Quick question about French

[alice]

In French, a pronominal object precedes the verb, whereas a nominal one follows it, thus Je le vois but Je vois sa soeur. What do you do when there are both? Je le vois et sa soeur?

[Ares Land]

Formal:

Je le vois, ainsi que sa soeur.

Less formal:

Je les vois, lui et sa soeur.

Je le vois, avec sa soeur
Je le vois, et sa soeur aussi

Most of the time, though, I think I don't use a pronoun at all, or use a plural pronoun for both:

Je vois Alice et sa soeur. Je les vois.

[vegfarandi]

Once I started thinking of the prenominals in French as prefixes and not separate words everything started making more sense.

[Ares Land]

Amusingly, my youngest kid (almost 2) uses moi as a 1P pronoun but a kind of non-commital i as pronoun. (~ moi, i court). Well, at least she did until a few days ago, I think it kinda sounds like je now (kids do pick up this stuff amazingly fast. I can't for the life of me remember if her sister did that too. I did note a few things, but not that one.)
She does without the object pronouns for now.

So it seems toddler (well, this toddler) learn the subject pronouns more or less as verb inflection.

[Kuchigakatai]

Amusingly, my youngest kid (almost 2) uses moi as a 1P pronoun but a kind of non-commital i as pronoun. (~ moi, i court). Well, at least she did until a few days ago, I think it kinda sounds like je now (kids do pick up this stuff amazingly fast. I can't for the life of me remember if her sister did that too. I did note a few things, but not that one.)
She does without the object pronouns for now.

So it seems toddler (well, this toddler) learn the subject pronouns more or less as verb inflection.

French is truly rebuilding conjugation there. Bantu/Coptic-style mostly-prefixed inflections are coming!

[kodé]

Amusingly, my youngest kid (almost 2) uses moi as a 1P pronoun but a kind of non-commital i as pronoun. (~ moi, i court). Well, at least she did until a few days ago, I think it kinda sounds like je now (kids do pick up this stuff amazingly fast. I can't for the life of me remember if her sister did that too. I did note a few things, but not that one.)
She does without the object pronouns for now.

So it seems toddler (well, this toddler) learn the subject pronouns more or less as verb inflection.

Whoa. Child language acquisition in the flesh is truly amazing.

Once I started thinking of the prenominals in French as prefixes and not separate words everything started making more sense.

I know a syntactician would call them clitics, but I agree that it feels like they’re sliding along the cline to full affixhood. I think this is accelerated by the fact that French prosody cares about phrases more than words, so distinguishing a clitic from an affix at the left edge phonologically is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

Question I’ve been mulling: is there a good reason NOT to think of “est-ce que” in questions as monomorphemic? To me, it’s a single head that sits in C, not a clause with inversion.

[zompist]

Question I’ve been mulling: is there a good reason NOT to think of “est-ce que” in questions as monomorphemic? To me, it’s a single head that sits in C, not a clause with inversion.

Several, I think. One, que is a very common subordinator, and in "est-ce que" it appears just where we can put a subordinator. Two, it's just one of many expressions with que: parce que, afin que, tandis que, bien que, pourvu que, quoi que... Three, question inversion isn't quite dead. Four, it has a non-interrogative, unreversed form c'est que, so all three components are common.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if children learn it as a fixed construction well before they understand any of these other constructions. But that's typical of child language acquisition; compare "I think" in English, which children may learn and use before they can generally use the frame "___ think(s)".

[kodé]

Question I’ve been mulling: is there a good reason NOT to think of “est-ce que” in questions as monomorphemic? To me, it’s a single head that sits in C, not a clause with inversion.

Several, I think. One, que is a very common subordinator, and in "est-ce que" it appears just where we can put a subordinator. Two, it's just one of many expressions with que: parce que, afin que, tandis que, bien que, pourvu que, quoi que... Three, question inversion isn't quite dead. Four, it has a non-interrogative, unreversed form c'est que, so all three components are common.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if children learn it as a fixed construction well before they understand any of these other constructions. But that's typical of child language acquisition; compare "I think" in English, which children may learn and use before they can generally use the frame "___ think(s)".

Okay, I’m convinced. Thanks!

[Ares Land]

Once I started thinking of the prenominals in French as prefixes and not separate words everything started making more sense.

I know a syntactician would call them clitics, but I agree that it feels like they’re sliding along the cline to full affixhood. I think this is accelerated by the fact that French prosody cares about phrases more than words, so distinguishing a clitic from an affix at the left edge phonologically is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

The neat thing is that sometimes they often act as prefixes, but occasionnally they are full words.
You can stress them: je fais la cuisine et tu mets la table.

You can omit the rest of the sentence after them: (Characters acting surprised in Boulet comics): je...

And insert pauses:
(In a comedy skit about the Last Supper): JUDAS: je (dramatic pause) n'ai pas très faim.

Of course, part of the joke in that last one is that it was a parody of the stilted French dubs of '80s Stallone movies: it's meant to sound awkward.
But it's not ungrammatical.

And you can omit them. IIRC, in the French translation of Watchmen, Rorschach is just as laconic as in the original. It sounds weird, yes, but no more than in English. OTOH, you can't do it as much as in English. In the translation of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Mannie doesn't omit pronouns.
For a more native example, there's m'en fous (don't care)

All of these though (except maybe the first one?) are kind of special though. Try these in normal conversation and people won't understand you. But I don't think you could do any of these with, say, Italian -o .

(Lots of conlanging ideas to steal here!)

[Kuchigakatai]

The neat thing is that sometimes they often act as prefixes, but occasionnally they are full words.
You can stress them: je fais la cuisine et tu mets la table.
[...]
All of these though (except maybe the first one?) are kind of special though. Try these in normal conversation and people won't understand you. But I don't think you could do any of these with, say, Italian -o .

Yeah, I definitely can't stress the -o and -es of hag-o, pon-es, met-es in Spanish.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Can't you simply use the pronoun to be emphatic in Spanish and Italian, or have I misunderstood that?

[ratammer]

The neat thing is that sometimes they often act as prefixes, but occasionnally they are full words.
You can stress them: je fais la cuisine et tu mets la table.

I was under the impression that stressing them was more likely to be done by adding the moi/toi form? Moi, je fais la cuisine. Which makes it more like Rounin's take on the Spanish/Italian example.

[Ares Land]

Can't you simply use the pronoun to be emphatic in Spanish and Italian, or have I misunderstood that?

Yes, that's the way it's done.

The neat thing is that sometimes they often act as prefixes, but occasionnally they are full words.
You can stress them: je fais la cuisine et tu mets la table.

I was under the impression that stressing them was more likely to be done by adding the moi/toi form? Moi, je fais la cuisine. Which makes it more like Rounin's take on the Spanish/Italian example.

That's correct, that.s really the most common way.

In fact none of the exemples I listed is very common. But they still work gramatically.

[Kuchigakatai]

I was under the impression that stressing them was more likely to be done by adding the moi/toi form? Moi, je fais la cuisine. Which makes it more like Rounin's take on the Spanish/Italian example.

That's correct, that.s really the most common way.

In fact none of the exemples I listed is very common. But they still work gramatically.

flicky: the very interesting thing here is that, artificial as it may feel, and uncommon as it may be compared to e.g. moi, je... / vous, vous... / eux, ils...", it is at least still possible to stress je, tu, vous, ils... In Spanish, there's no way I can say hago, metes with primary stress on the -o or -es. French is still missing that development as it undergoes the transition.

[circeus]

I was under the impression that stressing them was more likely to be done by adding the moi/toi form? Moi, je fais la cuisine. Which makes it more like Rounin's take on the Spanish/Italian example.

That's correct, that.s really the most common way.

In fact none of the exemples I listed is very common. But they still work gramatically.

flicky: the very interesting thing here is that, artificial as it may feel, and uncommon as it may be compared to e.g. moi, je... / vous, vous... / eux, ils...", it is at least still possible to stress je, tu, vous, ils... In Spanish, there's no way I can say hago, metes with primary stress on the -o or -es. French is still missing that development as it undergoes the transition.

Maybe I'm misreading the entire discussion, but how would French even do that given that it has eroded away most of the verbal endings in the first place?

[Kuchigakatai]

Maybe I'm misreading the entire discussion, but how would French even do that iven that it has eroded away most of the verbal endings in the first place?

Yeah... that is not my point. I mean, in Spanish we can't do it either (stressing the -o of yo hago). The point is that, in theory, if French subject pronoun are full blown inflections now (much like the -o of hago), then it could be impossible to stress them (moi, je fais). But in truth it is still possible, even if increasingly uncommon, even if increasingly felt as very artificial. It's interesting to observe it as part of the transition of je/tu/il/elle/etc. into inflectional prefixes.

[Vilike]

On that note, a blog post by transhimalayanist Guillaume Jacques (in French): Le français parlé, langue polysynthétique ? In the comments David Marjanović is contrasting this phenomenon with what's happening in a German dialect, which knows cliticization but hasn't fused the personal indices to the verb.