Nerulent wrote: ↑Sat Feb 29, 2020 8:31 pmI’m not sure why you say
only here - in the French examples, you can analyse it as verbal agreement whether or not the explicit object is present. Just as Spanish still has subject agreement in both
ayudo and
yo ayudo, French object agreement is the same across
je t’aide and
je t’aide toi.
Yes, that's what I originally said too, to steelman his example of French. But the interesting thing was that Zompist's argument didn't rely on this, but rather on a number of other behaviours about
je t'aide itself, without even considering
je t'aide toi at all. That's why we had a little argument and then he convinced me.
Richard W wrote: ↑Sun Mar 01, 2020 3:47 amSer's point is that the clear justification for treating
je t’aide as having object agreement is the existence of
je t’aide toi. Only agreeing with something if it is missing from the sentence is weird.
I thought calling it "object agreement" is weird, because it's not what we normally talk about when we say "object agreement", but there is merit for it in some languages. In French you can't coordinate verbs on them (*
je t'écoute et aide should be the mannered
je t'écoute et t'aide if not the more neutral
je t'écoute et je t'aide [ʃtekut e ʃtɛd] 'I listen to you and I help you'). Meanwhile, English, unlike French and Spanish, even allows pronouns to coordinate on an unrepeated verb: "I thought I could save you, and
you me".
caedes wrote: ↑Sun Mar 01, 2020 4:05 amGenerally speaking, are there any actual reasons why the pronominal object markers in Romance languages are so often called clitics and not affixes, if not for orthographic reasons only? A morpheme that always attaches to the same host looks quite like an affix to me.
I'm only really familiar with Spanish and French, but I see various reasons for it in Spanish that likely apply to much of Romance as well, even if they don't in French (French being a more atypical kind of Romance).
In Spanish they have some freedom to hop up in "linked" finite+infinitive verbs.
Quiero verte ~
Te quiero ver both mean 'I want to see you'; even though
te modifies
ver, it can jump up the syntax tree and superficially appear to modify
quiero instead. They can also do so across links with the prepositions
a and
de too:
Vuelvo a verte ~
Te vuelvo a ver 'I see you again',
Dejas de llamarme ~
Me dejas de llamar 'You stop calling me',
Tengo que verte ~
Te tengo que ver 'I have to see you', although not with
con and
por:
Insisto en verte ~ *
Te insisto en ver 'I insist on seeing you',
Comienzo por hacerlo ~ *
Lo comienzo por hacer 'I begin by doing it'. No such thing in French.
Spanish also allows coordinating verbs on pronouns:
Te veo y oigo 'I see you and listen to you' (which French hardly allows), although more commonly we say
Te veo y te oigo.
Phonologically and semantically, Spanish clitic pronouns are also completely stable. They have none of the odd phonetic irregularities you find elsewhere in the affixes of Spanish, such as the 2PL -ois of sois 'you guys are' (instead of would-be-regular *seis), or irregular plurals like
carácter ~ caracteres [kaˈɾaɣteɾ kaɾaɣˈteɾes] (weird stress shift) and
inglés ~ ingleses (instead of *
los inglés; the derivational suffix -és presents a regularized exception to the exception of -s stems having identical plurals:
el lunes, los lunes, el cumpleaños, los cumpleaños). Meaning-wise, they're also very predictable. French pronouns are completely stable too though.
Phonologically, though, French singular pronouns often reduce to a single consonant (also
ils [z] before a vowel), even though French doesn't allow words to consist of a single consonant segment (unless they're interjections, which are a world of their own).
Je l'aime [ʒlɛm] 'I love him',
tu assumes [tasym] ("t'assumes") 'you assume',
ils ouvrent [zuvʁ
ə] ("z'ouvrent") 'they open'. The Spanish clitic pronouns have shapes that are more adequate for words rather than affixes:
me, lo, te, los.
There is very clearly a demarcation between verbs with affixes forming a word and any pronoun clitics attached to it, with the pronoun clitics being unable to go in between the affixes and the verb. It's
lo rehice 'I re-did it', not *
re-lo-hice, and
lo deshice 'I undid it', not *
des-lo-hice. Spanish and French are the same here though.