The Categories of Grammar: French lui and le (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The categories of grammar: French lui and le by Alan Huffman Xavier Villalba The categories of grammar: French lui and le. By Alan Huffman. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. Pp. 381. In this book, Alan Huffman takes as a case study the distribution of pronominal clitics lui and le in French written texts, namely the existence of contrasts like Je le prie de venir tout de suite vs. Je lui demande de venir tout de suite both meaning ‘I ask him to come right away’. Following the guidelines of the Columbia school, he makes tabula rasa of traditional attempts resorting to nonlinguistic categories (‘direct object’ and ‘indirect object’) and to a stipulative notion of ‘government of the dative’, and tries to isolate the factor underlying the choice between lui and le through the examination of 40 twentieth-century French prose texts. His conclusion is that lui is a signal with the meaning ‘more control over an event’, whereas le is a signal with the meaning ‘less control over an event’, and that speakers make use of them accordingly—H doesn’t acknowledge previous work arriving at similar conclusions, like the longstanding tradition in Japanese linguistics treating the accusative/dative marking of the causee in certain intransitive causative constructions in terms of degree of control. While one must concede that H is quite successful in grounding this point empirically, in many cases he interprets the data in too biased a way (e.g. his classification of verbs regarding their selection of lui or le in Ch. 5 results in a fine piece of whimsical exegesis rather than in a linguistically grounded analysis). Moreover, he runs into trouble when integrating his hypothesis into the grammar of French (I leave aside its inapplicability to closely related languages, which he himself acknowledges) and resorts to naive assumptions about language processing without any experimental confirmation. Striking examples of this strategy abound: his analyses of the preverbal placement of clitics (315ff), clitic word order (318), the restriction on the combination of first/second person pronouns with lui (319), or the faire à/par alternation (357 n. 17). These empirical shortcomings coexist with dubious theoretical and methodological statements. On the one hand, H claims that the ‘Columbia-school theory takes the explanatory chain back to the most primitive level of observation: the sound waves of speech’ (338)—note also that his analysis is based on written texts, which are known to only partially reflect real usage due to prescriptive and stylistic factors—but he assumes uncritically the notion of morpheme as the basis of the analysis, ignoring well-grounded criticisms such as the ones made by Mark [End Page 792] Aronoff in the 1970s. Furthermore, he grounds the meaning of lui and le—the very core of his hypothesis—on logical categories like ‘event’ and ‘participant’ which, according to his own premises, could not form part of the meaning of any linguistic product altogether for they only arise during the hearer’s construction of the message. In sum, nobody can take seriously H’s arrogant conclusion that ‘[t]here is every reason to believe that the continuation of this work will lead to a revised view of the nature of language’ (341). Xavier Villalba Autonomous University of Barcelona Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America