Re: [tied] Re: verb agreement in one stage of English

On Sun Oct 12, 2003 11:38 am, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> Standard Italian can but need not show agreement:
>
> <Ho scritto una lettera> is much more frequent than
> <Ho scritta una lettera> (the latter form may be exlusively
> literary)

I usually don't post to the list. But could I add some things to your
description of Italian?
I would say that the form with the agreement, viz. "ho scritta una
lettera" is also old-fashioned. It isn't even tought or mentioned in
many modern Italian grammars - for instance, Giovanni
Battaglia's "Nuova Grammatica Italiana per Stranieri".
But you can find examples of this construction in older grammars
(like Michele Martina's "Grammatica Pratica della Lingua Italiana"):
- Io ho tutti i miei quaderni puliti - I have cleaned all my notebooks

> but, as in French, things are different when the
> participle follows the noun: La lettera che ho scritta/scritto
> are both acceptable. (I don't know which one is more common
> in spoken Italian).

Maybe both have similar frequencies.

> In Catalan, there is usually no agreement in the modern language,
> except when a third person direct object pronoun (el/la/els/les,
> en) is present:
>
> Has tancat la porta? Sí, l'he tancada.
> He menjat dues taronges. / D'aquestes taronges, n'he menjades dues.

This rule also applies to Italian:
- Hai comprato la pittura? L'ho (=la ho) compratA ieri.
- Dove avete trovato i professori? Li abbiamo trovatI nella scuola.
- Quanti amici hai visto oggi? Ne ho vistI tre.

> Castilian lost the agreement in the XVth century.

The same happened to Portuguese (maybe by about the same time as
Castilian).
About the perfect tenses, they aren't so used nowadays in Portuguese
as they are in Castilian / Italian / English. At least in Brazilian
Portuguese, I mean.

Regards
André
São Paulo, Brazil