to which they are satellite, Control system le-, leur-, lui- are effectively differentiable from the non-Control le, leur, and lui. The reader may object that examples like (63)-(69) are rare, and this is true. Nevertheless, one cannot therefore conclude that non-distinctness among these words would not inconvenience speakers and that the analysis has overstated the case. Rather, these examples are best regarded as extreme cases of a typical situation. Firstly, all these forms: clitic lui- and le- as well as nonclitic lui and "article" le, are high-frequency forms. Hearers have to process raw linguistic data at a very high rate of speed. Given the use of these highfrequency morphemes in more than one grammatical system, and given the highspeed processing of raw linguistic data that the hearer is constantly called upon to perform, it is clear that the facilitation of this process provided by the word order element of the signals is considerable. In other parts of the clitic pronoun complex, word order is even more crucial. In the first and second person plural, for instance, the morphemes nous and vous are both "subject" and "object" pronouns, the two functions being distinguished only by word order.19 It is, moreover, appropriate that fixed word order be used to differentiate homonyms among pronouns, even though such a tactic is apparently not employed with nouns. Given the much higher frequency of any one of these pronouns than of any given noun, the processing problem is correspondingly greater with the pronouns and justifies the extra measure. Clitic word order has consequences for the placement of words before the verb. If any word were to intervene between a clitic object pronoun and the verb, the clitic order would be abrogated; consequently, no word may occur in that position. Adverbs must go after the verb, unless they come before all participants satellite to the verb. Likewise, no word may intervene between two clitic object pronouns, not even a conjunction. Thus, a "compound object" may not be expressed with clitic pronouns. To say T see him and her' one must use disjunctive pronouns and the word-order Control system. One does not say: (70)

??Je le et la vois,

but rather: (71)

Je vois lui et elle.20

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3.1. Ordering among the Clitics Processing of the stream of discourse is further aided by the particular sequence of items in the clitic word-order hierarchy. Recall from the chart on page 35 that in this hierarchy, the forms meaning LESS CONTROL precede those meaning MORE CONTROL; we may add that forms representing the High Controller ordinarily precede both of these.21 As a rationale for this arrangement we would offer the following. At an early stage in processing, the hearer will attempt to grasp the overall structure of the message. He will try to establish its more salient points: event, participants, more important information vs. less important information, and then fill in details. It stands to reason that those things that are most helpful in establishing such "cardinal points" in the message will be put earlier. From this perspective, High Controller and le- are more useful than lui-. Being the polar extremes of participancy, they provide a basic framework. Furthermore, le- is much more frequent in texts than lui-} 22 Le- is therefore a more reliable indicator of the basic structure of the message. The greater overall importance to communication of le- is further suggested by the fact that a gender distinction has been invested in here (le- and la-), whereas no gender distinction has been invested in with lui-.23 This gender distinction provides a reason of its own for le- to come first when there is also a lui-. The gender distinction of le-/la- helps processing of the message by narrowing down the field of candidates for reference and thus the number of message possibilities, more than does the nondistinct lui-; even the processing of lui- itself, when it comes, is thereby made easier. It makes sense to have this work already done before the second, less distinct pronoun (lui-) is introduced. Moreover, as seen in Chapter 3, le- is associated with a narrower range of roles than lui-. Le- is therefore easier to process, and thus more useful in setting up the framework of the message than lui-. Lui-, being associated with a wider range of roles, is more difficult to process, and consequently less useful in setting up the basic message framework; it is therefore postponed.24 3.2. Combinatory Skewings among Clitics This relative difficulty of processing lui- has consequences for its combinatory possibilities with other clitic pronouns. The clitic pronouns of the first and second persons, me, te, nous-, vous-, as well as the low-deictic third person se, are nondistinct between dative and accusative; it may be that they do not signal Degree of Control at all. Associating a role with the referent of one of these

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pronouns thus relies even more heavily on inference.25 It is more complex than with lui- or le-, since the strategies of me, te, etc. cover the entire range of both the Mid and the Low Degrees of Control, as well as a set of strategies not associated with lui- or le- at all (the traditional "reflexive" uses). Combining this difficulty with the difficulty of inferring a role for lui- results in a level of complexity that French speakers are apparently not willing to cope with. Thus, lui- does not combine with these other clitics. The combination of le- with one of them, however, is tolerable. Thus we have the following possibilities: (72)

Elle me les confie. Elle te les confie. Elle se les confie. However, we do not have: (73)

*Elle me leur confie. *Elle te leur confie. *Elle se leur confie.

'She entrusts them to me.' 'She entrusts them to you.' 'She entrusts them to herself.'

etc.

'She entrusts me to them.' 'She entrusts you to them.' 'She entrusts herself to them.'

etc.

Faced with an inferential task of this complexity, the French speaker, when he needs to communicate these latter messages, will take some of the burden off of inference and supply more information to the hearer by including a lexical item (a preposition). Thus: (74)

Elle me confie à eux. Elle te confie à eux. Elle se confie à eux.

etc.26

3.3. Word Order in Imperative Messages The use of word order to help in processing is also reflected in those messages traditionally called "imperatives". In imperative messages lui- and leoccur in a fixed word-order pattern immediately after the verb, with le- preceding lui-. (75)

Achète-le-lui! 'Buy him it!'

In an imperative message, the most important element, of course, is the event. The main point is to communicate an action, and to do so with some urgency. Due to the importance of the action, the High Controller (which ordinarily comes first) is left out altogether, and the verb comes first. The rest of the clitic word-order hierarchy also bows to the urgency of getting the verb out first, and

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clitics are postponed until after the verb..Even in this position, however, the usual pattern of Low Controller before Mid Controller is preserved.27 In summary, clitic word order is functionally motivated in French. Like the pseudo-phenomenon of "case government", it has no place on the list of things that are completely arbitrary in language.

Chapter 8 The Categories of Grammar

1.

Grammar as Explanation

This book has defined a linguistic problem and offered a solution to that problem, in the framework of a particular paradigm for linguistic research. The problem is to explain why lui and le occur where they do in discourse. The solution has been to posit signal-meaning pairs: lui- = MORE CONTROL OVER AN EVENT, le- = LESS CONTROL. This solution is founded on an instrumental view of grammatical meaning, a recognition that the purely linguistic contribution to communication — the meanings — must be distinguished from other elements of communicative output that derive from non-linguistic sources, in particular human inference. Deployment of lui and le in discourse is seen as a consequence of speakers' and writers' communicative intent and of human behavioral characteristics such as reliance on hearers and readers to jump to conclusions. Grammatical categories — signals and meanings — are thus part of an attempt to solve a problem. They are hypotheses — categories of explanation, not categories of observation; they are the goal and end-point of analysis, not its starting point. The position that this analysis has directly challenged is well stated by Silverstein (1993:474, 480): The phenomena of case-marking, the indication of underlying propositional caserelations of predicates and their arguments, however indirectly but systematically, are fascinating precisely because, especially for the traditional so-called "grammatical" cases, they seemed to be the most abstract, formal, syntactic (as opposed to semantic) transformational markers, on the basis of which one could really understand the abstractness and autonomy of morphosyntax ... . You cannot know how to differentiate case-marking phenomena and properly to label them until you locate the formal devices in the set of language-independent possibilities dictated by an hypothesis about

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THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE predicate-argument types as well as inherent lexical-content types. Surface data, even in transformational batteries, are uninterpretable without such an ordering hypothesis ... This and this alone allows us to use formal indicators to make analytic and explanatory arguments about surface forms, at the level of noun phrases functioning in clause-level structures.

As seen from this quote, the fundamental assumptions of traditional thinking about case morphology have been: 1) cases have highly abstract values, and their primary functions are formal and syntactic, not semantic; 2) understanding of cases will validate a morphosyntactic approach to analysis; 3) cases must be understood in terms of language-independent categories; 4) surface data can not be taken in their own right as the basis for hypothesis formation; 5) the proper framework for understanding of occurrences of case morphology is the clause. This analysis has concluded, on the contrary, that the motivations for case marking are semantic; that those things that seem most formal and syntactic, "government"-type phenomena such as non-occurrences of certain case forms with certain verbs, are not syntactic, but pragmatic; that morphosyntax, far from being a vehicle for accurately representing linguistic structure, represents analytical failure; that the clause is not an appropriate framework within which to seek understanding of case phenomena. Rather than beginning with a language-independent set of categories, this study has developed the Saussurean idea that each language articulates its own categories; that "surface" phenomena are the best starting point and guide to discovery of the underlying grammatical categories of a language; that linguists must come to grips with individual languages before generalizing about language. Grammatical meaning. In concluding this study, it is germane to set the Columbia school in the broad context of contemporary theories of grammar, especially "functional" approaches that deal explicitly with the communicative function of language. The most basic points of comparison are: 1) the assumption of an instrumental view of grammatical meaning, as opposed to a fractional (compositional) or an abstractional view, and 2) the rejection or acceptance of a priori categories of Sentence grammar and syntax. The Columbia school's instrumental view of linguistic meaning stands in contrast to the almost universally adopted view that a meaning is one fraction of a total communication, and that "sentence meaning" is predictable from the meanings of its parts and a set of rules of arrangement. In traditional grammars this view emerges in the guise of "forms" and "uses". Each form is paired with a list of uses: dative of possession, dative of the disadvantaged, dative of the indirect object, etc. In each instance of its occurrence, a form's meaning is that fraction of the total message that can presumably be attributed to it. In

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many modern functionalist approaches, the fractional view manifests itself in an attempt to formally account (by "mapping") for every detectable nuance in the message.1 Others, not wanting to accept so much responsibility, buy into a universal canon of one sort or another that supersedes individual languages. Meaning is thereby taken as something that can be studied in the abstract, without reference to features of particular languages (or at least prior to such references). These approaches tell us about communication, about what speakers do; but they tell us nothing about language, because they are not tied to any hypothesis of the actual internal structure of a language. Instrumental meaning, by contrast, is a vehicle of problem solving, an instrument for explaining language-particular features. Meaning is not studied in the abstract, as a set of a priori universals, independent of particular grammatical problems in particular languages. In generative grammar, meaning appears most prominently in the guise of "sentence meaning". This likewise implies a direct correlation between a linguistic form — the Sentence — and at least some fraction of what is observably communicated. Chomskyan linguistics has made a fundamental principle of studying linguistic form without reference to linguistic meaning. But in actuality, it starts with a large set of assumptions about linguistic meaning. Notions like "dative of possession", "dative of the disadvantaged" and so forth appear freely and without scrutiny in generative analyses. These assumptions are even more evident with relation to the notion that sentences with similar phrase structures are in some sense parallel in meaning because they contain the same grammatical relations: subject-verb, verb-object, etc.2 The Columbia-school view is that linguistic form is no more given in advance than linguistic meaning; hypotheses about the two grow hand-in-hand. Meaning is just as language-specific as form. If the assumptions of generative grammar about meaning are incorrect, then its conclusions about form are too; one has not really understood the form of linguistic utterances until one has come firmly to grips with the question of linguistic meaning. The criterion of fit. In this process of hypothesizing categories of grammar, an overriding consideration is the fit between hypothesis and observations. Analysis means testing hypotheses and discarding those that do not fit. Traditional analysts started with a canon of a priori categories and devised grammars which preserved these categories at any cost. In the older grammars, this entailed an elaborate set of escape clauses — government, concord, and the like — to accommodate observations that contradict the categories. The consequence of this was, in effect, an abandonment of the deductive model based on logic and the development of a grammar with no deductive control at all. In modern

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grammars, the terminology has been changed — one speaks of "selection" and "subcategorization features" — but the underlying problem of lack of fit remains. At a pivotal point in modern linguistics, the assertion was made that syntactic analysis could proceed without resolution of "morphological" problems, such as those which lead to our rejection of the traditional treatment of lui and le and our search for a new solution. [I]t is sometimes argued that work on syntactic theory is premature at this time in view of the fact that many of the problems that arise on the lower levels of phonemics and morphology are unsolved ... [I]t would be absurd, or even hopeless, to state principles of sentence construction in terms of phonemes or morphemes, but only the development of such higher levels as phrase structure indicates that this futile task need not be undertaken on lower levels ... I think that the notion that syntactic theory must await the solution of problems of phonology and morphology is completely untenable ... (Chomsky 1957:59-60)

It has been entirely acceptable for modern analysts to simply assert the correctness of traditional categories, to assume that overt conflicts between observations and these categories represent minor problems that can be glossed over, and then to forge ahead, even going on to draw broad conclusions about the human mind and the nature of language acquisition based on the view of language represented in those categories. Our contemporaries in linguistics would be shocked by the suggestion that in their ordinary analytic practice they adhere to erroneous hypotheses; yet this is precisely what is being done when analysis starts with the a priori categories of Sentence grammar. There has been little if any significant effort to justify these basic analytical categories as categories of language, rather than accepting them merely because they are categories of thought.

2.

Language, Thought, and Communication

The divergent positions on meaning correlate with views held by the respective schools on the nature of language and its relation to thought and communication. Traditional grammar, as we have seen, was based on the premise that language has a structure which mirrors the structure of thought. This accommodates the fractional view of meaning, since there will naturally be an attempt to associate individual fractions of thoughts with particular elements of linguistic structure. The logical-structure premise, as an initial guess about the nature of

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language, is plausible; unquestionably, language is the primary vehicle for the expression of thought. The plausibility of this view is strengthened by the fact that in many cases the theory appears to work: to the extent that a decision can be reached as to what is a direct or an indirect object, many direct objects do occur in the accusative case, and many indirect objects in the dative. When, however, the lack of fit with logical-structure categories emerges, an entirely different type of analytical apparatus is resorted to. This apparatus, the arbitrary syntactic component, is not consistent with the premise that the structure of language reflects the structure of thought. As its etymology implies, the syntax is merely a flat statement of the "arrangement" of cooccurring items. What traditional grammar ends up being, then, is not in fact an analysis of language. It is, on the one hand, an elaborate analysis of thought, and, on the other hand, an extremely heterogeneous listing of characteristics of language derived from the fractional view of meaning: lists of uses of linguistic forms to express messages. One can see the fallacy in this approach. The fact that language is a tool for expressing thought does not require the link between expressive device and finished product — the message — to be nearly as direct as the traditional view has it. To draw an analogy, one can use a hammer to build a house. But the structure of the hammer in no way resembles the structure of the completed house. Rather, the structural characteristics of the hammer are fitted to its job: to drive and remove nails while being held in and powered by the hand of a human being. Trying to deal with lui and le in terms of the categories, features and configurations of syntax sets up a head-on conflict with morphological facts at every turn. "Government" claims an absence of contribution to messages; yet the distributions of lui and le are heavily skewed with respect to context, which in itself strongly suggests they have semantic functions. Identification of these functions allows every aspect of the problem to yield to solution. But these semantic contributions are of an instrumental, not a fractional nature. This fact in turn leads to the conclusion that speakers' cognitive and behavioral characteristics enter the picture in an important way, making human beings' linguistic behavior comparable to other familiar types of human behavior. Telementation. Roy Harris (1990) points out that both the Saussurean and the Chomskyan schools have attempted to construct a theory of communication, which Harris calls telementation. This theory is embodied in Saussure's concept (1971:27) of the "speech circuit". Ideas occur to A which A wishes to transmit to B. These ideas trigger in A's mind the phonetic image of certain words, which A utters. B hears A's utterance and, being a speaker of the same Ian-

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guage, is able to interpret the sounds as having meanings corresponding precisely to the original ideas in A's mind. B may then reply in like manner. This transfer of ideas is possible because language is viewed as an encoding device. Harris shows that this same view is clearly articulated in the writings of generative grammarians. The view of language as an encoding device is, of course, a direct reflection of the fractional view of meaning. Linguistic units — signs — are held to directly encode the various parts of the communicated message. Saussure himself never developed this idea into an analytical mechanism, so we cannot know what actual categories of grammar he might have suggested. He has been much criticized for slighting the Sentence and its parts. Otheguy (1995), however, points out that there are many passages in the Cours showing that Saussure explicitly rejected the categories of Sentence grammar, since these represent an a priori nomenclature, the exact antithesis of Saussure's position that there are no independent, pre-existing concepts that languages must encode.3 Chomsky. Chomsky, by contrast, embraced the Theory of the Sentence wholeheartedly. In the "Aspects model" (Chomsky 1965), a level of "deep structure" is posited, mapped by a complex collection of devices onto a "surface structure", which ultimately produces a representation of linguistic utterances in their observed form. This "deep structure" (ideally) represents the structure of the thought, the logical analysis of the message, as does the logical (and thus universal) component of traditional grammar. The positing of "deep structure" is thus a reaffirmation of the logical-structure premise. The complicated — indeed, messy — apparatus required to "map" deep structure onto surface structure is the analog of the syntactic component of traditional grammar, the mediating apparatus required when the logical component fails to fit observations. In the end, though, there is no consistent, convincing way to mechanically map deep structure onto surface structure. In the more recent evolution of this theory, Chomsky has attempted to preserve the logical basis of grammar while in effect jettisoning the complicated mapping apparatus, by claiming to have discovered new features of the human mind, thus redefining what constitutes "logical structure", as it were. This raises the whole enterprise to a new level of abstraction and further blurs the still-unsolved analytical problems. After the Aspects model, Chomsky tried — by means of "subcategorization features" attached to lexical items — to formalize what is encoded in language. The notion of "thematic roles" extends this idea. One of the main points of the present study has been that neither syntactic features nor thematic roles are encoded by lexical items in French. The roles are only derived inferentially.

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Their presence in messages results from the interaction of several factors, including the semantic content of lexical items and grammatical meanings like Degree of Control; but the roles themselves are ultimately underdetermined by anything encoded in French. Similarly, the apparent syntactic constraints we have examined in this study have all turned out to have semantic and pragmatic motivations. A number of insightful discussions, e.g. Moore & Carling (1982), Botha (1989), Love (1990), and Winston (1978), have critiqued Chomskyan linguistics on philosophical grounds and at a high level of abstraction. But these discussions have not taken a hard look at the analytical foundations of the Chomskyan castle, to ensure that the whole structure is not built on air. Consequently, they have failed to recognize and point out the fundamental and pervasive indebtedness of generative grammar to an unsuccessful theory of language: the Theory of the Sentence. What this book has suggested is that arguing the antiChomskyan position must begin at a much more fundamental level than has been done. Once this is undertaken, other objections that have been raised fall into place. Ultimately, then, generative grammar, like traditional grammar, is based on an analysis of thought rather than an analysis of language. Its starting-point is an idealized Sentence structure, reflecting an idealization of the structure of thought; and the relationship between that idealized structure and actual linguistic utterances has never ceased to be extremely problematic. Harris. Harris (1990) agrees with Saussure and Chomsky before him, and with cognitive grammarians, that what is needed is a theory of communication. However, he finds many logical inconsistencies in the theory of telementation, the view that language represents a code, and thus discards this view. Along with the telementational model, since they are part of the same package, Harris rejects sign-based linguistic meaning and Saussure's langue. In Harris's scheme, the concept of meaning is replaced by that of "communicational function". The communicational function of a sign is a contextually determined entity that derives from the network of integrational relations which obtain in a particular situation. Unfortunately, this theory is not at present verifiable because, as in the case of Saussure, a body of successful grammatical analyses set in the framework suggested by Harris is lacking. One might, however, anticipate difficulties similar to those encountered by Jakobson (1936), discussed above in Chapter 4, whose attempt to define grammatical items purely relationally also relied too heavily on value. All these attempts to construct a theory of communication share a common problem. Until accurate analyses of language are available, one can not say what

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the contribution of language to communication actually is. Yet any theory of human communication necessarily depends on language in an important way; and theories of communication forge ahead as though the problem of language had been solved, when in reality it has not. Harris's disenchantment with the view of language as a code, once again, can be attributed to the fractional view of meaning that he assumes: since signs apparently have different meanings in different contexts, the notion of language as a discrete set of signal-meaning pairs is useless. He recognizes the failure of the theory that language is an encoding device, but then throws the baby out with the bath because he misses the underlying problem of correctly identifying the nature of linguistic meaning. Two fundamental points set the Columbia school apart from both Harris and the telementational view which he condemns. The first difference is the espousal of an instrumental versus a fractional view of meaning. The second is that, in contrast to the others, Columbia school does not have a theory of communication; it does not claim to explain how people communicate. Its goal is, rather, to elucidate the structure of one particular instrument of communication, the one we call "language". Against this background, then, the Columbia school can be defined as a "Hints-and-Construction" view of language, as opposed to an "Encoding-andDecoding" view. The instrumental view of meaning implies that what the speaker does is to throw various hints the hearer's way, counting on the hearer to use his intelligence and experience to figure out what the speaker means. The hearer's task, rather than being that of simply decoding what the speaker has encoded, is that of constructing a message, which he infers to be the speaker's communicative intent. In other words, the message is not transmitted to the hearer; it is constructed by the hearer.

3.

Functionalist Schools of Grammar

In recent years many linguists have become convinced of the failure or, at least, inadequacy of purely formal linguistics and have explicitly reintroduced the communicative function of language into analytical practice. However, rather than discarding syntax as the basis of grammar and rejecting syntactic categories as observations, they have largely tried simply to fit communicative functions to pre-approved syntactic structures. We saw this in Chapter 6 in relation to Hopper & Thompson's study of "transitivity". This fact in particular sets these functionalist schools apart from the Columbia school.

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Cognitive Grammar. Cognitive Grammar presents many apparent similarities to Columbia-school grammar, and indeed there are important points on which the two schools agree. Both hold the nature of linguistic meaning to be a fundamental issue, and grammar to be meaningful in the same way that lexicon is. Both specifically reject a formal semantics based on truth conditions, recognizing that the semantic categories established by a particular language will not necessarily correspond to those of the real world. Columbia-school linguists would agree with Langacker's (1987:1-55) critique of generative grammar, as far as it goes. However, the objection Columbia school raises to generative and other sentence-based grammars is much more fundamental than Langacker's, or indeed that of any other contemporary critic. A few of the main areas of contrast between Columbia-school and Cognitive Grammar are set forth here. 1. The problem to be solved. Langacker (1987) sets his task as that of discovering the manifestations of cognition in language, that is, finding cognitive categories appropriate for a description of language. [A cognitive grammar is] the most complete description possible of those aspects of cognitive processing which constitute the mental representation of a linguistic system. (1991:512)

These categories may manifest themselves in many different ways, and on different levels (phonology, grammar, etc.). The starting point of a Columbia-school analysis is a purely linguistic problem: accounting for occurrences of morphemes. Cognitive Grammar sets out to apply to language a body of preestablished knowledge about cognition. 2. Justification of categories. Since Langacker's grammar begins with cognition, its categories must be justified by demonstration that they correspond to the structure of cognition. What is known about cognition is the validating criterion of a grammatical analysis: Language is an integral part of human cognition. An account of linguistic structure should therefore articulate with what is known about cognitive processing in general ... (1987:12) [The description of a language is] a substantive hypothesis about its actual cognitive representation, and linguistic investigation is an empirical enterprise, its claims to be tested against the facts of cognitive structure. (1987:56)

Langacker (1987) sets out an elaborate set of theoretical prerequisites that precede actual analysis. A great deal must be known in advance about cognition for grammatical analysis to be possible; so much, in fact, that the writing of a complete cognitive grammar is presently unfeasible:

330

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE Linguistic structure can only be understood and characterized in the context of a broader account of cognitive functioning. This has the theoretical consequence ... that an exhaustive description of language cannot be achieved without a full description of human cognition. (64)

Nonetheless, linguistic theorizing can take place even in the absence of a body of analyses: No one is presently capable of writing the cognitive grammar of a language, just as no one is about to write a full generative grammar. It is important, however, to reach some understanding of what a grammar would consist of were we really able to write one. (1987:41)

A Columbia-school analysis starts with much less: morphemes and their observed occurrences. Fit between hypothesized categories and the occurrences they are supposed to explain is the initial goal and the final test. Other disciplines must of course be invoked to ensure that the categories posited do not contradict established knowledge. But this is not done in advance of analysis; purely deductive categories are not established independently of an attempt to solve a particular problem of morphemic distribution. The inductive and deductive sources of the solution are thereby kept in balance. Independent knowledge — e.g. the fact that language is used for communication, and that people jump to conclusions on the basis of sparse information — is invoked to justify the kinds of categories postulated; but the relevance of these facts becomes clear only as solution of the purely linguistic problem evolves. A larger picture of the nature of grammar emerges only after many such categories are successfully established. Understanding of the form and content of a grammar develops together with successful attempts to postulate categories of grammar that fit observations. Moreover, Columbia-school theory does not limit itself in advance to certain kinds of independent knowledge to deductively support its categories. Analytical experience shows that the human and communicative factors must be invoked in grammatical explanation. But the relevance of other factors is not excluded a priori. The possibility of alternative kinds of solutions (such as those in phonology which appeal to human physiology, acoustics, and other factors; see Diver 1979) is acknowledged. Further, this outside knowledge is brought in only to the extent needed to solve the purely linguistic problem; it is by no means necessary for our knowledge of other disciplines to be complete before linguistic analysis can begin. The discipline of linguistics thereby sets its own limits.4 Columbia-school linguists thus allow the feasibility of writing complete grammars, and in fact attempt to

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do so.5 The present study has been offered as a complete statement of one particular area of French grammar. Cognitive Grammar differs significantly from Columbia school on the issue of fit. In Cognitive Grammar, categories that have little or no motivation from purely linguistic data, i.e. observed occurrences of forms, are admitted to grammar. If subject is defined schematically as relational figure, it is both coherent and quite reasonable to posit subjects even for a language where the construct appears to have little grammatical significance. They may be largely invisible to the analyst ... There may be little that subjects do in such a language to attract the linguist's attention, and as a limiting case, there may be nothing at all ... I would say that the subject relation's grammatical potential remains latent ... Its invisibility does not entail its absence. (Langacker 1991:320-321)

Langacker does not question whether "subject" is a valid category; subjects simply exist. For him, the basic categories of grammar are available at the outset. For Columbia school, categories are unknown at the outset and must be discovered by analysis. Their justification is their ability to explain actual occurrences of morphemes. The notion of an "invisible" category, one that has no consequence for what can be observed directly, is meaningless. 3. The status of the categories of traditional grammar. In spite of the promise of something new and different offered by Cognitive Grammar, its most fundamental categories are identical with those of the traditional canon. The validity of these traditional categories was a founding assumption of generative grammar, and Langacker offers no disagreement on this basic point. Nouns and verbs are the two most fundamental grammatical categories ... they are pivotal to the description of every natural language. The respective counterparts of nouns and verbs at the level of sentence structure are nominals and finite clauses, whose universality and grammatical significance are also beyond dispute. (1991:51) I consider it highly probable that notions like subject, noun, verb, possessive, count vs. mass, etc. are fundamental to grammar precisely because they are grounded in very basic aspects of cognition, which are directly reflected in their proposed schematic values. (1991:312-313)

It is thus granted at the very outset that these categories "are fundamental to grammar"; it is not that the cognitive orientation defines an analytical task that leads to their discovery. Among Langacker's basic grammatical constructs are: subject, direct object, transitivity, finite clause (298). Subject, direct object, and indirect object are retained as "basic grammatical relations" (304); Langacker says every syntactic theory has to provide some account of these notions. Syntax itself is treated as an a priori given about the structure of language, not as a

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potential conclusion derived from analysis. In Columbia-school theory, no category of grammar is "beyond dispute". On the contrary, every category must withstand rigorous testing and earn its way into the grammar. A category of grammar is hypothesized only as an attempt to solve some problem of occurrence of morphemes, and is accepted only if the explanation it offers fits the problem it is attempting to solve. Traditional categories, in the Columbia-school view, are merely artifacts of an unsuccessful hypothesis about the structure of language. The very idea that traditional grammar should be viewed as a theory of language is itself a radical innovation. 4. Divergent conceptions of linguistic meaning and their analytical consequences. Cognitive Grammar has nothing corresponding to the Columbia-school meaning/message distinction; its concept of meaning combines elements of the fractional and abstractional views. The differing conceptions of meaning entail different stances toward linguistic form as well. Answering the question of why the morphemes lui and le are distributed the way they are has required the positing of signals and meanings, recognizing that French speakers use these meanings in an instrumental way. The necessity for positing signals implies that grammatical form can not be taken for granted; it is as much a product of analysis as is meaning. In Cognitive Grammar, multiword "conventional expressions" (such as clichés and idioms) and "constructions" are accepted as bearers of meaning, even when the morphemes that constitute them have their own, independent meanings. Columbia-school analysis, while allowing in principle the possibility of multiple signals based on one morpheme, has found that the problems dealt with by Cognitive Grammar or traditional grammar at the level of the construction or "conventional expression" more often than not resolve themselves at the level of the morpheme, once the correct meaning is found, and once the instrumental nature of meaning is recognized. A further consequence of their differing views on the nature of linguistic meaning is the differing conclusions arrived at by the two schools on the structure of grammar. Cognitive Grammar finds the prototype model to be the appropriate one (Langacker 1991:294). Columbia school has consistently found that the signal-meaning approach is correct and that this model surpasses the prototype model.6 Correlate to this is Langacker's view (1991:398) that polysemy is typical in grammar; Columbia school has found monosemy to be the typical situation in grammar. Finally, the Columbia school's explicit recognition of user inference in bridging the gap between meaning and message necessitates an elaborate validation procedure that relies on extended texts and counts, rather than on

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short, invented examples. Cognitive Grammar, on the other hand, assumes a direct mapping between linguistic resource and communicative output; it therefore employs short, decontextualized examples, mostly one sentence in length, and mostly invented by the analyst. In this respect its practice is like that of generative grammar. Divergences between the two schools on these basic points results in actual analyses that are fundamentally dissimilar, both in spirit and in substance.

4.

The Nature and Role of Linguistic Theory

On the question of what linguistic theory is and what its role should be in promoting understanding of language, the various schools have staked out positions which, indeed, correspond closely to their analytical procedures. We can characterize the difference as one of a priorism versus a posteriorism. Chomskyan Universal Grammar can be characterized as occupying the extreme deductive, a priori end of the spectrum. The goals of the theory are to describe language as a property of the human mind and to explain its source. To achieve these goals it establishes an apparatus of considerable complexity. Though the specific proposals put forward are not necessarily correct, the theory provides the unified framework within which they may be tested. (Cook 1988:1)

This theory of Universal Grammar contains, as part of the "apparatus" alluded to, many sub-theories: government/binding theory, X-bar theory, theta theory, case theory, and more. Each of these represents, not a solution to a problem, but a speculative framework for the application of a deductive model. In other words, UG reaches for the big picture at the beginning and then tries to fit the details in with an analytical apparatus. In Columbia-school linguistics, the procedure is just the opposite. First come analyses; theory then gradually emerges out of the body of successful analyses and constitutes a summary of the general characteristics of those successful solutions to problems. There is of course a temptation to begin by posing the question "What is a theory?" or to demand that the term "theory" be defined before we take even the first step in the discussion. But that question and that demand rest on a certain metaphysical approach to the whole problem of the acquisition of knowledge: an approach that implies the a priori existence of certain metaphysical realities, such as theories, with an accompanying analytical task of discovering the properties of those metaphysical realities. (Diver 1995:45)

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We do not want to take the position that, although we know very little as yet about language, the one thing we do know is that it has a very abstract and complex structure; for, obviously, until we are able to state what that structure is, there is no justification for saying there is any structure at all. The very term "structural linguistics", after all, is but another speculative hypothesis. (Diver 1995:46)

Indeed, consider how many things are presupposed by Cook's statement: that language is a property of the human mind; that the human mind is the source of language; the notion "language" itself. For Diver, even this is something that might emerge at the end, not be assumed at the beginning: ... we probably want to save the English word "language" and apply it to the solution to the problem. We want to be able to say, at some point, "This, then, is what language is," recognizing, in the word "language", a common-sense reference to a certain kind of human activity, but not, again, a metaphysical reality whose properties we have to set out to discover, (ibid.)

Theory is neither a grand initial speculation nor a device for preserving an a priori set of categories. Rather, it emerges together with successful analytical experience. With regard to analytical procedure, theory allows a kind of bootstrapping by nudging analysis along on the path that has so far achieved the greatest success.

5.

The Acquisition and Use of Language

Both the Columbia school and generative grammar are, in a broad sense, working toward a theory of linguistic knowledge. Both posit some kind of language system, and both are, in some fashion, trying to get at what the speaker "has in his head". Yet the two schools diverge sharply on what it is they believe the speaker has internalized and how this knowledge gets there. Like Columbia school, Chomsky's Universal Grammar posits a human factor; one might even say that Chomskyan linguistics is the study of the human factor as it reveals itself in language. But the two schools are diametrically opposed on the nature of this human factor. In Chomsky's scheme, (core) grammar is a manifestation of a unique characteristic of the human mind, which bears no overt resemblance to any other kind of human behavior or cognitive activity, and for which, in fact, no extralinguistic parallel is sought or even desired. Developing a model of this part of the human mind is a goal of Chomskyan grammar. For the Columbia school, the mental side of language is completely

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incidental; linguistic hypotheses are devised for the sole purpose of solving the empirical problem of the shape of the sound wave of speech. The human factor is not an object of explanation. It is neither the immediate nor the ultimate goal of Columbia school analysis to come to an understanding of the human mind or of human behavior. There is simply an admission that ordinary human behavioral characteristics play a role in the structure and functioning of language and that analysis cannot succeed without recognition of this fact. Chomsky's Universal Grammar asks how language is acquired and posits an innate language acquisition mechanism. This construct is motivated by what Chomsky calls the "logical question of language acquisition": "How do we come to have such rich and specific knowledge, or such intricate systems of belief and understanding, when the evidence available to us is so meager?" (Chomsky, Kyoto lectures, 1987). Our knowledge of language is complex and abstract; the experience of language we receive is limited. Our minds could not create such complex knowledge on the basis of such sparse information. It must therefore come from somewhere other than the evidence we encounter ... Chomsky's [solution is] from innate properties of the mind. (Cook 1988:55)

Specifically, Chomsky believes that the child is born with linguistic "principles" in its brain. For example, he posits a principle of "structure dependency", which stipulates that "movement" of linguistic elements (in the transition from deep structure to surface structure) must respect syntactic units in the sentence. Some principles have "parameters"; and part of language acquisition, that of "core grammar", is the "setting" of these parameters, much as one sets switches. Thus, there is a "head parameter", whereby "heads" of phrases come either to the left or to the right — depending on the "setting" — of other elements in Noun phrases, Verb phrases, Adjective phrases, and Prepositional phrases. This scheme of linguistic knowledge requires assuming that the brain is divided into separate "modules", because this type of learning and behavior is qualitatively different from other types of child learning and behavior that we can observe. All this, however, depends on a crucial assumption about what it is that is being acquired. It is self-evident that what is acquired must be determined beyond a shadow of a doubt before one can entertain the question of how it is acquired. And here again we encounter the a priori assumption that what is acquired is the categories of sentence grammar. Indeed, the very fact that Chomsky can pose the "logical question of language acquisition" in this form is the strongest possible endorsement of the traditional logical-structure view of language. Consider the examples of "structure dependency" and the "head parameter". In order for these to operate, the child has to recognize things like Noun

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phrase, Verb phrase, Subject, Object, in advance. That is, he has to be able to perform a parsing, which means he has first processed the message. But how does he do this? How does he get the message in the first place, so that he can recognize Noun phrases, etc.? The Chomskyan scheme begs this question, precisely the question the Columbia school addresses. Chomsky, in effect, asks: How does the child deal with the parsed message? The Columbia school asks: How does he get the message to begin with? Chomsky says we need a theory to explain how the child could know all these things: structure dependency, head parameter, subjacency, etc. This assumes that these things actually constitute observed behavior. Columbia school disagrees. These are hypotheses about behavior, not actually observed behavior. They are part of a theory of language, not observations of language. They are what people are doing only if that particular theory of language is correct. In this study we have argued that that theory is not correct. Is there, then, a "logical question of language acquisition"? There is only if one adopts the a priori position that that which is acquired is traditional sentence-based grammar. In contrast, the grammar posited by a Columbia-school analysis is a much simpler thing. One can well imagine children learning meanings like MORE and LESS CONTROL by ordinary hypothesizing processes observed in other areas of child behavior. It is simply a question of trial and error before they guess the meanings that other speakers appear to associate with lui and le. To quote the writer Tim Appelo,7 anyone who pays any attention to children sees that they "love the primal thrill of demolishing their simple, recently constructed mental categories" and do it all the time. Using this grammar then becomes a skill like other skills children learn. Much of Chomsky's evidence for innateness hinges on assumptions of nonfunctionality in language, like the puzzling anomalies in the use of lui and le seen at the outset of this study. The whole thrust of the present analysis, though, has been to reveal functionality in the complexity of lui and le. Neither innateness nor "modularity" is necessary to explain it. Indeed, it appears that grammar can be acquired precisely because it is like other human faculties and skills, particularly those involving tool-using. It must be said that linguistic-cognitive theorizing in the UG framework has run far ahead of neurobiological research (see, e.g. Kimura 1988). Columbia-school assumptions about innate human abilities are much more self-evident and less controversial than Chomsky's. We know independently of language that people are able to deal with symbols and abstract mental structures, that they use inferential powers to jump to conclusions on the basis of sparse information, and that they generally try to achieve a maximum return for a minimum investment of effort. Little else need be invoked.

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR 6.

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Observations and Hypotheses in Linguistics

This book has viewed sentence grammar as a relic of prescientific thinking, a heterogeneous mixture of deductively motivated but inductively unsupported categories of thought and logic with deductively unmotivated, purely descriptive categories whose function is to plug holes in the deductive scheme. Although this grammar originally had an explanatory purpose, it was not regarded as a testable hypothesis in the modern sense. Empirically unsuccessful categories were not discarded; rather, the whole body of categories, the motivated ones and the unmotivated ones, emerged as a canon that was relied upon unquestioningly in most subsequent thinking about language. As the empirical problem of occurrences of forms was lost sight of, the canon came to usurp the role of observations. In contemporary grammatical theory, sentences and sentence structure are the starting point of analysis; they function as premises, not hypotheses, about language. Columbia-school linguists, on the other hand, maintain that the sentence and its derivative categories are indeed hypotheses about language, that they require justification, and that, upon testing, they turn out to be unsupported. One can not directly observe a sentence, or parts of a sentence. People will say they can "observe" a sentence on a printed page; but they are, of course, not observing a sentence. They are observing only ink marks on the page. Any categorization imposed on these ink marks — letter, word, phrase, clause, sentence, or whatever — comes not from the page itself, but from the mind. Categories in the mind can likewise not be directly observed; their identity is determined by the devising and testing of hypotheses. One occasionally hears it argued that the existence of sentences and parts of the sentence can be proven on the basis of intonation patterns or perceptual pauses in processing, or by speaker intuitions. Yet it has never been demonstrated that these are not simply reactions to groupings in messages, units or partial units of thought. Speakers may group words together by intonation or pauses to make messages easier to process; but in identifying such groups one has not identified units of linguistic structure. What, then, are the observations about language which a Columbia school analysis undertakes to explain? The problem set forth in this study was to explain the distribution of a particular set of morphemes, those represented in writing as lui, leur, le, la, les. But of course morphemes are not directly observable; they themselves are hypotheses, part of an explanatory chain, not primary observations. What we want to do is get back to the beginning of this chain, to the brute facts of nature,

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as it were, which first motivate the "Why?" and set in motion the search for explanation. Columbia-school theory takes the explanatory chain back to the most primitive level of observation: the sound waves of speech.8 One can actually hear sound (or see ink marks on a page). Specifically, what we are attempting to explain is the shape of those sound waves (or ink marks). The sound waves produced by speech have a different shape from those of, say, white noise (which would be shapeless) or other types of noise (each of which would have a different shape), and we want to know why. Why do people make those particular noises? Communication is one explanatory parameter; the human factor is another. (Explaining ink marks requires an additional layer of explanation, which ultimately links up with sound.) Descriptivist linguistics began the chain of explanation by isolating the units called "phonemes" and "morphemes". To get this far, a single criterion is used: distinctiveness. But the process can go no further without a major shift in procedure. In particular, there are two things left unexplained at this point: asymmetry in the distribution of phonemes within morphemes, and asymmetry in the distribution of morphemes with relation to each other in discourse. For example, we find in French texts the combination lui obéir; we do not find the combination l'obéir. This is simply one precise way of asking what explains the shape of the sound wave of speech. What is needed now is a criterion other than simple distinctiveness. For the asymmetry of morphemes in texts, the obvious candidate is meaning. Bloomfield himself (1926: §50; 1933:264) posited a unit — the noeme — connected to the morpheme much like Saussure's signifiant and signifié. But the anti-mentalistic Bloomfieldian school shied away from analysis based on these units. The analytical difficulties associated with meaning at the level of the morpheme were one of the reasons why generative grammar went off in an entirely different direction. The issue here is that of orientations: What should be the deductive control on the kinds of meanings one posits? Put another way: Upon what sources of knowledge, independent of language, must one draw in order to explain this asymmetry in the sound waves? Thus far in the descriptivist procedure, there is only one orientation: communication. The criterion of "distinctiveness" used to isolate phonemes and morphemes is, of course, a distinctiveness in communication. The question: "Same or different?" which the field worker asked of his informant meant simply "same or different with regard to what is communicated". Attempts to introduce consideration of different kinds of differences, that is, of different meanings, all aimed to continue the process as it had proceeded

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up to this point, namely, by applying only one orientation: the communicative orientation. This led to analytical failure. Communication is a plausible starting point for linguistic analysis because language clearly has to do with communication. But the kinds of meanings postulated repeatedly failed to fit actual distributions of morphemes in texts. To syntacticians, this suggests that meaning be abandoned altogether as a basis for explanation. To Columbia school linguists, however, it suggests only that the communicative orientation is an insufficient control, not that it should be abandoned. Here a second orientation is introduced: the human factor. Just as it is not surprising that the distributions of morphemes have something to do with communication, so too is it predictable that behavioral characteristics of humans are involved. Language is, after all, transparently an instance of human behavior.

7.

The Human Factor in Language

The instrumental view of meaning recognizes the constant, active intervention of the language user in bridging the gap between meaning and message. In consequence, the connection between meaning and message will not necessarily be transparent in the abstract, independently of a particular instance of exploitation of a meaning. A meaning may not be transparently present in a message. What the analyst must show is that the tool — a particular meaning — is appropriate for the task — the intended message. This approach might risk running off into unchecked speculation about the human factor — resulting in a "black box" approach to analysis — were it not for the inductive control. The analyst's eyes are always focused on the problem to be solved: a skewed distribution of morphemes. Only as much is brought in from the human factor as is needed to solve that problem. The human factor itself never becomes the object of study. In practice, it has turned out that such problems can be solved by appealing to uncontroversial aspects of human behavior. The sparsity of information communicated by lui- and le-, in contrast to the richness of messages associated with them, points to the well-known human tendency to jump to conclusions on the basis of a minimum of information. The preference of speakers to use the relatively imprecise lui- when its association with a role is easy, and to use one of the more precise "prepositions" when there is some difficulty in inferring a role point to the well-known human proclivity to do no more work than is necessary to get a job done (in this case, to choose among various more precise items when a less precise one will do). The grammatical interlock reflects the

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well-known human tendency to devise tools that will accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously, rather than using separate tools, when the simultaneous accomplishment of a particular group of tasks is a frequent necessity. We have also seen familiar human perceptual and cognitive strategies reflected in the strategies of language. One example of this occurred in Chapter 7 when we saw à, meaning CIRCUMSTANCE, used for messages of "responsibility", reflecting the ordinary human bias to attribute responsibility for an event to whatever entity is found at the scene of the event. More generally, the whole study of lui- and le- has been laced with motifs which betray the active involvement of the human user of language: the constant weighing of alternatives; the use of subtlety; repeating oneself with a variety of mechanisms to make sure the point gets across; selecting things which are of greater interest to humans for greater linguistic investment. In contrast to a code (such as, say, Morse code), where there is a fixed, mechanical relation between input and output, human language requires human beings for its successful operation, since the content of the message far exceeds the scanty input. In the standard grammars, the fundamental assumption seems to be that of an imperfect code: "Methods of indicating the Indirect Object"; but the issue of how this code functions in communication is never confronted. The standard grammars essentially ignore the morphology, the human operator, and even the fact that communication is involved. The Columbia school also posits an imperfect code, but one that is oriented in the opposite direction: "Methods of exploiting the meaning of lui-"; and a Columbia-school analysis goes to considerable pains to show how the imprecision is made use of. This book is sprinkled with phrases like "the precision factor", "resolution of ambiguity", "interest in ... ", and "exploitation of ... ", which imply the need for an intelligent assessment of the possibilities of communication, by both speaker and hearer. The essence of this approach, then, is to recognize the similarities between language and other types of human behavior and trace the consequences of the similarities, rather than the differences. The language faculty is much like other faculties. Language is a set of tools, and language use is a learned skill, like other human tool-using skills. To summarize the larger issue in very simple terms: The major schools of twentieth-century American linguistics — Bloomfield, the Descriptivists, the Generativists — wanted to analyze language without getting into what they regarded as the intractably messy problem of the meanings of linguistic forms. They asserted that there exists a linguistic structure that is independent of meaning, that is not a consequence of the communicative function of language, and that can be explored on its own terms. But this structure, to the extent that

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one was ever actually postulated, turned out to be none other than sentence grammar, derived from the premise that the structure of language reflects the structure of thought, and replete with the sentence-derived categories of traditional grammar as well as its lack of inductive fit and deductive coherency. The analytical mess that linguists tried to avoid by ignoring meaning, in short, surfaced in another place. What Columbia-school analysis shows is that the intractability of meaning can be overcome by adding the human factor orientation to the communicative orientation. As long as the analytical procedure is dominated by an insistence on fit between hypothesis and observations, analysis does indeed reveal language to have a structure; but the structure thus revealed is very different from that postulated by sentence grammar. This book has endeavored to present a radically non-traditional functional view of language and linguistics through the vehicle of an analysis of French lui and le. The heart of this view is the rejection of a prioristic categories of grammar and the adoption of categories that sustain rigorous testing against observable facts of French usage. This search for defensible categories is propelled by meaning, and finds no place for traditional categories of syntax. The syntactic tradition is vast and deeply ingrained in the thinking of nearly all linguists. No claim can be made that this vast tradition has been vaporized by the analysis in this book. However, it can be asserted that this analysis has removed one chip from what has been assumed to be an irreducible central syntactic core. When this analysis is put together with work along the same lines by Reid, Garcia, Zubin, Contini-Morava and others, and especially the as yet largely unpublished work of William Diver, the chipping away leaves a considerable dent. There is every reason to believe that the continuation of this work will lead to a revised view of the nature of language, a view in which the structure of language is motivated, not opaque, and the human users of language are recognized as playing a major role in shaping this communicative instrument through their creativity, intelligence, impatience, and, yes, laziness. That is to say, people are being typically human when they engage in that most typically, human activity: language.

Notes

Chapter 1 1.

See De la Garza (1985), esp. Ch. II.

2.

See Guiraud (1974:7); Harris & Taylor (1989:49).

3.

See Aarsleff (1967:14-15).

4.

See e.g. Greenough et al. (1931:228).

5.

See e.g. Bloomfield (1933:192-193); Lyons (1968:241).

6.

See Lyons (1968:289); Bloomfield (1933:272).

7.

Case Grammar also assigns this to the syntactic component, implying that the choice of case is not meaning-based (Lyons 1977:436-437).

8.

Many grammars attempt to justify this rule on the grounds that in French a verb cannot take two direct objects (as it could e.g. in Latin). This is incorrect, for example (10) does in fact have two direct objects. If it be countered that these objects could not both be pronouns, the second one being les, then one could ask why the second object is not simply made clitic to the second verb (i.e. *le fit les rencontrer).

9.

Brunot (1936:379) attributes this paradox to the fact that the benefactive construction derives from Latin ad 'to', and the privative from ab 'from', which, by regular phonological development, coalesced into French à, both uses being preserved. (If the object is a noun, both examples in (14) will have à: On an envoyé/volé 100 francs à Jean.) This argument clearly fails, because both constructions pronominalize to lui, for which no comparable argument can be brought to bear. We are then led back to the original question of why lui is used for both.

10.

Barnes (1979:216) blames "government" on history: "The indirect construction of nuire is apparently a vestige of the usual Latin construction which has resisted the tendency toward transitivity." But "government" is a problem for Latin grammars too, and Barnes admits that "even Classical Latin had its inconsistencies." Her last line of defense is to attribute it to capaciousness: these datives are (p. 247) "evidence for the arbitrary nature of the direct/indirect object distinction where the verb has only one object". This problem forces Barnes to admit (p. 216) that the semantic values she

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posits for direct and indirect object constructions in French "must be considered more a tendency than an absolute rule." Moreover: "the principle itself is somewhat problematic in that it can only be stated in relatively imprecise terms." Ultimately Barnes must mark individual verbs for a dative object in the lexicon. For further discussion of Barnes (1979) see Huffman (1985:21-33). 11.

Especially recommended are Reid (1991), Contini-Morava & Goldberg (eds.) (1995), and García (1975). See also Diver (1977, 1981, 1982, 1986 and 1995); Diver (ed.) (1982); Gorup (1987); Contini-Morava (1989); Huffman (1989a); Kirsner (1979b); Reid (1974, 1979).

12.

See e.g. Searle (1972) and Chomsky (1975:56-57).

13.

To say that the communicative function of language is a determining factor in its structure by no means implies that every time language is used, it must be for purely communicative purposes; it is merely to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of the communicative function. This error in understanding of the issue is made by Chomsky (1980:230).

14.

Such is the view of Harris (1990); see Chapter 8 below. Otheguy (1995: §4) appears to disagree with this attribution to Saussure.

15.

This is also called a "compositional" view (Reid 1991:7, 95, 327-328). See Pinker (1994:334) for the unquestioning assumption of this view.

16.

See Chapter 6, below, for further discussion.

17.

Cf. the 99 datives in Smyth's Greek Grammar.

18.

The disjunctive pronouns in French are used as objects of prepositions, or generally in any part of the sentence, without exhibiting the type of word-order relationship to the verb exhibited by the clitics (hence their designation as "disjunctives" — disjoined from the verb). The forms of the disjunctive (i.e. non-clitic) personal pronouns of the third person are: lui, masculine singular; elle, feminine singular; eux, masculine plural; elles, feminine plural. According to the traditional view the disjunctive masculine singular lui and the clitic masculine and feminine singular lui are not the same form, but homonyms; this view is in agreement with the hypothesis to be presented in the present study.

19.

Kayne (1975:146-147) erroneously cites semblable as taking the dative clitic; it in fact takes à + disjunctive like pareil (see below).

20.

Barnes (1979:271-272) calls these cases "the most problematic for our analysis, since we could discover no consistent semantic property which would distinguish all of these verbs from the non-dative intransitives such as penser" Again (p. 244): "There does not appear to be any systematic semantic distinction between these two classes which would explain the differing behavior of their á-complements." Rouveret & Vergnaud (1980:169) admit frankly that they have no way of isolating the relevant semantic parameter and revert to the "list" approach.

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Chapter 2 1.

As per Lyons (1977:483).

2.

See Reid (1991:171-177). Participants in Events are thus distinguished from e.g. circumstances of Events. For example, in John sent Mary home, 'home' is interpreted as the place where John sent Mary; thus, 'John' and 'Mary' are the only two Participants. However, in John sent Mary a home, the article encourages an entity-like interpretation of 'home', which is consequently taken as a third participant and assumes the role played by 'Mary' in the earlier two-participant example. In certain areas of English grammar this terminological innovation has even more crucial consequenses than in the present analysis; cf. Reid (1991:174—178).

3.

Other discussions of Degree of Control can be found in Diver (1982) and (1995); García (1975); García & Otheguy (1974) and (1977); Lattey (1980); Otheguy (1981); Penhallurick (1975); Port (1972); Zubin (1972, 1977 and 1978).

4.

By convention, in this type of diagram meanings are indicated with small capital letters, semantic substances with capitals and lower case. When necessary, areas of semantic substance which are not meanings because not associated with a signal are indicated in lower case letters.

5.

Il

often looks like a High Controller: (A) Il a vendu la maison. 'He sold the house.' However, il is also used to communicate another type of message which could apparently not be accounted for by assigning il the meaning HIGH Degree of Control; rather, it appears to be a question of manipulating Focus (see Chapter 5): (B) Il vient quelquefois des Américaines riches. 'There sometimes come rich American women.' One possible hypothesis is that il has only a Focus meaning, but not a Control meaning; this is the hypothesis to be suggested below. It is also possible that il in (B) is part of a different signal with a different meaning from il in (A), in which case the first il might well mean HIGH Degree of Control. Elle can be used as "subject pronoun", as in: (C) Elle a vendu la maison. 'She sold the house.' However, the word elle can also be used "disjunctively" after prepositions, or for emphasis: (D1) Je suis parti avec elle. 'I left with her.' (D2) Je ne l'aime pas, elle. 'Her I don't like.' It might be possible to account for the distribution of elle in both types of examples with a single meaning, or it may turn out that elle with clitic word order means HIGH Degree of Control and elle without clitic word order is a different signal with a different meaning.

NOTES

345

These are all analytical questions. In the present study we will not attempt to decide these questions, concentrating only on lui and le. For practical purposes here, il and elle will be treated as High Controllers in the same way as preverbal nouns. 6.

That is, lui and le are interlocked differently from the word-order Control system; in particular, they signal Deixis, Person, Gender, and Number meanings, which the wordorder system does not.

7.

That is, le and la being written /' before a vowel.

8.

That is, the final consonant of les being pronounced before a vowel.

9.

We have made the point that Columbia-school analyses hold themselves strictly responsible to linguistic form at the morphemic level and insist that any analysis including homonyms be preceded by a serious attempt to establish a one-to-one correlation between a form and a meaning. The reader may thus wonder whether the present analysis has fully discounted the possibility of functional and formal identity between clitic lui- and non-clitic lui, and between clitic le- and the definite article le. This author in fact spent much time attempting to establish a "one lui, one le" analysis before settling on the present analysis. Attempts to establish unified signal-meaning pairs all failed. The details of these unsuccessful analyses cannot be given here; space is short enough for the details of the successful analysis. One problem with the unified lui hypothesis can be seen immediately. Non-clitic lui has a distinct feminine form and plural forms which are different from those of lui-; no explanation emerged for this incongruity. But the difficulty of finding a satisfactory semantic characterization of the putative unified lui was the real problem. A more serious hypothesis, based on a Deixis meaning (see Chapter 5), suggested itself for le, and a serious effort was made to validate such a hypothesis. Ultimately, however, it seemed to be the case that that although Deixis alone may work well for "article" le, the "pronoun" le- has many distributional peculiarities that cannot be explained by Deixis alone. The present analysis emerged when the author realized the significance of clitic word order as a differentiator of signals, and the role of Focus (see Chapter 5) as a unifying semantic feature of the clitics. Thus, strictly speaking, the present work will not provide a complete explanation of the distribution of the morphemes lui and le, since no formal hypothesis will be offered for "disjunctive" lui and "definite article" le. Only that part of the distribution represented by the signals lui- and le- will be explained.

10. This discussion points up a fundamental weakness in Chomskyan Universal Grammar. It will be pointed out in Chapter 6 that Chomsky's "projection principle", whereby syntactic properties of lexical items are "projected" onto the syntax, does not work because properties such as "transitivity" are in fact not encoded by individual verbs. With regard to roles in the activity of the type we have been discussing here, Chomsky posits "semantic selection", with "thematic roles" likewise built into entries in the lexicon for individual lexical items (see Cook, 1988:110-117). But this "s-selection" will not work any more than "c-selection"; the "roles" can not be built into the verb any more than can syntactic "selection features".

346 11.

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

The key ta abbreviations of texts cited follows the Bibliography at the end of this work.

12.

See Reid (1991:327-328).

13.

Note that when 'Mary' is mentioned this way — in traditional terms, as the "object of a preposition" — it is technically being asserted that she is not a controlling participant in the event, since no meaning from the System of Participants is signalled. This is true even when the message seems very close to what would be communicated by lui-: Marie l'a achetée pour elle. 'Mary bought it for her.' An extensive discussion below will establish that this mechanism does, in fact, deny the status of Controlling Participant, and the motivations for the choice between this mechanism and lui- will be explained.

14.

We note that any comparison between our strategies and Chomsky's "grammatical functions" is inappropriate. Chomsky (1965:68 ff.) makes a sharp distinction between "grammatical categories", i.e. actual categories of a language, and "grammatical functions", i.e. things the categories are used for. Traditional notions such as "subject" and "object" are cast into the latter class. To be sure, the Columbia School makes an apparently similar distinction with "meanings" = actual categories of a language, and "strategies" of exploitation of these meanings. But the similarity is only superficial. Chomsky's distinction is not part of an instrumental orientation toward language of the kind offered here. Moreover, in our analysis, notions like "subject" and "object" do not figure even as strategies. That is, at no level, even at that of the message, do we recognize these logic-based notions as operative in French.

15.

Contextual factors, of course, have a great deal to do with what the nature of the entity in question is inferred to be. If something is done to push the interpretation of 'home' in the direction of being a thing rather than a place, then it becomes a candidate for participancy, as in: John sent Mary a home. The "article" attached to 'home' favors its interpretation as an entity; Mary once again is the recipient, and John is her wealthy benefactor.

16.

We would, however, expect context to show that 'they' in this case were not posing as deliberately or motivating as strongly as when leur- is used.

17.

See above, p. 9.

18.

Thus, it is not necessarily the case that the disjunctive pronouns signal emphasis, as is often stated or implied in traditional grammars (cf. the designation "emphatic pronouns" for these forms). This is clear enough from the fact that the disjunctives are regularly used with prepositions without any special emphatic effect. (The designation "emphatic pronoun" is apparently motivated by non-prepositional uses.) Rather, emphasizing requires breaking out of the satellite relation with the verb; and since luiand le- are no longer available, the disjunctives are used by default. See Davis (1992:349, 377) for further discussion of disjunctive pronouns, with reference to Italian.

NOTES

19.

347

Examples like this, with lui- and faire plus an infinitive, will be discussed at length in Chapter 4.

20.

For a full discussion and evaluation of Hatcher's analysis see Huffman (1985:398-405).

21.

The texts used in the count are MCE, CER, GHT, MDA, BCR, AMS, and SAR.

22.

For readers not familiar with the concept of "skewing" as used here, the explanation of this table is as follows. The numbers in the cells are the actually observed frequencies. To determine whether these numbers support the prediction we determine a calculated frequency. That is, the 182 examples of /- form with Group I against 5 with Group II might simply reflect the fact that these texts talk about Group I type events more than about the Group II type. We control for this by multiplying the proportion of lui- to le- in the corpus by the overall proportion of Group I events to Group II (these numbers obtained from the totals of the rows and the totals of the columns), and multiplying this by the total number N of examples. This yields a number for each cell representing the null hypothesis, i.e. what the figures would be if the correlation between /- form vs. possessive adjective and type of event predicted by the Control hypothesis did not exist. We then take the difference, "d", between these calculated frequencies and the observed frequencies. This number, ±35.9 in this table, is of course the same for each cell. Since this number is not zero, the null hypothesis is disconfirmed and a skewing confirmed. The table is arranged so that the cells representing the predicted favorings are in the upper left and lower right corners of the table. In the upper left and lower right cells the d of 35. 9 is a positive number, and in the other two cells it is a negative number. This means that the prediction is confirmed. The odds ratio (OR) is obtained by dividing the product of the two plus cells (upper left and lower right) by the product of the two minus cells (upper right and lower left). An odds ratio of 1 represents the null hypothesis; anything over 1 shows a favoring of the hypothesis. (Less than one would disfavor the hypothesis.) Thus, the odds ratio in this count says: "In this corpus, the odds that an /- form will occur with a Group I event (rather than Group II) is 67.8 times greater than that a possessive adjective will occur with a Group I event (rather than Group II)."

23.

Readers may wonder whether lui- and le- behave differently from each other in this test. One would predict the major division to be between the Control forms and the non-Control forms. But one might also predict that, as between lui- and le-, the former would skew more strongly toward Group I verbs, since its higher Control meaning implies a greater degree of crucial involvement than le-. However, there is a conflicting factor which could tend to neutralize this effect. Type B are two-participant examples. It will be shown in Chapter 5 that in two-participant examples there is a strategy reflecting Control level of the High Controller whereby le- is favored with a relatively more aggressive High Controller and consequently with a verb denoting a relatively more aggressive activity. Group I contains a number of such verbs, while Group II does not. This means that there is at least one factor not relevant to the rationale of the present count, which will favor use of le- with Group I verbs. The figures are as follows:

348

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

Group I

Group II

d = ±20.1

Group I

Group II

Type A {lui-)

Type C

127 +

29

1

54 +

OR = 236.5

N = 211

Type A {lui-)

Type B {le-)

127 +

55

1

4 +

d = ±2.4 OR = 9.2 N=187 The first table represents a strong skewing, the second table a weaker one, confirming that the major division is between Control and non-Control. 24.

In the original, this is in the first person: "Le garçon d'hôtel rigolait quand nous sommes montés, c'est un Algérien, je déteste ces types-là, j ' e n ai peur, il m'a regardé les jambes ...". The object pronoun here, me, is a clitic pronoun which indicates that its referent is a participant. Had this passage been written in the third person, the pronoun would have been lui-. We have made this transposition, allowing the thirdperson form to appear, since our immediate object of interest is the third-person pronouns.

25.

The count includes all examples in the text with a body part and either lui- or the possessive adjective, excluding those involving verbs which never occur with one of the two (like être, which occurs only with the possessive adjective when there is a body part, as discussed below).

26.

The one example in the count which did contain both lui- and an adjective was as follows: ' Marcelle lâcha la main droite de Mathieu et lui happa l'autre main au passage ... 'Marcelle released Mathieu's right hand and grapped his other hand in passing ...' The adjective here, autre, serves merely to identify which hand is being talked about, and does not concentrate attention on the hand by describing it in any way.

Chapter 3 1.

It must be understood that Figure 3.1 in no sense indicates how likely it is that the Degree of Control system itself — as opposed to non-Control options — will be used for a particular type of message; it simply relates, in the abstract, different types of involvement to greater or lesser degrees of Control.

NOTES

349

2.

The "agent" is usually High Controller; but when there is a participant exerting a degree of control even higher than that of agent, this "superagent" is High Controller and the agent is Mid Controller (lui-). These examples, traditionally termed "causatives", are a striking manifestation of linguistic value in the functioning of this system and will be discussed in Chapter 4. Our term "causer" refers not to that usage, but rather to a Degree of Control somewhat higher than that of the "motivator", as will be explained.

3.

As will be suggested in Chapter 7, English relies less on its Control system than French because of the relative difficulty of using a word-order signal, as compared to the morphological signals of French.

4.

This usage of the term "causer" must not be confused with examples consisting of lui+ faire + infinitive, referred to in the grammars as "faire causative". We use the term "superagent" to denote the High Controller in those examples, which will be dealt with fully in Chaper 4.

5.

We emphasize that this special effect is motivated for these particular verbs, which denote typical human interactions. It does not follow that lui- referring to an inanimate with other verbs would necessarily entail personification or some other special effect.

6.

Note the identity of our position on this point to that of Langacker (1991:187 ff.).

7.

That is, for this type of message. The regular way, of course, of including a noninteracting entity is as Low Controller: Il sait bien lire le français et il le parle bien aussi. 'He knows how to read French well and he speaks it well also.' This, however, is a manifestation of the value relations within the system, not a question of applicability of the semantic substance of Degree of Control. This phenomenon will be discussed in the next chapter.

8.

The category "dative of possession" survives from Latin grammars, where it is found among the semantically-motivated "uses of the dative", all of these uses unrelated to the primary function of the dative as Indirect Object. The Dative is used with esse ('to be') and similar words to denote Possession: est mihi domi pater T have a father at home' (Greenough et al 1931: §373) In grammars of French, it refers to a very different type of construction. In Latin, the "dative of possession" is syntactically a "predicate dative", whereas in the French example it is an "indirect object".

9.

Saying explicitly that the man had the hat in his hands contributes to the picture of the man's awkwardness and nervousness that is being presented here.

10.

The choice between a message of "instrument" and one of "accompaniment" for avec depends on other information in the context. For "accompaniment" to be inferred, since this is a rather unusual message, we would expect contextual mention of the fact that we are dealing with the hands of a mannequin or hands severed from a human body. In the absence of this, the "instrument" interpretation is more plausible.

350

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

11.

For further discussion of "inalienable possession" see García (1975:281-284), and Hinnebusch & Kirsner (1980, esp. §4).

12.

Cf. Fraser, Squair & Parker (1948:566); Blinkenberg (1961:243). Grevisse (1969:§192) uses the terms "attribution" and "deprivation".

13.

Here and in the next example, which contains the same kind of double mention, the possessive adjective is called for because this is the first mention in context of the associated item, and it is necessary to make it clear which "property" and "terrine" are being referred to.

14.

The other factor contributing to the supposed idiomaticity of lui en vouloir is the use of en with no apparent antecedent. Note that such use of a pronoun is common when a speaker wishes a referent to be inferred that has some negative or menacing character, as in English: "Watch out, or you're going to get it!" The effect of not specifying the referent is to enhance the threatening nature of the remark, by leaving it open to the hearer's imagination.

Chapter 4 1.

Harmer (1979; see discussion below) does report one such example. However, there is a textual problem with this example, discussed in Huffman (1985:208).

2.

Cannings & Moody (1978) cite additional arguments for treating French "causatives" on a semantic rather than a syntactic basis. They offer their own semantic approach, which will be examined in detail in Chapter 7. Briefly, their analysis fails for many of the same reasons as does that of Barnes (1979), discussed in Chapter 1, especially: overly broad and consequently untestable semantic categories (such as the notion of "Goal"), and reliance on invented examples and informants' offhand impressions ("intuitions") rather than on fully contextualized data from actual French texts.

3.

Cannings & Moody (1978:351) discuss examples where lui- is used in the absence of an "expressed direct object": Je lui ai fait parler de Pierre. T had him speak about Pierre.' They themselves point out that the existence of such examples argues against a syntactic treatment of the "faire causative construction". However, they overlook the fact that both lui- and le- occur in this environment, and they thus fail to pose the crucial question of what differentiates the two.

4.

Some of Harmer's examples do not belong on his list at all, since they are not examples of what he is discussing. For details, see Huffman (1985:238-239, note 9).

5.

Even if he is speaking French to his friends so that they can practice their French, and thus we might say that the language is providing some motivation for the speaking, the motivation for speaking nevertheless comes much less directly and in much smaller measure from the language than from the friends themselves. If it is he who wants to practice his French, the interaction of the interlocutors enables the speaking to occur, so that they exercise a relatively powerful control. In either case, the interaction of the "friends" is much greater than that of the language.

NOTES

351

6.

One-participant messages are not examined in any depth in the present study, because they do not involve lui- or le-.

7.

The presence of the prepositional phrase with sur in (53) has no bearing on the choice between lui- and le-, which reflects only the Control level of the Non-High Participant. Compare example (53) to the following:

8. 9.

Quand on le pressait sur le comptoir, il en sortait un jus jaune. 'When one squeezed it (le-, e.g. the lemon) on the counter, there came out a yellow juice.' Avant de lui donner le citron, je le lui ai pressé sur le comptoir. 'Before giving him the lemon, I squeezed it (le-) for him (lui-) on the counter.' All possibilities — lui- alone, le- alone, or both together — can occur in the presence of the prepositional phrase. The choice is independent of the syntactic environment. A pair like this was advanced early in Chapter 1 to show the failure of the category "direct object" to correlate with choice of clitic. The foregoing represents a rethinking of the analysis of these examples presented in Huffman (1983:294).

10. As will be seen below, this option actually also exists with payer, but conseiller provides a clearer illustration. 11.

Juggling this many entities at once is a complex task, which surely explains why this message is so rare. The range of inferences derivable from lui- under these circumstances is limited, the only role one will infer apparently being the one seen here, a "dative of interest"-type message. More likely is the use of a preposition to make inference easier, in which case a disjunctive would be used rather than lui-.

12. This is not to say that all French verbs fall into one of these three categories; rather, that when we examine which verbs do fall into these categories, there are noteworthy skewings within the categories. 13.

By higher- and lower-potential we mean substantive potential for control, independently of what status French speakers actually decide to give them in a particular situation, a decision which must also take into account the value-related factors discussed here. Such a distinction is implicit in the differentiation made in the vertical columns of Tables 4.1 and 4.2, with the division of referents into human and inanimate.

14.

The reason for this has to do with disambiguation of referents, for which French speakers depend on the difference of Degree of Control; see below, Chapter 5.

15.

The X's in parentheses indicate that it is not always possible to use this type of participant alone in a two-participant message. As noted above, a four-entity, "dative of interest"-type message with lui- is possible in types B2 and C.

16.

Another example with sourire was given in Chapter 3, example (41).

17.

Note that an "inner object" with one of these verbs in French is not a Controling Participant, but rather the object of a preposition: Il souriait d'un sourire malin. 'He was smiling a malicious smile.'

352

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

18.

We note that le- itself does not appear in example (a) here or in examples (67) and (68) below, although each example does contain a Low-Control participant commutable to le-. Recall that we are attempting here to establish something about these particular verbs and the type of message associated with them; it is therefore sufficient to know that if a pronoun were substituted for the noun in these examples, the pronoun used would be le-.

19.

The option rejected here would be: dont De Gaulle pourrait les fournir.

20.

See Barnes (1979:116).

21.

Consider this pair, showing the same point in English: John sent Mary home, (home = a place) John sent Mary a home, (home = a thing; John is Mary's wealthy benefactor)

22.

The difference between "textual resonance" and Halliday & Hasan's (1976) notion of textual "cohesion" is explained in Reid (1991:307-309).

Chapter 5 1.

The term "portmanteau morpheme", inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, was adopted by the strongly anti-deductive Descriptivist school, their goal being to provide a neutral description of linguistic structure without attempting to explain it. Here, we shall take an explantory approach by viewing such morphology against the background of the human and communicative orientations.

2.

For further discussion of the concept of Focus in Columbia-school analysis, the reader is referred especially to Zubin (1978, 1979). Other valuable discussions are found in Aoyama (1982, 1983), Davis (1992, 1995), García (1975), Gildin (1979, 1982, 1989), Kirsner (1973, 1979b), Lattey (1980), Moore (1982), Reid (1991:178-183), Otheguy (1981).

3.

Entities that are not technically participants in the event, such as those with prepositions, may be thought of as representing "even less focus" or "no focus". However, "no focus" is not a meaning of the Focus system because there is no signal for it. It is, rather, an effect that can be produced by failure to signal one of the two Focus meanings.

4.

See Gildin (1989) for analysis of the word-order-signalled Focus system. The Degree of Control portion of this interlock will be discussed further below in Chapter 7.

5.

The precise way in which this is done will not be discussed here. However, as an example of one such mechanism we may cite participles, one of which is involved in the so-called "passive voice".

6.

For Deixis in Columbia-school analysis see Aoyama (1995), García (1975), Kirsner (1972, 1979a), Léonard (1980, 1982, 1985, 1987, 1995), Otheguy (1981).

7.

That is, the typical strategy is of mentioning this entity twice: once in Focus, and once again out of focus.

8.

The diagram also helps to make clear why the logical place to begin investigating this system is with Degree of Control. The right-hand side of the diagram represents the

NOTES

353

most highly interlocked portion of the system. That is, the /- forms signal all three semantic substances: Control, Deixis, and Focus. Se signals only two of these, and il, only one. Thus, the opposition among the /- forms — lui-, leur- on the one hand, le-, la-, les- on the other — is in terms of only one parameter: Degree of Control, whereas other oppositions — e.g. between lui- and se, between lui- and il, or between se and il — must take into account at least two semantic substances. Degree of Control, then, can be discussed for the most part without introducing the other semantic substances. Once Degree of Control has been fully explicated, all the /- forms can be lumped together and their opposition to se discussed in terms of one parameter: Deixis. Subsequently, all of the above can be lumped together and their opposition to il be discussed in terms of one parameter: Focus. Were we to do things the other way around, it would be necessary to introduce at least two new notions and control at least two variables at the same time, resulting in a more difficult exposition. It is hoped that the present study will be the first installment in a larger study dealing with all the French clitics and, ultimately, the non-clitic pronouns as well. 9.

See Huffman (1985:76-77) on the essential dissimilarity between this analysis and the analysis of Spanish offered in García (1975).

10.

See Diver (1995).

11.

Even if it be argued that eczema can be a chronic condition and scars can be excised, the excision of a scar is a rare occurrence, and eczema, when chronic, is regularly prone to cycles of flaring up and subsiding. If these examples of lui- and le- are typical, the strategies will then reflect the typical, not the exceptional, situation.

12.

For additional examples of demander Huffman (1985:331-345).

13.

The verbs of communication of Type A might seem at first glance to be an exceptional instance of exploitation of the macro-level, yet this is not the case. It is not that all verbs of communication are of Type A; there are in fact several verbs of Type C that are verbs of communication, again reflecting micro-level exploitation. What was actually found is the reverse: in Type A, all verbs appear to have something to do with communication.

14.

Joseph Davis (personal communication) points out that in the Port Royal grammar (Lancelot 1660:141-142) government was originally understood as an "arbitrary" exception to an otherwise mentalistic view of grammar; the chapter on "syntax" (i.e. government and concord) was almost like an appendix to the grammar. Indeed, it is noteworthy that what was once just an appendix, a list of instances where a theory failed, has today become "linguistics" itself, in the view of many.

15.

From this vantage, much of what has traditionally been considered non-functional "redundancy" in language reveals itself as a highly integrated functional element of the communicative instrument. See Reid (1991:255, 303, 323, et passim.)

16.

For the rationale of the correlation between Control level and animacy, the reader is referred to our discussion of the two previous Tables.

and prier in the Mémoires de Guerre see

354

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

17.

Robertson (1859) was a very useful tool for devising these charts.

18.

Strictly speaking, we are only concerned here with instances where the non-high participant is animate. When inanimate, the non-high participant with échapper is denoted neither by lui- nor by le-, but by y, except in expressions meaning 'have a narrow escape', such as l'échapper belle, l'échapper de justesse.

19.

This choice offers a number of advantages, some of which have been alluded to already. Firstly, the context and the narrative itself are generally familiar, and require less detailed recounting than with a work of fiction. Secondly, the thematic unity often allows a minimization of the number of variables when comparing examples. Finally, the sheer length of the work (over 1000 pages) provides an ample number of examples, as well as sufficient material for the all-important quantitative study presented at the beginning of this section.

20.

This is the case in 7 of the 14 examples of blesser in our collection. Interestingly, the other 7 are all in the "passive voice" (i.e. even though the action involves two participants, only the Low Controller is mentioned); and in all but one of these the identity of the High Controller is not stated explicitly. The High Controller's not being mentioned provides a motivation for there being only one action; the more actions one mentions, the harder it becomes to avoid saying who is performing them all.

21.

There, De Gaulle was low Controller of the le- verb; here, he is high Controller of the lui- verb.

Chapter 6 1.

Cf. Harris & Taylor (1989:xiii, 26-27), Aarsleff (1967:15).

2.

See Diver (1977) for a more thorough tracing of the tripartite relationship in various areas of universal grammar.

3.

For a lucid discussion of the hypothetico-deductive method which provides the framework for modern research in the natural sciences, see Hempel (1966).

4.

Some grammars (e.g. Greenough et al. 1931:163) distinguish between General Grammar, to encompass those facts which represent a fit between logical structure and morphology, and Particular Grammar, the syntax, to include those facts which do not.

5.

Cf. note (14) of Chapter 5, above.

6.

Thanks to William Diver for supplying these examples from Homer, along with translations.

7.

See Guiraud (1974:5).

8.

See e.g. Brunot (1936:300).

9.

See Jespersen (1934:39 ff).

10.

Blinkenberg says (p. 50) that these cases represent an "apparently capricious distribution of the objects" and that these verbs "easily fall victim to an 'error' of construction."

11.

This view is argued in Otheguy (1995).

NOTES

355

12.

There is an analytical difficulty here, in that it is not established clearly that the criteria used to judge clauses as "foregrounded" or "backgrounded" were completely independent from the parameters against which they were being tested; that is, a judgement of fore- or backgrounding may have been a response to the presence of one or more of these parameters, resulting in a circular argument. We pass over this point, though, in favor of the theoretical point which is of more immediate interest.

13.

Somewhat paradoxically, Hopper (1988) himself attacks a priori grammar in favor of an "emergent grammar attitude". Without a doubt, Hopper's criticism of the "assumption of the prior givenness of linguistic categories like Noun, Pronoun, Proper Name" (p. 121) is perceptive. However, the actual categories which "emerge" in his own Emergent Grammar all turn out to be the "canonical" ones: Clause, Noun, Verb, Pronoun, Agent, Patient. One may doubt, then, whether Hopper has fully grasped the inconsistency we are pointing out here.

14.

The problems posed for Sentence grammar by "object drop" phenomena are in many ways similar to those posed by the notion of "pronominalization", on which see Chapter 7.

15.

In Chomsky's grammar, to be sure, the concepts "subject" and "object" are not given the status of "grammatical categories"; they are instead demoted to "grammatical functions". Even this, though, in our view, does not constitute a sufficient dismissal. For more on this point, see Chapter 2, fn. 14.

16.

See, e.g. Gary & Keenan (1977) and Johnson (1977).

Chapter 7 1.

Blanche-Benveniste (1975) begins with pronoun morphology, but still within an explicitly syntactic analytical framework.

2.

In the paradigms established by Blanche-Benveniste (1975:204), y appears three times, le three times, la and les each two times, lui and leur each four times, en four times, and me, te, nous, vous, se each a grand total of six times.

3.

The analysis presented in this book is in fact an example. Our reasons for postulating distinct signals lui- and le- for Degree of Control in addition to a "disjunctive" lui and a "definite article" le were discussed in Chapter 2. Note, however, that these signals are kept distinct by the clitic word-order element, a more immediate differentiator than the appeal to context on the basis of which many lexical homonyms are distinguished.

4.

We are willing to admit that the apparent meaning difference between à and a 'has' is as great as that between the two 'bear's or between 'blew' and 'blue', and that it is reasonable to assume for now that à and a are bona fide homonyms.

5.

The essentials of this hypothesis were first laid out in an essay by Gildin (1978), which is now unfortunately unavailable.

6.

It may be that the meaning HIGH Degree of Control is nowhere actually signalled in French. This question must remain open until the strategies of clitic se are explicated; see Chapter 5, section 1.4.

356

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

7.

This is not to say that one can not have participants in the message that do not employ this mechanism. One gets, for instance: La soupe, Pierre Va brûlée. 'The soup, Pierre burned it.' Here, la soupe is included without being specifically signalled as a Controlling Participant. The point is that the word-order Control system is a dedicated mechanism for including Controlling Participants and signalling their degree of control.

8.

In a few cases, noted below, a message with lui- corresponds to a noun participant included as a word-order-signalled Low Controller.

9.

See Reid (1991:299) on the perceptual problem of signal identification.

10.

Recall that lui- is a survival of Latin case morphology; whereas the use of word order as a signal of Control-Focus appears to have begun to develop only in the Old French period.

11.

An alternative possibility would be that the ranges of all these prepositions are different and overlap only in relatively small sectors of each. As will be seen below, however, the internal evidence from French strongly favors the hypothesis of relative imprecision.

12.

Vandeloise's other function of à — localizing — is somewhat misleading, because he introduces this bias by limiting his investigation to spatial uses of à in the first place. Nevertheless, to the extent that "localizing" means evoking an asymmetric target and landmark, this function is covered by the CIRCUMSTANCE meaning: a circumstance must be a circumstance of something else which is in some way more central.

13.

For instance, they associate this notion of Goal with the subject of the sentence: Les étudiants ont remarqué l'erreur. 'The students noticed the error.' This is anticipated by their analysis, the "agent" in the "causative construction" being regarded as the "subject of the lower clause". The above sentence thus underlies the sentence il afait remarquer l'erreur aux étudiants. They talk about "the content of the error moving to the students' attention", which consequently makes the "students" a "goal". Such dilution of semantic parameters to the point of meaninglessness, as well as the unconcern for a pairing of notion with morphology, leads to an analytical treatment very much like that of Barnes (1979), discussed in Chapter 1, with similar resulting problems.

14.

In a footnote (p. 356), Cannings & Moody do make passing reference to a possible analysis based on the notion "least marked preposition", perhaps implying something like the "degree of precision" hypothesis we are offering; but they do not develop this notion any further.

15.

The actual meaning of par may well be something like 'intermediary'. With places, par can suggest an 'intermediary stage', e.g.: Pour aller de Paris à Nice il faut passer par Marseille. 'To go from Paris to Nice one must pass through Marseilles.' In the examples we are examining, the "intermediary" takes the specific form of an agent, comparable to a message of means or instrument which would be associated with an inanimate object. Notice that the word "agent" itself can have the sense of 'someone who acts for someone else', i.e. an intermediary.

NOTES

357

16.

See e.g. Fraser, Squair and Parker (1948: §99).

17.

Cannings & Moody further note that "when the reflexive pronoun is a direct object, par is the preferred preposition." Here, too, they have overlooked "reserving". They cite the example: On s'est fait connaître aux/par les invités, glossing it 'We had (got) ourselves introduced to the guests.' But, in fact, with par, the message would most likely be: 'We had ourselved introduced by the guests', leaving 'to the guests' to be expressed with à. There may well be some overall favoring of par with these examples, but this would again have to do with the relative precision of par over à. These examples contain only three participants, as opposed to four in the examples we have been looking at. The morphological ambiguity of the "reflexive" pronouns between dative and accusative thereby becomes a critical factor. Given the greater inferential burden on the hearer, the relative precision of par is a useful means of helping inference, and the imprecision of à may create a degree of inferential complexity that hearers will not tolerate.

18.

Diver (1987) shows that in Homeric Greek, the choice of a member of the system of Number is a function of degree of interest. When two of something are being talked about, the more precise Dual number is chosen over the Plural when the part of the message in which it occurs commands a relatively high degree of interest.

19.

For example: Nous voyons Jean. Jean nous voit.

'We see Jean.' 'Jean sees us.'

There may, in fact, be an additional factor distinguishing the two. The "subject" nous and vous may be part of discontinuous morphemes which include also the verb ending; thus the actual signals would be nous... -ons and vous... -ez versus nous- and vous- . From a communicative standpoint it is very significant that the first and second persons plural are the only ones to have really maintained distinctive verb endings, particularly in spoken French and in the productive conjugation (-er verbs). It is precisely here that the pronouns lack morphological distinctions they have in the other persons; the first and second persons plural maintain these distinctions with the help of verb endings. This does not, however, imply that the help provided by word order is unnecessary; on the contrary, both factors help the hearer cope. See Chapter 5 on the meanings of the first and second person clitics. 20.

Another possibility is to use the plural clitic pronoun which includes both (or all) the entities to be itemized, and then individualize them after the verb. Thus, example (71) might also be rendered: (71') Je les vois, lui et elle. T see them, him and her.'

21.

Unless they are placed after the verb, in which case a different meaning is being signalled. See Gildin (1982, 1989).

22.

The frequency-of-occurrence ratio of le- to lui- in two of the texts in our corpus is: SNA 3.4 to 1; DNH 5.0 to 1.

358

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

23.

Another correlation between numerical frequency (an indicator of communicative importance) and investment in linguistic apparatus can be seen in the singular/plural distinction. With LESS CONTROL, there is a gender distinction in the more heavily used singular, but none in the plural. The ratio of singular {le-, la- ) to plural {les-) in our two texts is as follows: SNA 2.8 to 1; DNH 5.2 to 1.

24.

This author is aware that clitics order differently in e.g. Italian, and one naturally wonders why, if, as seems largely true, the factors mentioned here also apply to Italian. Unfortunately, it is not possible to answer this question without a full analysis of the corresponding Italian clitics. Experience has shown that a close look at the facts in particular languages reveals differences — possibly subtle — in the ways different languages exploit similar mechanisms. It may also happen that a close look at Italian would reveal some as yet unidentified factor applicable also to French, which could be added to the list of factors we have given here, or perhaps replace them.

25.

They do, however, signal PERIPHERAL FOCUS, as do lui- and le-, and this delimits the potential roles to some extent.

26.

Of course, these pronouns cannot be used with each other, for the same reason. Thus, not: ?Elle me te confie. 'She entrusts me to you.' but rather: Elle me confie à toi. In light of the fact that French speakers are unwilling to combine me, te, se, nous and vous with each other and with lui-, it is not at all surprising that they are also unwilling to combine two lui-' s or two le-'s. That is, we do not get: ?Je lui lui ai fait un gâteau. T made him a cake for her.' ?Je le le paye. T pay him it.' The unacceptable inferential complexity here consists in figuring out two different roles for the same verb using the same Degree of Control meaning. Furthermore, there would be the additional complexity of figuring out the referent of each pronoun (always for lui-', when the genders are the same for le- and la-). As mentioned earlier, the difference in Degree of Control between lui- and le- helps in determining the referent of the pronoun. The reason why the first and second person pronouns come before the thirdperson /- forms, as in our first set of examples here, is presumably an egocentricity strategy, which manifests itself in numerous areas of grammar. We hope to develop this point in a future study.

27.

The remarks in note (24) apply here too. We limit our discussion here to the written language. In spoken French there is some fluidity in this particular aspect of word order; the motivations for this are undoubtedly related to the imperative message situation and may involve other rationales in addition to those we have spelled out here.

NOTES

359

Chapter 8 1. For an example see Van Valin (1993:503-504). Wierzbicka (1988), discussed above in Chapter 1, is an extreme instance of this. 2.

This is clearly what lies behind discussions like those in Chomsky (1957:86-87). Otheguy (1995) discusses this passage.

3.

Besides Otheguy, authors such as Culler (1976) and Ellis (1993) remind us that this anti-nomenclaturism was Saussure's really central point; that his famous "arbitrariness of the sign" concerns not so much the arbitrariness of the signal-meaning association as the arbitrary way in which each language establishes a unique principle of classification. Only Otheguy, and Diver (1974), though, seem to have realized the extent to which this anti-nomenclaturism applies to categories of grammar, constituting as it does a rejection of universal grammar.

4.

Cf. the task Saussure (1971:20) set for linguistics "de se délimiter et de se définir ellemême".

5.

See Diver (1989), Huffman (forthcoming).

6.

In the course of developing a grammatical hypothesis, a Columbia school linguist will occasionally group strategies around meanings in prototype fashion; but this has always turned out to be an intermediate step, not the final analysis.

7.

From The Sciences, September/October 1989, p. 48.

8.

The observational foundations of Columbia school linguistics are laid out by Diver (1995); they are illuminated from an interesting angle by Reid (1991: Chapter 10).

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Abbreviations CUWPL

Columbia University Working Papers in Linguistics

Abbreviations of Texts Cited ACB AGM AJV AMC AMS APM AVO AVP

Aragon, Louis Les cloches de Bâle. Paris: Dunoël (Folio 270), 1934. Alain-Fournier Le grand Meaulnes. Paris: Emil-Paul frères (livre de poche 1000), 1913. Aymé, Marcel La jument verte. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 108), 1933. Audoux, Marguerite Marie-Claire. Paris: Fasquette (livre de poche 742), 1958. Aymé, Marcel Le moulin de la Sourdine. Paris: Gallimard (Folio 321), 1936. Aymé, Marcel Lepasse-muraille. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 218), 1943. Aymé, Marcel La vouivre. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 1230), 1943. Aymé, Marcel Le vin de Paris. Paris: Gallimard 1947.

BIBLIOGRAPHY BCR CER CPE DER DMA DMS DMU DNH GCB GGC GHT GPE GRC GVD MBE MCE MDA MPF MSO PAS PGM PPE SAR SJF SMP SMU SMV

369

Bernanos, Georges Un crime. Paris: Librairie Plon (livre de poche 271), 1935. Camus, Albert L'exil et le royaume. Paris: Gallimard (Folio 78), 1957. Camus, Albert La peste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. De Gaulle, Charles Mémoires d'espoir. Vol. 1: Le renouveau. Paris: Plon (livre de poche 3478), 1970. De Gaulle, Charles Mémoires de guerre. Vol. 1: L'appel. Paris: Plon (livre de poche 389-390), 1954. De Gaulle, Charles Mémoires de guerre. Vol. 3: Le salut. Paris: Plon (livre de poche 612-613), 1959. De Gaulle, Charles Mémoires de guerre. Vol. 2: L'unité. Paris: Plon (livre de poche 391-392), 1956. Duhamel, Georges Le notaire du Havre. Paris: Mercure de France (livre de poche 731), 1933. Gary, Romain Chien blanc. Paris: Gallimard, 1970 (collection folio 50). Giono, Jean Les grands chemins. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. Giono, Jean Le hussard sur le toit. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. Gide, André La porte étroite. Paris: Mercure de France, 1959. Gary, Romain Les racines du ciel. Paris: Gallimard, 1956. Gary, Romain (Emile Ajar) La vie devant soi. Paris: Mercure de France (collection folio 1362), 1975. Montherlant, Henry de Les bestiaires. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 268), 1954. Montherlant, Henry de Les célibataires. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 397), 1954. Mauriac, François Le désert de l'amour. Paris: Bernard Grasset (livre de poche 691), 1925. Montherlant, Henry de Pitié pour les femmes. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 47), 1936. Montherlant, Henry de Le songe. Paris: Gallimard. Proust, Marcel Un amour de Swann. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 79), 1919. Pagnol, Marcel La gloire de mon père. Paris: Presses pocket, 1976. Perrin, André Le père. Paris: Julliard, 1956. Sartre, Jean-Paul L'age de raison. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 522-523), 1945. Sartre, Jean-Paul Les jeux sont faits. New York: Appleton-CenturyCrofts, 1952. Simenon, Georges Maigret a peur. Paris: Presses de la cité, 1953. Sartre, Jean-Paul Le mur. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 33), 1939. Simenon, Georges Maigret voyage. Paris: Presses de la cité, 1958.

370 SNA SPB SVN VCH WMI

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE Sartre, Jean-Paul La nausée. Paris: Gallimard (livre de poche 160), 1938. Simenon, Georges Le port des brumes. Paris: Fayard, 1963. Saint Exupéry, Antoine de Vol de nuit. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939. Vi alar, Paul Cinq hommes de ce monde (2 volumes). Paris: Editions J'ai lu, 1954. Weill, Robert M. La michna, tome 9. Paris: Presses du temps présent, 1975.

Index

A Aarsleff, H. 258 à contrasted to par 306-314 relative imprecision 299, 302-315 semantic content 299-302 á-phrases 25-28, 45-51, 266ff., 289-315 a-priorism in linguistics 257, 280ff., 322ff., 326, 329-334, 336ff. abandonner 103-104, 236 abîmer 246 ablative case 210, 301 accoutumé 120 acheter 36-41 accuser 197 adjurer 220 aider 255 aller 50-51, 235 anéantir 246 antérieur 121 anti-nomenclaturist view 15, 29, 326, 359 appartenir 242 apprendre 164, 229 Aristotelian thought 1,258,264 arracher 142-143 arriver 256 assaillir 220 assiéger 220 atteindre 256 autoriser 255

avantager 255 avertir 198 B Bailard, J. 167 Barnes, B. 10, 27, 342-343, 356 beneficiary 104, 138-144, 298 binary oppositions 161-162 bivalent verbs 278-279 Blanche-Benveniste, C. 355 blesser 246-247 Blinkenberg, A. 9, 139, 270-273, 277ff., 280, 283 Bloomfield, L. 338, 340 Bolinger, D. 21-22 Botha, R. 327 Bréal, M. 277 brûler 148, 218 Brunot, F. 269, 280, 342 C Cannings, P., & Moody, M. 307-314, 350 canonical nature of traditional categories 260, 281-284 captiver 235 case government, see also "government of the dative" 2, 5-8, 147, 205, 215, 230-256

372

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

cases historical accident view 160-161 syntactic function 2, 260ff. casser 149, 153 categories of observation vs. categories of explanation 2, 281-282, 287, 321ff., 337-339 causative construction, see also "faire causative" 7 - 8 , 306-314 causer strategy 103-104 ceindre 105 charger 197, 200-205 charmer 235 chercher 55-57 265-266, 281, 324, Chomsky, N. 326-328, 333-336, 346, 359 Circumstance meaning 299-306 cliticity 34-36, 315-320 clitics 3-4 combinations of 318-319, 358 code, linguistic 15, 17, 285-286, 325-328, 340 cogner 86-87, 299 Cognitive Grammar 17, 21, 23, 329-333 Columbia School 14ff., 321-341 combattre 238 comment, messages of 11 Iff., 147ff., 159, 297-298 communication and language 14ff., 2 1 1 212, 323-328, 338-341, 343 compléter 237 Comrie, B. 287 concerner 235, 242-246 conjurer 220 connaître 9, 94 conseiller 189-190, 194 consoler 198 constructional synonymy 9, 54, 292 constructions, grammatical 2 2 - 3 , 159, 285, 332 context, importance of 11-12, 22, 32, 142ff., 159, 230, 332-333

contraindre 242 contrarier 238-240 convenient-handle strategy 130ff., 134 convenir 235 Cook, V.J. 2 6 5 , 2 8 1 , 3 3 3 - 3 3 4 , 3 3 5 courir 53-54 creativity in language use 18-19, 328 cuire 156-157 Culler, J. 359

D data base 13 dative 16-17, 27, 160-161, 260-264, 286-287, 292-293 dative of interest 138ff. dative of possession 9, 16, 64, 87, 124-138, 322, 349 dative of the disadvantaged 10, 16, 104, 124, 138-159, 322 Davis, J. 346, 353 découvrir 97-98, 353 deductive basis of grammar 1, 259-286, 324-325, 330-332 défendre 256 dégoûter 197, 255 Degree of Control contrasted to direct and indirect object 286-287 defined 31 greater appropriateness of Mid degree for pronouns 297-298 highest degree of Control 32-34, 355 interlocks 211 word-order signals see "word-order Degree of Control" Deixis interlock 206, 210-211, 352 demander 106ff., 193, 220-230 démanger 7, 218 demeurer 53 déplaire 255 descendre 93-94

INDEX description vs. explanation 16, 261, 281— 282, 32Iff. déserter 236 détruire 246 devoir 88 dire 107ff. direct object 2-3, 259ff., 287 discourse: impact on grammar, see also "context, importance of" 22, 32 disjunctive pronouns see "non-clitic pronouns" Diver, William 14ff, 28, 161-162, 258ff., 301-302, 330, 333-334, 354, 357, 359 donner 102, 105-106 doter 198 double mention 74, 112, 150 doux 114-115 E échapper 236, 354 écrire 181, 189, 193, 274 égal 115-117, 120 elle 33, 344 Ellis, J. 359 éluder 236 emboîter 89 empêcher 256 empirical problem of linguistics 2-3, 257, 280-282, 321, 329-332 emprunter 88 enchanter 235 enlever 141-142, 151 ennuyer 255 entendre 178-180 ériger 105 étayer 255 étranger 117 être 74, 114-118, 183-185 Event, defined 30 éviter 164, 229, 236 expediter/enabler strategy 87-103

373

explanation, object of 13-14, 23-4, 41, 281-282, 321, 337-339 F fâcher 255 faire 61-63, 100, 140 faire causative 7-8, 164-180, 189, 306314 féliciter 198 fit of data with hypothesis see "testing of hypotheses" flatter 235 Focus 352 contrasted to subject and object 286-287 interlock 206, 208-209, 211, 213-214, 345 forcer 242 fournir 99, 194-197 frapper 7, 131-133, 144-145, 186ff., 231-232, 256, 299 fuir 236 functionalism 284, 322ff., 328-333 G García, E. 23, 29 gender, in clitic pronouns 4, 36, 206, 211,318 generative grammar 3, 264-266, 323-324, 326-327, 329, 333-336, 338, 340 genitive case 263 Gildin, B. 352, 355 goal-directed choice 5 government of the dative, see also "case government" 2, 5-8, 111, 123-124, 230-256, 262-264, 342-343 grammatical interlock, defined 207-208, 286 grammatical relations 1, 258ff., 323, 331, 346, 355

374

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

grammatical theory 212, 257ff. gratifier 198 Greek case system 302 Grevisse, M. 26, 124, 139, 266ff., 277280 guérir 198, 255 H Halliday, M. & Hasan, R. 352 Harmer, L.C. 8, 167ff. Harris, R. 258, 325-328 Hatcher, A.G. 65 helplessness strategy 130, 136ff. Hempel, C. 354 high-controller strategy 212ff. homonymy 6-7, 20, 35, 187, 275-276, 291, 315-317, 345, 355 Hopper, P.J. 282-285, 328, 355 hostile 122 human factor in language 15, 207-208, 334-335, 338-341 I idioms 154ff., 159, 262, 285, 332 il 33, 344 imiter 256 immobiliser 81-82 impénétrable 123 imperatives, clitic order with 319-320 implorer 220 important 118 importuner 220 incomber 242-246 incommoder 255 indeterminacy in utterances 15, 17-18 of grammatical categories 12-13, 271-273, 297 indirect object 287 deductive motivation 2-3, 259ff., 277ff.

formal ambiguity of 25-28, 266-273, 290 notional indeterminacy of 4-5, 187, 267ff. unmotivated functions of 4ff., 9, 10, 125, 138, 215, 262-264 indispensable 117-118 inductive basis of grammar 2, 260ff., 330-332, 339-341 inference 15, 17-19, 36-41, 142, 321 infliger 155-156 informer 198 inspirer 100, 102, 194 instrumental meaning see "meaning, instrumental view" interactor strategy 84-87 interdire 256 intéresser 235, 242-246 intuitions, linguistic 281-283, 287 invariance 291 J jaillir 57-59 Jakobson, R. 161-162 Jespersen, O. 269 jouer 61 K Kayne, R. 5, 26-27, 307, 343 Keenan, E. 287 Kimura, D. 336 L lâcher 70, 236 laisser 178-180, 236, 255 Langacker, R. 231,329-333,349 language and thought 1-2, 258ff., 324328, 337 language-specific categories 9-11, 15, 125-129, 166, 290 Latin case system 301 le with adjectival referent 183-185

INDEX le with stative verbs 183-185 lexical case 5, 117 lexical subcategorization 5 linguistic knowledge 334-336 linguistic theory 2-3, 212, 257ff., 332-334 logic-based grammar 1-3, 20, 23, 258ff, 264-266, 324-326 louer 198 Love, N. 327 M maleficiary see "dative of the disadvantaged" manquer 6, 216-217, 229 markedness 161-162 Martinet, A. 15, 20 meaning abstractional view 10, 16, 32 compositional/fractional view 16, 40, 65, 124, 161, 281, 322-328 instrumental view 15-19, 31, 40-43, 159, 162, 276, 286-287, 321ff., 339-341 locus of in language 22-3, 40-41, 285-286, 322-323 meaning/message distinction 17-19, 328, 332 meaninglessness of grammatical forms 9, 268, 270ff., 285, 290, 315 menacer 197 ménager 47-48 message categories 23, 161, 273, 337 mettre 126 monter 76-77, 212, 229 montrer 103, 107ff. Moore, C. & T. Carling 327 morphemes as locus of meaning 22-3, 287 contrasted to signals 19-20, 290-292 morphological reflex 287 motivator strategy 104-114, 139ff.

375

N non-clitic pronouns 20, 35-36, 119-120, 296, 316-317, 343, 346, 355 non-modularity 336, 339-341 nuire 246 Number interlock 206,211 O obéir 247-252 obliger 242 observations, linguistic 2, 336-339 offenser 95-96 offrir 140 orientations 14-15, 338-341 ôter 89 Otheguy, R. 326, 343, 354, 359 P paradigmatic structure 211-212 par 307-314, 356 pareil 120 parler 109ff., 125-126, 181, 193 Participant, defined 30, 44-82, 344 Participant Interlock 30-31, 206-212 diagram 211 participants three vs. two in message 180-182, 185-188 parts of speech 259ff., 288 parvenir 256 passer 85-86 payer 112-113, 165, 188-189, 194ff., 274-275 permettre 101, 255 person interlock 206, 209-210 persons, first and second 33, 209-210, 317, 357 peser 59-60, 187ff. piquer 146-147 plaindre 198 plaire 235

376

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

polarizing/depolarizing of participants 215ff. porter 100 portmanteau morpheme 352 poser 77-80 possession 9, 16, 64-65, 124ff. possessive adjective 64-82, 90, 124ff., 316 Port Royal grammar 1, 258, 353 pousser 242 pragmatic factors in case selection 19, 188 precision factor in choice of meaning 41-42, 55, 6063, 299, 302-315 in paradigmatic structure 211-212 predicate nouns and adjectives with lui114-124 Predicate of the Sentence 1, 259ff. prendre 125, 134-138, 143-144, 149, 152 prepositional phrases 51-64, 130ff., 293, 295-315 prescrire 200-205 préserver 198 presser 185ff., 220 prévenir 198 prier 220-230 principle of classification 15, 162, 257 priver 197 produire 96 profiter 255 projection principle 281, 345 pronominalization 26-28, 45ff., 288-306 pronoun as a grammatical category 184— 185, 288-293 protéger 198 prototypes, grammatical 17, 332, 359 provoquer 96-97 punir 197

Q quantitative use of data 12-13, 44, 162163, 347 quitter 236 R rabattre 113 radical functionalism 341 ramasser 153 rassasier 231 reflexive messages 209-210, 310-311 régaler 235 regarder 69, 235, 242-246 Reid, W. 5, 6, 18, 199, 231, 344, 352, 353, 356, 359 rejeter 236 réjouir 235 Relational Grammar 287 relational meanings 31-2, 42, 83, 161-162, 213-215 remercier 198 remplacer 13, 98, 240-242 remplir 237 rendre 95 répugner 255 résister 238-240 ressembler 256 rester 110-111 retomber 92 revenir 235, 242 révolter 255 Rouveret, A. & J.-R. Vergnaud 10, 2728, 343 S saigner 145-146 saisir 130-131, 134 satellite relationship 34-36, 37, 63-64, 166, 315-317 saturer 237

INDEX Saussure, Ferdinand de 14ff., 29, 160, 325-327, 359 se 209-210 secouer 219 secourir 198 selectional features 5, 324, 345 semantic constants 11, 65, 276 semantic interpretation see "meaning, locus of in language"; "inference" semantic systems 21 semantics 19, 188 semantics of grammar 22-3, 232-235 Sentence, Theory of 258ff., 288ff. sentence as linguistic unit 1, 23, 32, 258ff., 286 sentence parts 23, 264-266, 281 sentence-based theory of case selection 2, 19, 259-264 servir 213, 229, 255, 275-276 siffler 182ff. sign, linguistic 14-15, 161, 325-328 signals 17, 19-20, 285-287 Silverstein, M. 321-322 simuler 256 Smyth, H. W. 16-17, 160-161, 259ff. soigner 255 sommer 200-205 soûler 237 soulever 158 sourire 110, 193-194 soutenir 255 strategies of exploitation 42, 84 structural case 7-8 Subject of the Sentence 1, 259ff., 286-287 substituer 98 succéder 13, 240-242 suffire 237 suivre 240, 247-252 superagent strategy 84, 164-180, 192ff., 215, 306ff.

377

supplanter 240 supplier 220 supposer 106 synchrony vs. diachrony 160-161 synonymy 229-230 syntax 19, 187-188, 259ff., 325, 331, 341, 353 central core 5, 199, 341 System of Participants see "Participant Interlock" T testing of hypotheses 13, 19, 43-44, 161-162, 258-264, 323-324, 331-332 textual resonance 147, 159, 199, 231 thematic roles 12-13, 31-32, 36-40, 83-84, 127-129, 282, 285, 326, 345 Thompson, S.A. 282-285, 328 tirer 57, 130 toucher 154 traditional grammar 1-3, 41, 257-287, 322-325, 331-332, 337 transitivity 187, 273-284 translational non-equivalence see "language-specific categories" trembler 219 Trubetskoy, N. 161 U universal categories of grammar 258ff., 280ff., 331-332

2, 24,

V value relations in language 20-21, 160ff., 213-215, 315 Van Valin, R. 23, 359 Vandeloise, C. 304-305, 356 venir 49-50, 127, 158, 256 voir 89-92, 178-180, 229 vouloir: en vouloir à 154-155

378

THE CATEGORIES OF GRAMMAR: LUI AND LE

W Weinreich, U. 231 Wierzbicka, A. 21-23, 359 Winston, M. 327 with 300 word-order Degree of Control English 44-45, 54-55, 294-295, 344 French 33-34, 294-298

Y y 26, 46-48, 290

Z Zipf, G. K. 15 zombie strategy 130, 133, 136 Zubin, D. 28