Starting with the most important point first:
zompist wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2024 4:22 am
You'd probably have to explain what notion of markedness you're using. To me the form used in clefting and emphasis would be more rather than less marked. (Note that in French the clefted/emphatic form is different from both nom. and acc. pronouns.)
Essentially, by ‘less marked’, I mean ‘has a wider range of usage’. In a nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive system, there are two core cases, both with their core function, but one of the cases will generally be the ‘default’ for usages outside that range too. Usually, people call call that the ‘less marked’ case. To justify this, there’s the very important fact that this almost always coincides with formal markedness: the null-marked case generally has the widest usage.
(Haspelmath has a paper where he makes a good case for simply saying, ‘has a wider range of usage’, when that’s what we mean. ‘Markedness’ is a horribly overloaded term which can mean all kinds of different things. But I think this is one place where it’s not unjustified, because like I said, both formal and functional markedness criteria point in the same direction here.)
Citation form is just lexicography. The last point is just inherited from IE, so to be relevant you'd have to show that the argument holds for all of IE.
Indeed: those two are the weakest arguments.
(And, besides, if PIE was active-stative like many people claim, then perhaps it
would have been marked-S anyway?)
The others all apply to the disjunctive pronouns in French:
2. Il vient après moi.
3. Moi je le vois.
4. C'est moi.
The key difference here is that the disjunctive pronouns are, in general, different from both subject and object series (
moi vs
je/
me): they are neither nominative nor accusative. (Indeed, in the one case where they overlap with the other series,
elle is the nominative form!) Therefore, this gives no grounds to call French ‘marked-nominative’.
Does this mean that these forms are marked in French?
I think this notion of ‘markedness’ is just not a very useful concept in French. As I said, markedness in case-marking is generally related to which of the core cases is generalised the most beyond its core function. But in French, neither nominative nor accusative pronouns are generalised in any way at all. (There’s some syncretism with the dative pronouns, but that’s about it.) So I think I’d call the French bound pronouns equal in terms of markedness: the less marked forms would be the free forms, if any. (It’s very weird to think of emphatic pronouns as being ‘less marked’, but it falls out naturally from the definition as ‘wider usage range’.)
English is not the same, but perhaps it's on the same path: "I" used to be used in more situations, especially after be.
Wasn’t this mostly prescriptivists trying to make English work like Latin? I’m not sure if anyone ever actually talked like this naturally.
It can still be stressed, but it's notable that we're more likely to answer "Who did it?" with "Me!" not "I!"
Indeed, which was what I meant by them being the citation form (and also the emphatic form, for that matter).
