--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Ray" <ray28238317@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
> <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:
>
> > Its web site is http://www.academie-francaise.fr . The Académie
> > Française is charged with regulating the usage of French.
> >
>
> Did you suggest that moder-day French shows verb-object agreement?
> I think so because yout said 'the past participle in avoir
perfects
> agree with a direct preceding object to this day'
>
> What is avoir perfect? Could you please give an example sentence
and
> tell me how the verb agrees with the direct object? Thank you very
> much
Miguel and Larry Trask have probably between them answered these
question, but I will tidy up a few loose ends just in case.
In Germanic and Romance, the perfects formed from the past
participle had either the verb 'to have' (OE _habban_, German
_haben_, French _avoir_) or the verb 'to be' (OE _wesan_, German
_sein_, French _être_) as the auxiliary. The usage of the verb 'to
be' is restricted to intransitive and reflexive verbs. When the
past participle agrees, it agrees with the subject if the auxiliary
is the verb 'to be', and with the object if the auxiliary is 'to
have'.
I expect Greek follows the same pattern - would anyone here care to
fill in the gap?
> > I think the verb should be treated as a whole. We then see both
> > subject-marking on the auxiliary and (optional) object-marking
on
> > the participle.
> Why should the main verb and the auxiliary be treated as one verb?
> When I draw a phrase structure tree, the auxiliary occupies the
INFL
> position and the verb occupies a different position.
> Or is the decision that the auxiliary and the main verb should be
> considered a whole based on the fact that many languages use only
one
> form(main verb plus marking) to express the perfect aspect?
Unfortunately, I am not acquainted with the concept of an 'INFL'
node. Where can I find a detailed enough summary of the phase
structure analysis you are using?
To me it just seems natural to consider the whole verb rather than
particular parts of it. One gets quite a range of behaviours - in
English, markings (number, person, present/past) appear on the
auxiliary, but in other languages the markings may be on the main
verb while the auxiliary is itself optional. (The auxiliary has
vanished in the Russian past tense.) There's nothing peculiar about
the perfect in this regard. Sometimes the markings are formally
separate words, and it simplifies matters if one can refer to the
whole, possibly discontiguous, set as the verb. Also, it simplifies
matters if fusion is incomplete, e.g. the Portuguese future, which
famously incorporates pronominal objects.
Richard.