Bibliographical details: Hudson, Richard. forthcoming. “French Pronouns in Cognition.” In Defaults
in Morphological Theory, edited by Andrew Hippisley and Nikolas Gisborne. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
French pronouns in cognition
Abstract
This chapter applies a cognitive theory of language – Word Grammar – to the analysis of French
pronoun clitics, with default inheritance as the underlying logic. It outlines the relevant cognitive
apparatus that seems to be available in general cognition, then shows in general terms how this
apparatus supports autonomous morphology, default morphology and the treatment of clitics as
words realized by affixes. It then turns to French pronouns, with separate formal network analyses
for enclitics, proclitics, and clitic-climbing to auxiliaries (arguing that other kinds of clitic-climbing are
syntactic rather than morphosyntactic). Finally it draws the following five general conclusions and
two specific ones about French clitics:
1. The formal apparatus of general cognition is sufficient for an analysis of French
clitics.
2. Default inheritance and ‘isa’ hierarchies provide just the right amount of flexibility to
accommodate all the French facts into a unified analysis which makes no distinction
between grammar and lexicon.
3. Language is a symbolic network, so linguistics needs a network model.
4. Relational concepts can be created as needed, giving important extra flexibility in
analysis.
5. Morphology is an autonomous level of analysis defined by units and relations.
6. French unstressed pronouns are clitics rather than inflectional affixes.
7. French enclitics (with affirmative imperatives) are simple clitics, in contrast with the
complex proclitics. This being so, they are a syntactically non-default category with a
morphologically default realization.
1 French pronouns in cognition
This chapter focuses on one particularly well-studied and apparently well-understood area of
morphology: the unstressed pronouns of French, illustrated in (1).
(1) Je te
le donnerai
I to.you it will.give
‘I will give it to you’
The aim of the chapter is to suggest ways in which a ‘cognitive’ orientation affects the analysis.
The chapter will assume a set of assumptions that have evolved since 1980 under the name
‘Word Grammar’ (Duran-Eppler 2011; Gisborne 2010; Hudson 1984; Hudson 1990; Hudson 1998;
Hudson 2007; Hudson 2010; Sugayama 2003; Sugayama and Hudson 2006; Traugott and Trousdale
2013), which is one of the theoretical models in the tradition called ‘cognitive linguistics’ (Croft and
Cruse 2004; Evans and Green 2006; Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007), alongside Cognitive Grammar
and Construction Grammar. As its name suggests, cognitive linguistics aims to model language as a
cognitive system – in other words, as knowledge of language, or as Chomsky’s ‘competence’ or ‘Ilanguage’; and to some extent the same could, of course, be said of almost every modern theoretical
approach. But the distinctive characteristic of cognitive linguistics lies in the second of what we
might call the ‘cognitive assumptions’ in (2).
(2) The cognitive assumptions:
a. The reality which cognitive linguistics tries to model is the individual user’s
knowledge of language.
b. Knowledge of language is an example of domain-general knowledge.
In other words, ‘knowledge of language is knowledge’ (Goldberg 1995:5), so, as a scientific
hypothesis, the mental apparatus needed for learning and processing language is the same
apparatus that we use in other parts of our mental life – for remembering people and their
relationships, for recognising places, for organising our social behaviour, and so on.
The present paper aims to show that, in the analysis of linguistic systems such as
morphology, the cognitive assumptions matter. There are three reasons why they are important.
First, they predict that every structural pattern found in language can be matched by a non-linguistic
pattern with the same formal properties, so, as a methodological principle, we should try hard to
avoid ‘special’ structures that have no equivalent outside language. If we fail, then we shall have
found really strong evidence for the uniqueness of language, whereas if we build uniqueness into
the framework from the start, we shall learn nothing. A truly minimalist linguistic theory makes no
special formal assumptions about language knowledge at all. This principle challenges any theory to
produce non-linguistic analogues for linguistic structures, in contrast with most current practice.
The second consequence of the cognitive assumptions is equally important: that the full
range of domain-general cognition should be made available for language. This principle is in direct
conflict with the widely accepted principle of limiting the available apparatus. To take a syntactic
example (which will only be marginally relevant below), phrase structure assumes that the only
possible apparatus for showing relations between co-occurring words is the mother-daughter
relation between a phrase and its constituents, ignoring the obvious fact that general cognition
allows us to establish direct links between co-occurring events or objects, without needing to
postulate ‘mother’ entities.
The third important consequence of the cognitive principle is that it guarantees the ‘graceful
integration’ that will eventually be needed between any theory of language structure and existing
theories of cognition:
a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a
graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive
capacities and about the character of brain computation (Jackendoff 2011:586)
If we see our theories of language knowledge as part of a much more general study of cognition,
then the sooner we try to reconcile the two, the better.
2 The cognitive apparatus
What, then, is the cognitive apparatus that we can take for granted as the basis for linguistic
analyses? The following list includes the assumptions that are relevant to the rest of this paper.
Networks
Knowledge consists of a symbolic network of atomic concepts, each of which is simply the meeting
point of links to other concepts. This ‘network notion’ (Reisberg 2007) is inspired by Stratificational
Grammar (Lamb 1966; Lamb 1998) but is incompatible with other current views of language
structure, including those which view language as a network of lexical items, constructions or
attribute-value matrices (Langacker 2007; Goldberg 2006; Pollard and Sag 1994). The network notion
is massively supported by evidence from priming experiments which show how activation ‘spills
over’ from active concepts to their neighbours in the network.
Node creation
The network is highly dynamic, and allows us to create new nodes to handle our experiences as
perceivers or actors; so for example we create a new node for an observed object before we
‘recognise’ it by attaching it to a permanent node in the network, thereby integrating this new node
in the total network. Most new nodes fade away and die within seconds, but some turn into
permanent memories. The evidence for these temporary nodes lies in memory experiments which
show our unsurprising tendency to recall recent events more easily than more distant ones.
Recycling
Recent research in graph theory (Barabási 2003; Barabási 2009) has revealed a curious fact about
the networks that humans build, from social networks to airport networks and the internet: they
tend strongly to be ‘scale-free’, meaning that they have far more richly-linked ‘hubs’ than would be
expected if the links were distributed randomly. The obvious explanation for this fact is that when
we innovate we always have to start where we already are, with our existing concepts and
infrastructure; and consequently we tend to innovate by ‘recycling’ existing structures, with a strong
preference for structures that are already well developed – i.e. richly networked. The principle
behind this is well known:
(3) The rich get richer.
We tend to enrich existing structure and to favour richly linked nodes.
For example, if we need an airport, it is easier to use one that already exists than to build a new one;
and similarly, if we want to add a new concept, we have to link it to existing concepts. This will have
consequences for the theory of morphology in section 4.
Classification
Most concepts are classified as examples of more general concepts by the elementary ‘isa’ relation,
e.g. ‘robin isa bird’. This is the relation not only between specific and general categories in the
permanent network, but also between newly-created nodes and their permanent models. The term
‘isa’ comes from AI, where it is assumed to facilitate generalisation, so the massive evidence for
generalisation also supports the ‘isa’ relation. It also supports the idea of ‘isa’ hierarchies, e.g. ‘robin
isa garden-bird isa bird isa creature’.
Relations
The links between concepts are not mere associations, but are typed – classified so that we can
distinguish our friends from our enemies, opposite and adjacent sides, preceding and following
events, and so on and on. The most obvious evidence for this classification lies in our relational
vocabulary, but everyday experience confirms that we distinguish relations even when we are not
talking about them – e.g. we can systematically locate knives and forks on opposite sides of a plate.
If relations can be classified, then they must also allow ‘isa’ links, just like ordinary concepts, so the
easiest conclusion is that they are a special kind of concept: relational concepts. The distinctive
characteristic of a relational concept is that it has two elementary relations: ‘argument’ and ‘value’,
bringing the total of elementary relations to three: argument, value and isa.
Binding and quantity
Two further elementary relations are relevant to node creation. Suppose I see an object in the sky,
and wonder what it is. I start by creating a node for it, which we may call N. But this node, like every
other node, is the meeting point for a set of relations to other nodes, so it has links not only to all
the known properties (its location, its size, its colour) but also to two ‘logical’ properties: its
classification and its quantity. Its classification is simply an ‘isa’ link to to an unknown concept, for
which the obvious notation is ‘?’. We can be sure that this isa link exists because that is what it
means to wonder what N is. But ‘?’ has the special property of needing to be bound to some other
concept, its permanent model. The search for this model is driven by activation spreading through
the network from N’s known properties, so the ‘best-fit principle’ (Winograd 1976) chooses the most
active node as the winner, and binds N to it. But this means that all, or at least most, of N’s
properties must match those of its eventual model. This is where the quantity relation applies. The
quantity of N is simply ‘1’ – i.e. it exists as an entity. Like its other known properties, this needs to be
compatible with the properties of the model, so ‘?’ can’t bind to a node whose quantity doesn’t
unify with 1. It is the quantity relation that allows Word Grammar to distinguish obligatory, optional
and impossible values.
Defaults
As in other chapters of this book, the analysis assumes default inheritance as the underlying logic –
in other words, generalisations that allow exceptions. Default inheritance is widely accepted in AI
(Luger and Stubblefield 1993), and the same logic explains the ‘prototype’ concepts of cognitive
psychology (Rosch 1978), so non-linguistic examples are plentiful: penguins as exceptional birds,
ash-trays as marginal furniture, and so on. Critics have noted a number of potential weaknesses in
the logic such as its ‘non-monotonicity’ (meaning that any inference in a series of dedunctions is in
danger of being overturned later), but all of these weaknesses vanish if we make one simple
assumption: that inheritance is part of the process of creating and enriching new nodes, and only
applies at that point (Hudson 2010, 43).
Landmarks
One obvious fact about a network is that it has no left-right dimension, so it forces us to treat linear
ordering in terms of relations. Fortunately, Cognitive Grammar offers a name for spatial and
temporal relations: ‘landmark’ (Langacker 2007), which links a ‘trajector’ to the entity from which it
takes its position. For example, in thinking about my nose I take my face as its landmark, and
similarly I know that our house is in London, so London is its landmark. Since ‘landmark’ is a
relational concept, it can be further subclassified into ‘before’ and ‘after’, which will provide the
basis for specifying the order of morphemes or words in a linguistic structure (Hudson 2007, 130).
This list defines the ‘mental apparatus’ that Word Grammar assumes to be available for linguistic
analysis. Every item seems to be part of general cognition, so the challenge is to apply the apparatus
to complex linguistic data, such as the French pronoun system.
3 The notation
However, before embarking on this analysis I need to introduce the Word Grammar notation for
networks. Inevitably, network analysis requires network diagrams. We start with Figure 1.
meaning
purrer
purring
cat
CAT
Smudge
Figure 1: A network for 'cat'
The rectangles contain names for non-relational concepts (or ‘entities’) while the ellipses
contain the names for relations. The small triangle signals the ‘isa’ relation iconically, with its broad
base on the supercategory and its narrow apex linked (by a dotted line) to the example. ‘CAT’ is a
lexeme, while the other labels have their ordinary meanings. In words, Smudge isa cat, a cat
(typically) purrs (i.e. it is the ‘purrer’ in the typical act of purring), and the concept ‘cat’ is the
meaning of the lexeme CAT.
Figure 2 shows how default inheritance works. It assumes a ‘token’, an object that I have
seen and classified as a penguin. The only additional notation is the ‘#’ label, short for ‘quantity’, and
the fact that boxes may have no name. (Indeed, one of the consequences of the network notion
described above is that labels are irrelevant, because a node’s links to other nodes exhaust its
properties.) When a box has no name, it is notationally convenient to put the quantity label into the
box, thereby saving one box and one link; so a box containing, say, ‘0’ is equivalent to an empty box
with a ‘#’ link to another box containing ‘0’.
According to this diagram, then, my token isa penguin, which isa bird; but whereas the
typical bird (‘bird’) may fly (is the flier in more than 0 occurrences of flying), penguins cannot. So if
my token had been flying, the quantity of its flying would have been 1, and its classification as a
penguin would at least have been problematic. (If it looked like a penguin and was in the right
location for a penguin and behaved otherwise like a penguin, then maybe I have discovered a new
variety of penguin that flies.) This diagram also shows how relational concepts are linked, like
entities, in an isa hierarchy.
#
flier
bird
flying
penguin
0
token
0
>0
Figure 2: Penguins as an exception in WG notation
Finally, we have two diagrams which apply this notation to language, starting with an
example from morphology, Figure 3. This network fragment does not introduce any new notation,
but shows a slightly higher degree of complexity. In prose, the lexeme BE isa verb, and so is the
category ‘present’. (This is obviously a simplification.) By default, a present-tense verb has an
inflected form or ‘infl’ (called ‘fif’ for ‘fully inflected form’ in earlier Word Grammar work) which
inherits all the properties of its base, so given that the base of BE is the morpheme {be}, we might
expect a token of [BE, present] to be {be}, but exceptionally it is {are}, so this is the infl that the
token inherits.
verb
base
base
{be}
BE
present
infl
[BE, present]
{are}
token
Figure 3: By default, a verb’s present form is its base, but BE is an exception
The next diagram shows how the ‘landmark’ relation can be combined with default
inheritance. As mentioned earlier, once we recognise ‘landmark’ as a relation, we can make it more
precise by distinguishing two sub-cases: ‘before’ and ‘after’; for example, if my birthday is before
Christmas, Christmas is its landmark but more precisely Christmas is its ‘before’. Now suppose we
want to use these relations to define the order of a series of objects which can occur together in
random combinations but a fixed order – in other words, a series such as the letters of the alphabet
or, indeed, a morphological template. What we can’t do is simply to link adjacent pairs; for instance,
to define the order A B C D, we cannot simply show B as the before of A, C as the before of B and D
as the before of C. The trouble with this analysis is that, as it stands, it doesn’t generalise to partial
strings such as A C. To solve this problem we could ‘overspecify’ by listing every possible pair: A
before B, A before C, A before D, and so on. But although this solution would work, it would miss the
simple point that the relations are transitive: for any items x, y and z, if x before y and y before z
then x before z. A transitive analysis is shown in Figure 4. This figure presents the same analysis
twice. On the left side, the letters A, B, C and D are shown in the desired order, in contrast with the
diagram on the right, where they are in random order. The point of this diagram is that the two
diagrams are exactly equivalent, because all that counts in a network is the relations, and not the
left-right orientation. In prose, C and D belong to a category ‘cd’, which isa ‘bcd’ along with B. These
isa relations guarantee transitivity, because if A is before bcd, it is necessarily before all of them.
A
B
C
D
B
C
D
A
before
cd
cd
before
bcd
bcd
Figure 4: Landmarks in transitive ordering
The last example illustrates a further consequence of the cognitive principles, which is that
we are trying to model the mind of individual people. Since our minds reflect our experience of life
and (in language) of usage, and since different people inevitably have different experiences and may
construe similar experiences in different ways, we may expect considerable variation from one mind
to another even within a homogeneous community. This variation applies to the ordering of A, B, C
and D because orders can be analysed either in terms of ‘before’ or in terms of ‘after’, with exactly
the same result. It would be very hard to find evidence for one analysis rather than the other, so any
analysis is simply a currently untestable hypothesis that some minds have this structure, while
others may have the alternative and others again may even have both, or some other combination.
4 The architecture of language
If language really is a sub-network within the super-network of cognition, can we recognise any kind
of ‘architectural’ structure comparable with the traditional ‘levels’ of grammar, semantics,
phonology and the lexicon (Jackendoff 1997)?
One of the points on which all cognitive theories agree is that there is no cognitive basis for
the traditional distinction between ‘the lexicon’ and ‘the grammar’. Rather, we have a continuum of
generality with very general categories such as ‘word’ at one end and very specific ones such as ‘the
word KICK as used in kick the bucket’ at the other end, and no formal boundary between the two.
This can be seen in the fragment of morphology presented above in Figure 3. In this diagram, both
the lexeme BE and ‘present’ isa ‘verb’, although traditionally the lexeme would belong in the lexicon
and the inflectional category in the grammar. Moreover, the exceptional realization {are} for [BE,
present] has just the same status (and formal structure) as the default realization of ‘present’ which
it overrides. Even more strikingly, the same diagram even includes a transient token of [BE, present],
with its inherited structure which (precisely because it is inherited) has the same formal structure as
the type from which it inherits. In this analysis, then, there is a clear hierarchy of generality from
‘grammatical’ categories through ‘lexical’ categories down to the least general categories of all, the
tokens; but there are no natural boundaries in this hierarchy which might justify a division between
the lexicon and the grammar. In this respect, cognitive theories such as Word Grammar are sharply
at odds with more traditional theories, whether transformational or not. In relation to morphology
in general, and clitics in particular, this conclusion rules out any ‘lexicalist’ analysis, whether
generative or not, in which morphology and cliticization are handled ‘in the lexicon’, prior to
insertion into a structure generated by ‘the grammar’ (Scalise and Guevara 2005; Miller and Sag
1997).
On the other hand, a network can distinguish the traditional ‘levels of analysis’ by means of
classified relations, just as in an attribute-value matrix. Consider a conservative analysis of words in
which a word has a meaning and a realization; for example, the lexeme CAT (a word) means ‘cat’ (an
animal) and is realized by /kat/ (a sound-sequence). The only part of this analysisis which is at all
controversial is the claim that CAT is autonomous of its meaning and its realization, in contrast with
the claim in Cognitive Grammar that words are merely Saussurean signs which relate meanings
directly to sounds (Langacker 2007). The conservative view distinguishes three ‘levels’ of linguistic
analysis: semantics, grammar and phonology (or graphology), which are clear consequences of the
general cognitive process of ‘representational redescription’ (Karmiloff-Smith 1992) whereby
children build increasingly abstract representations of their experience. (And of course, phonology
and graphology are in turn redescriptions of less abstract levels such as acoustic and articulatory
phonetics; in a network approach it makes no sense at all to debate whether or not these are ‘truly’
levels of language structure, just as it makes no sense to ask similar questions about the status of
semantics.) Each level is distinguished by:



a vocabulary of elementary units of a particular kind (e.g. words for syntax,
phonological segments for phonology)
a particular relation to neighbouring levels (e.g. ‘meaning’ and ‘realization’ relating
words to meanings and realizing forms)
a vocabulary of categories, relations and structural types for organising elements at
that level.
Similar distinctions of level apply across cognition, as in the familiar levels of physics, chemistry,
biology and psychology, each of which is a more abstract redescription of the level below it.
What is more controversial in linguistics is the status of morphology. Is morphology a
separate level of representation, mediating between the words of syntax and the segments of
phonology? Or do syntax and phonology meet directly, either by means of processes that relate
words directly to phonology (Anderson 1992), or by syntactic rules which organise morphemes
inside words (Halle and Marantz 1993)? For instance, is the internal structure of, say, dogs simply
/dogz/, without any morphological division into root and suffix, or a combination of two
morphemes, {dog}+{Z}; and in the latter case, is it the rules of syntax that are responsible for this
combination or do we need a separate level of morphology with its own combinatory principles and
vocabulary of elements? The status of morphology thus breaks down into two questions:


Are morphemes psychologically real?
Are morphemes combined into words by the same mental principles or rules that
combine words with one another?
On these questions, Word Grammar takes the rather conservative view that morphemes are real
and are distinct from words, so they are meaningless ‘morphomes’ (Aronoff 1994); and that they are
handled by a separate set of rules, so there really is a separate level of morphology. But it is
important to keep the two questions separate.
First, then, are morphemes psychologically real? Here too the cognitive assumptions of (2)
are relevant.

Recycling in processing. The general principle in (3) that ‘the rich get richer’ means that we
try to ‘recycle’ existing forms in interpreting word tokens, even when the fit isn’t perfect. For
instance, when we hear the word fearing we recognise the form /fiər/ as an example of
/fiə/, the realization of fear, even though (in a non-rhotic accent) the two are not
phonologically identical and the first is not even a complete syllable (or any other kind of
phonological unit) in the larger structure /fiə+rɪŋ/. So the morpheme {fear} must be distinct
from its phonological realizations /fiə/ and /fiər/.
 Concept-creation in learning. When we learned a new word as children we must have
identified its form as a unit; so when we learned WAIT we identified /weɪt/ as its form,
linked to a particular meaning. But given the network view of concepts, this linkage
immediately creates a new concept, which is necessarily distinct from any purely
phonological concept such as a stored syllable; so even if we stored every syllable as a
syllable, the syllable /weɪt/, without a semantic link, must be distinct from the morpheme
{wait}, which also has a semantic link.
 Recycling in learning. Our learning was also guided by the recycling principle, so we were
constantly on the lookout for partial similarities, including similarities between
monomorphemic words such as WAIT and complex words such as WAITER. But every
similarity between two words requires an extra network link, not to mention the links to
morpheme classes such as ‘affix’ or ‘base-form’, all of which reinforces the difference
between purely phonological units and morphemes. For the record, it can be argued that we
do much the same in semantics when we build a familiar meaning into the definition of a
more complex one (Hudson and Holmes 2000).
 Recycling in folk etymology. Ordinary people reanalyse complex words in terms of existing
words, regardless of the meaning. For instance, when hamburger (originally, a sausage from
Hamburg) was adopted in English, its first syllable was identified with the form of ham, even
though the sausage didn't actually contain ham, leading eventually to creations such as
cheeseburger. In short, {ham} is a morpheme shared by both ham and hamburger rather
than just a bit of phonology.
 Priming: psychological experiments show that phonological priming (e.g. nurse – verse) dies
out much faster than morphological priming (e.g. contain – retain) (Frost and others 2000).
This shows that morphological and phonological patterns must be cognitively distinct.
These cognitive arguments support the view that morphological structure (including morphemes) is
psychologically real. This means that we must know not only the lexemes of our language, but also
its morphemes. And that in turn is at least compatible with the idea that we recognise morphology
as a distinct, autonomous, level of structure.
The second question is whether syntax is responsible for morphological structure. Once
again, the cognitive arguments are compelling. If morphemes really are distinct from words, so that
words and morphemes constitute two separate vocabularies, then it obviously follows that they
must be classified as different, with ‘word’ and ‘morpheme’ as super-categories at the top of two
different isa hierarchies. And if these two super-categories are different, then once again they must
have different properties so words and morphemes must inherit different properties. For example,
we may assume that words have a ‘meaning’ relation which morphemes don’t have, while
morphemes are realized by phonology whereas words are realized by morphology. These
differences are enough to guarantee that different principles or rules govern the ways that words
and morphemes combine.
Fortunately, there is also plenty of empirical evidence that this is indeed the case – all the
evidence that supports the familiar arguments for Word and Paradigm morphology (Robins 1959)
and its more recent manifestations in inferential and realizational models (Stump 2001). For
example, whereas free order is common in syntax, it is vanishingly rare in morphology (with an
interesting exception in French clitics which I explore below); and whereas ordering by template is
generally accepted in morphology, it is unknown in syntax. And of course there are well-attested
cases where the morphological structure of a sentence is out of step with its syntactic structure
(Sadock 1991). The empirical evidence therefore supports the a priori argument from general
cognition, so Word Grammar is one of the many theories of language which assumes that
morphology constitutes an autonomous level of analysis, as shown in Figure 5.
concept
'cat'
meaning
word
CAT
realization
morpheme
{cat}
realization
syllable
/kæt/
Figure 5: four levels: semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology
One important consequence of this conclusion is that the units of morphology and syntax
differ in abstraction rather than in size. As the figure’s cat example shows, the word CAT is realized
by the morpheme {cat}, both of which correspond to the same amount of phonology, so they both
have the same length. The same is true of the plural cats, where the syntactic word [CAT, plural] is
realized by {cats} – a ‘wordform’ rather than a single morpheme. The distinction between words and
wordforms is important in comparison with non-realizational theories where the whole of which a
morpheme is a part is a word rather than a wordform, but it also underlines the contrast between
morphology and syntax because Word Grammar, like other dependency-based theories, claims that
words are related by dependency relations rather than by part-whole constituency relations. Thus
one of the differences between syntax and morphology is the basic combinatory relationship – partwhole in morphology, but dependency in syntax (Hudson forthcoming).
The ‘architecture’ of Figure 5 is a statement of typical patterns: a typical word has a meaning
and is realized by a morpheme, a typical morpheme is realized by a syllable and a typical syllable
realizes a morpheme. But alongside these typical arrangements there are many exceptions, all of
which can be accommodated thanks to default inheritance. Most obviously, words, morphemes and
syllables are often not in a 1:1 relation, but even the ‘levels’ allow exceptions; for instance,
phonesthemes seem to relate directly to meaning, as do the tunes of intonation.)
5 Default morphology
Following the assumptions of Word Grammar, therefore, our mental representation of an utterance
includes an autonomous morphological structure, consisting of morphemes and larger
morphological units, and linked by realization to the neighbouring levels of syntax and phonology (or
graphology). Since the stored grammar is nothing but a network, it is purely declarative and cannot
contain procedural rules such as ‘Add {Z} to the base’, though it can of course include network
structures that are equivalent. Mental procedures do of course exist, but they are the domaingeneral processes of node-building and node-enrichment, including the process of inheritance. It is
these procedures that allow the static network to apply dynamically to particular tokens, and that
allow defaults to be overridden.
I have already introduced the basic principles of inflectional morphology through the earlier
example Figure 3, which showed how {are} overrides the default value for ‘infl’, the inflected form of
a word. As this example showed, all the complexities of morphology lie in the relations (e.g. ‘base’,
‘infl’); so each inflectable word inherits its base from the lexeme and its infl from the inflectional
category. In more complex morphology, the number of relations involved increases proportionately.
For instance, English morphology recognises a ‘z-form’ relation, which links the base to a form which
is used both in plural nouns and in singular verbs; the morphology of z-forms is shown in Figure 6. In
prose, a word has both a base (defined by its lexeme) and a z-form, which consists of two parts
(labelled ‘0’ and ‘+’, as explained below): the first part inherits from the word’s base, while the
second part inherits from the morpheme {Z}. The right-hand part of the figure shows an elementary
classification of forms, dividing them first into base-forms (simple or complex) and affixes. A typical
word has a base-form as its base. No doubt the diagram could be improved, and it could certainly be
extended, but the main point is that (apart from the term ‘word’) the diagram is pure morphology. It
should be easy to see how this kind of analysis can be extended to cover more complicated
morphological patterns such as those of French inflected verbs; for instance, finirons, ‘(we) will
finish’, is the ons-form of the r-form of the verb FINIR (whose base is just {fin}).
form
affix
base-form
base
e
word
{Z}
complex
simple
0
z-form
+
Figure 6: The morphology of z-forms
One extra fact which will prove important in the discussion of French pronouns is that affixes
inherit a general property of needing a ‘mother’, a complex form of which the affix is a part and
which also contains a base-form. The traditional classification of affixes as prefixes, suffixes and
infixes determines their position relative to their landmark, the base-form, which is shown in these
diagrams by labelling the ‘part’ relation as ‘0’ (for the base) or ‘+’ (for a suffix, i.e. a unit that follows
the base). This notation for showing simply that some affix follows the base will play an important
part in the analysis of French enclitics (section 8).
form
affix
mother
baseform
suffix
+
complex
Figure 7: Affixes have a mother
Once a morphological structure has been defined in this way, it can be mapped by the
morphosyntax onto the categories of syntax and by the morphophonology onto those of phonology.
The irregularity of are (instead of the expected be) in Figure 3 already illustrates morphophonology,
so we only need an example of morphosyntax, for which we take the plural noun. As can be seen in
Figure 8, the morphosyntax is trivial, but the example illustrates the benefits, for users, of separating
morphology from syntax. This separation allows morphological patterns to be recycled in different
parts of the morphosyntax, explaining the phenomenonon of ‘inflectional polyfunctionality, the
systematic use of the same morphology to express distinct but related morphosyntactic content’
(Stump 2014, 73). In the English case, the suffix {Z} is recycled in the paradigms of both nouns and
verbs, so that the number of affixes used is smaller than the number of inflectional categories
distinguished.
noun
z-form
plural
infl
Figure 8: Plural nouns have the z-form
This elementary introduction to inflectional morphology in Word Grammar provides the
foundations needed for the discussion of French pronouns.
6 Clitics
The following sections will argue that French pronouns are clitics, so it is important to be clear what
this claim means. The term clitic has been defined in many different ways, but all the definitions
locate clitics as something between a full word and an affix, with the syntax of a full word but the
phonology and rigid position of an affix. But the previous discussion has argued that words and
affixes are different kinds of entity, as different as (say) nouns and vowels, so they cannot be located
on a continuum with clitics somewhere in between. However, this discussion also lays the ground for
a very simple definition:
(4) A clitic is a word realized by an affix.
Whereas a typical word is realized by a base-form, with or without added affixes, a clitic is
exceptional in being realized just by an affix – i.e. in having an affix as its ‘infl’, the form that realizes
it and which cannot be inflected any further. Thanks to default inheritance, this exceptional pattern
is easy to model, and of course it also explains why clitics combine the meaning and syntax of a
whole word with the phonological weakness and inflexible position of an affix.
We start with simple clitics (Zwicky 1977) - syntactically normal words, in their normal
position, but with reduced pronunciation, as in (5).
(5) That’s right.
(6) That is right.
Example (5) has exactly the same syntactic structure, including the same ordering of all the
elements, as its unreduced equivalent in (6), so there can be no doubt that the element written ’s is
a separate word – a finite verb, without which the sentence is ungrammatical. But nor can there be
any doubt that it is morphologically like an affix, because it has the same allomorphy as the {Z} which
we find in plural nouns, singular verbs and possessives (Hudson 2013). If this really is the {Z}
morpheme, it is another example of recycling which maximizes the functions of each morpheme.
One important element is missing even in the analysis of simple clitics like this. We saw in
section 5 that an affix needs a ‘mother’ – a complex form that holds it together with the base-form
to which it is attached. Traditionally, clitics ‘lean’ on the word to which they are attached, in just the
same way that an affix might be said to ‘lean’ on its base-form. But in both cases this ‘leaning’ is
enabled by a larger unit, the affix’s mother. So what is the mother for the affix in (5)? It must be
{that’s}, a morphological complex specially created to accommodate the morphemes {that} and {Z}.
And this, in turn, must be an example of a special kind of complex which we can call a ‘hostform’
(building on the terminology in which the clitic ‘leans’ on its ‘host’). The general network for clitics is
show in Figure 9: a word’s ‘infl’ (i.e. final form, including any inflections) is normally a word-form, but
exceptionally a clitic’s is an affix. Like any other affix, this affix needs a mother, which is an otherwise
undefined unit called a ‘hostform’ which is also mother to the realization of some other word, the
clitic’s ‘host’. The converse of the ‘mother’ relation is ‘part’, which may be either the first or second
part, labelled once again ‘0’ and ‘+’.
infl
word
wordform
form
infl
mother
0
host
hostform
mother
clitic
infl
+
affix
\
Figure 9: A grammar for simple clitics
Given this grammar, Figure 10 should be largely self-explanatory as an analysis of that’s in
That’s right. The fact that the verb is a clitic is shown in its classification as [BE, pres, sing, clitic],
showing that it isa ‘clitic’ as well as the three other categories. Strictly speaking, these labels belong
to stored types, and the word tokens in this example should be distinguished from the types of
which they are examples (Hudson 2015), but for the purposes of this chapter the distinction is
unimportant. However it is important to emphasise that the hostform labeled {that’s} is not a stored
unit, unlike the morphemes {that} and {Z}. The label on the hostform is simply a concatenation of the
labels on its parts.
host
THAT
[BE, pres, sing, clitic]
infl
infl
{that}
{Z}
mother
0
mother
{that’s}
+1
Figure 10: A simple clitic in That's right.
It is important to note that the cliticized auxiliary verb is syntactically the head of the entire
sentence, and its host word is subordinate to it (unlike the clitic patterns of Middle English, where
we find ‘t is rather than it’s). This is the reverse of the situation with French pronouns, where the
clitic is syntactically subordinate and functionally not dissimilar from inflectional affixes. English
cliticized auxiliary verbs are important because they have nothing at all in common with inflectional
affixes, so they establish the general principle that ‘clitic’ is a real category in grammatical theory,
and that at least some putative clitics really are clitics, not inflectional affixes. The question for the
next section is not whether clitics exist, but where the boundary lies between clitics and inflectional
affixes.
What this section has achieved is the beginnings of an analysis of clitics, based on the idea of
clitics as syntactic words with an irregular morphological realization as affixes, combined with the
new ‘hostform’ to act as mother to this affix and to the word on which it ‘leans’.
7 French pronouns as clitics
French unstressed pronouns are found in examples like (7), in contrast with non-pronominal
equivalents such as (8).
(7) Je te
le donnerai
I to.you it will.give ‘I will give it to you.’
(8) Jean donnera le cadeau à Marie.
John will.give the present to Mary.
The challenge is to explain why the object pronouns te and le stand before the verb when their
phrasal equivalents stand after it. Moreover, the relative order of the pronouns is absolutely fixed:
te le, never *le te. In contrast, when the objects are both phrases, either order is possible,
depending on the elements’ relative ‘weight’ so (8) and (9) are both possible.
(9) Jean donnera à Marie un cadeau merveilleux.
John will.give to Mary a present marvelous ‘John will give Mary a marvelous present.’
However, there is one pattern in which the object pronouns follow the verb: when the verb is
imperative and affirmative, as in (10) and (11).
(10)
(11)
Donne-le-moi!
give it to.me ‘Give it me’
Donne-moi-le!
give
to.me it ‘Give me it’
Prescriptive grammars of standard French proscribe the pattern in (11), but it is reported to be
common in spoken French, at least in Paris (Hawkins and Towell 2001, 69), and more generally, postverb pairs of pronouns can almost always be used in either order (with one interesting exception
discussed below).
The first question, therefore, is whether examples like (7), (10) and (11) really contain clitics.
The alternative is that the affixes realize inflectional contrasts, in just the same way as the suffixes
which indicate tense and subject-agreement inflection. The inflectional analysis has been defended
in a number of generative analyses (reviewed and rejected in De Cat 2005), and is particularly
popular in the HPSG tradition (Miller and Sag 1997; Crysmann and Bonami 2015), so it needs to be
addressed seriously. The debate is sometimes cast in terms of ‘syntactic’ versus ‘morphological’
analyses, but even if clitics are syntactic words they are also linked by morphology to their host, so
the question is simply whether the affixes concerned realize separate syntactic words (as clitics), or
inflectional categories on the verb (as inflectional affixes). The following arguments all support the
clitic analysis. In order not to presuppose the conclusion too strongly, I shall refer to the putative
pronouns merely as ‘pronoun-affixes’, since most people agree that in some sense they are affixes.
The first argument is cognitive. Imagine a French child who encounters the following pair of
very ordinary sentences:
(12)
Mange le fromage.
eat
(13)
the cheese
Mange-le.
eat
it
The inflectional analysis assumes that the child sees no similarity between these examples beyond
the verb mange. But surely this is implausible. Any theory of learning which allows learners to spot
patterns must allow the learner to notice the repeated le. But the determiner le in (12) is definitely a
syntactic word (though it too may be a clitic within the noun phrase), so why should the child not
assume the same for the pronoun le? Moreover, this identification is strongly supported by other
examples, which show that le is associated in both cases with masculine singular nouns, in contrast
with la for feminine singular and les for any plurals; and in all cases, this word signals definiteness.
The choice among le, la and les is made on exactly the same basis in each case, so it is fair to assume
that a learner will identify them, choosing a clitic analysis rather than the inflectional analysis.
The same argument can be run in reverse: if le is directly dependent on mange in (13), then
why not also in (12)? In this case the argument supports the DP-style analysis in which le is the head
of le fromage, just as (arguably) the is the head of the cheese (Hudson 1990, 268–276).
A second argument is based on typology. As we have seen, the pronoun-affixes can occur
either before or after the verb, and when they follow the verb there is almost complete free
variation. As an example of inflectional affixes, this would very unusual. Although free word order is
common, free morpheme order is rare (Moravcsik 2012, 173). Admittedly this typological claim has
been disputed (Crysmann and Bonami 2015), but one of the key cases cited is that of the French
pronoun affixes, so there is some doubt regarding the reliability of the remaining cases. The fact
remains that most affixes, in most languages, are rigidly tied to just one position within the structure
of their word, so any analysis which assumes mobile affixes requires extremely strong supporting
evidence.
A third argument is based on semantics. The pronoun-affixes at least appear to have
referential meanings, just like the meanings of the pronouns that translate them in other languages
such as English. Moreover, the quantifier tous, ‘all’, can ‘float’ off any plural affix pronoun, just as it
can from a wh-pronoun. Miller and Sag quote the following examples (Miller and Sag 1997, 627):
(14)
Marie a vu tous les livres. 'Marie saw all the books.'
Mary has seen all the books
(15)
(16)
(17)
(18)
*Marie a tous vu les livres.
Marie les a vus tous. 'Marie saw all of them.'
Marie les a tous vus. 'Marie saw all of them.'
... les livres que Marie a vus tous...
... the books which Mary has seen all... ‘the books all of which Mary has seen’
(19)
... les livres que Marie a tous vus ...
The obvious conclusion from the distribution of tous is that the pronoun-affixes have the same
status as wh-pronouns, so if the latter are syntactic words, the same must be true of the former.
The fourth argument is based on syntax. The inflectional analysis is based on the assumption
that each pronoun-affix removes some element from the verb’s valency (i.e. from the list of
complements and the subject). The inflectional analysis works smoothly because the valency is one
of the verb’s properties, comparable with its tense and subject agreement; but one of the pronounforms is y, meaning ‘there, to it, at it’.
(20)
Jean y a écrit son nom.
John on.it has written his name
This is seriously problematic for the inflectional analysis because y would not normally qualify as a
complement, so some kind of special arrangement would need to made to accommodate these nonarguments in the argument list (Miller and Sag 1997, 597). In contrast, the clitic analysis can
accommodate adjuncts as easily as arguments.
The fifth argument is similar to the two previous arguments: like y, the pronoun-affix en, which
means ‘of it, from it’, need not be a complement or subject of the verb to which it is attached; but
like the object pronouns, it behaves in a very similar way to a relative pronoun, in this case dont ‘of
which’ (Miller and Sag 1997, 612–623). The argument involves examples like the following:
(21)
Marie en connaît la fin.
Mary of.it knows the end ‘Mary knows the end of it.’
(22)
La fin en est désagréable.
the end of.it is unpleasant
In these examples, en seems to be a complement of fin, ‘end’ rather than a direct dependent of the
verb. This is clearly not expected in the inflectional analysis, but worse still, the noun phrase to
which en belongs need not even be a complement of the host verb, as can be seen in the next
example:
(23)
On en peindra le bout du
pied gauche.
one of.it will.paint the end of.the foot left. ‘One will paint the end of its left
foot.’
However, as Miller and Sag point out, the constraints on en are exactly the same as those on the
relative pronoun dont, ‘of which’, as in (24) to (26):
(24)
(25)
(26)
... la seule histoire dont
Marie connaît la fin ...
... the only story of.which Mary knows the end ...
... une histoire dont
la fin est désagréable ...
... a story of.which the end is unpleasant ...
... une statue dont
on peindra le bout du
pied gauche ...
... a statue of.which one will.paint the end of.the foot left ...
Once again, the obvious conclusion is that en has the same syntactic status as dont, so that the same
generalisations can apply to them both. But this implies that en, like dont, is a syntactic word – as in
the clitic analysis, but not in the inflectional analysis.
The last argument is based on morphosyntax, and involves not only the pronoun-affixes y
and en, but also the object pronouns le, la and les (‘him’, ‘her’, ‘them’) whose similarities to the
definite articles were the basis of the first argument. The pronoun-affix y has the meanings expected
with the preposition À, which usually translates as ‘to’ or ‘at’; and similarly en is very similar to the
preposition DE. In some sense, therefore, it is tempting to see these two prepositions ‘in’ the
pronoun-affixes. But the same two prepositions are also involved in a morphological rule which
applies when they combine with a definite article: where we expect de le and à le we find du and au,
and the expected de les and à les are replaced by des and aux. Almost everyone agrees that these
complications leave the syntax unaffected, so that du is simply an irregular morphological realization
of the two words DE LE (i.e. DE + the definite, masculine, singular article). As mentioned earlier, this
pattern suggests that the determiner is directly linked to de, thereby supporting the DP-style analysis
with determiners as heads (Hudson 1990, 272). But it also strengthens the temptation to find DE in
en and À in y, and even suggests an analysis in which each of these pronoun-affixes is an irregular
realization of the preposition plus a gender- and number-neutral pronoun. Admittedly the wordform correspondence is even more irregular than for du, but y is no less regular than au, given their
respective pronunciations as [i] and [o]. The same analysis could even be extended to the relative
pronoun dont mentioned above, as an irregular realization of DE + relative pronoun. At present
these analyses are merely speculative, but none of them could be reconciled with the inflectional
analysis of y and en, whereas they are all compatible with a clitic analysis.
In conclusion, therefore, the overall evidence seems to give overwhelming support for the
traditional analysis of French pronoun-affixes as clitics – as syntactic words which are realized by
affixes. This is the analysis that will be assumed in the remaining sections.
8 Enclitics as simple clitics
We now move towards a formal analysis of French clitic pronouns, building on the theoretical
framework already established for simple clitics in English. A simple clitic such as the ‘s in That’s right
is a syntactic word – in this case, exactly the same syntactic word as the verb in That is right, except
that its classification includes ‘clitic’, so we can call it [BE, 3sg, clitic]. Being a clitic, its base (and infl)
is an affix rather than the expected ‘base-form’, but any affix needs a ‘mother’, a word within which
it is a part. This mother-word cannot be the ‘host’, the word on which the clitic is traditionally said to
‘lean’, because this does not provide a suitable morphological home for the affix. Consequently, the
clitic carries its own ‘hostform’, a morphological unit which does provide the necessary home for the
clitic affix and which also has a vacancy for another word’s morphology – i.e. for the host-word. This
is the analysis that was shown in Figure 9.
A French example corresponding to the English simple clitics is the definite article, which we
can call simply [DEF], to be clear that this is a syntactic word, in contrast with its morphological
realizations {le}, {la}, {les}, signalling gender and number, and {l’}, used in the singular before a
vowel. This qualifies as a proclitic because it attaches phonologically to the next word, but like the
English auxiliaries, the only restrictions on the next word are those that follow from the ordinary
rules of syntax. Take an example like (27).
(27)
le grand livre
the big book
Here the word [DEF, masc] is realized by {le}, which, as a clitic, is part of a hostword, with the next
word, [GRAND], as its host and the latter’s realization as the other part of the hostword. The
ordinary rules of syntax are responsible for the existence and position of grand so it happens to be
the next word after le, and therefore to qualify as the latter’s host. The example is deliberately
chosen, of course, because of the similarities noted earlier between this clitic and the clitic pronouns
meaning ‘him’, ‘her’ and ‘them’. The clitic analysis of pronouns allows a much more revealing
analysis of these similarities.
The main aim of this section is to consider French pronouns when they are enclitics, which
only happens with affirmative imperative verbs. Because of this limited distribution, enclitics are
usually treated as an exception to the normal pattern of proclitics, but this approach misses a rather
important fact about enclitics: that they are actually simple clitics because their ordering follows the
ordinary rules of syntax for phrasal dependents of the verb. As explained earlier, if two enclitics
combine, their order is almost always free, just as it is for phrasal dependents. The relevant
examples are (10) and (11), repeated below:
(28)
(29)
Donne-le-moi!
give it to.me
Donne-moi-le!
give
to.me it
According to a reviewer, the only exception to this general freedom is that le, la, les (him, her, them)
must not follow lui, leur (to him/her, to them).
(30)
(31)
Donne-le-lui!
*Donne-lui-le!
This exception can easily be handled by a ‘landmark’ link from the indirect object pronoun lui to the
direct object le, just like the one which positions them in the opposite order in English examples like
(32)and (33) (which, incidentally, are overridden for pronouns, as in Give it me!).
(32)
(33)
*Give good marks your students!
Give your students good marks!
This exception will turn up again in the ordering of proclitics. Otherwise, enclitics follow the same
relative ordering as phrases, except, of course, that they cannot be separated from the host verb by
an adjunct such as bien, ‘well’:
(34)
Mange bien le fromage!
eat
(35)
(36)
well the cheese
Mange le bien!
*Mange bien le!
If enclitics really are simple clitics (with this one exception), there is no need for a template
to position them relative to one another. All they need is a hostform to glue them morphologically
onto each other and onto the host verb. Moreover, there is no ‘clitic climbing’ from imperatives, so
the host verb is easy to identify, as the verb on which the pronouns depend. (The apparently
exceptional pronoun en as in Mange-en beaucoup! ‘Eat a lot of it’ will be discussed in section 10.)
In short, the grammar for French enclitics is not much more complicated than that for
English cliticized auxiliary verbs. The main difference is that, whereas the English hostform could
accommodate any base-form, the French one selects a particular kind of host, an affirmative
imperative verb. This selection implies a relation ‘hostform’ (abbreviated to ‘hf’ in diagrams)
between the host verb [MANGE, imper] and the hostform {mange-le}. Since the clitic is also part of
this same hostform, we can assume the same relation between clitic and hostform. This relation is
additional to the relations already listed, so in mange-le, ‘eat it’, for example, we have the following
relations:







hostform (hf): the hostform {mange-le} is the hf of the word [MANGE, imper] and
also of the word [LE, masc].
host: the word [MANGE, imper] is the host of the word [LE, masc].
infl: the base-form {mange} is the infl of the word [MANGE, imper].
infl: the affix {le} is the infl of the word [LE, masc].
mother: the hostform {mange-le} is the mother of both the base-form {mange} and
the affix {le}.
0: {mange} is the ‘0’ (in this case, the first part) of {mange-le}.
+: {le} is the ‘+’ (second part) of {mange-le}.
The cognitive assumptions (2) mean that there is no limit to the number of ad hoc relations that can
be created (as we do all the time in the social arena), but in any case each of these relations plays a
role in the grammar, so they can all be justified. They are all included in Figure 11, which is laid out
so as to be as easily comparable as possible with Figure 10 for the English that’s in That’s right. It
can be seen that the highlighted ‘hostform’ link from the syntactic verb to the hostform is the only
extra relation.
host
[LE, masc]
[MANGE, imper]
infl
infl
hf
{mange}
hf
{le}
mother
0
{mange-le}
mother
+
Figure 11: The structure of Mange-le!
Another obvious difference between French enclitics and English clitic auxiliaries is that
French allows multiple enclitics hosted by the same verb. This means that the French hostform
accommodates more than one clitic, and is equivalent to the ‘clitic cluster’ of other analyses. If, as I
have argued, these clitics are in fact simple clitics, occupying the positions they are regularly
assigned by the syntax, then the analysis need not restrict the order of the cltics (except for the one
restriction noted earlier, to which we return below). But there are systematic restrictions on clitic
combinations which go beyond anything found in French syntax. The clitics fall into four groups, with
the general restriction that members of the same group may not combine with each other,
regardless of meaning and syntax. The groups are listed in Table 1.
Table 1: French clitic pronoun groups
group A
A1
me
te
se
nous
vous
A2
lui
leur
me
you
himself/herself/themselves
us
you
group B
le
him
la
her
les
them
group C
y, ‘to it, at it’
group D
en, ‘from
it’
to him/her
to them
The cooccurrence bans are quite rigid, ruling out sentences which would be semantically and
syntactically perfect such as (37), contrasting with the syntactically similar, but non-clitic, (38).
(37)
*Présentez-me-lui.
introduce me to.her
(38)
Présentez mon ami à votre soeur.
introduce my friend to your sister
It is true that ‘ethical datives’ break these restrictions, as in the following examples
(Jouitteau and Rezac 2008):
(39)
Regarde te me nous donc ça!
Look
(40)
you me us
Prends te
c’mon that “C’mon, look at that!”
moi donc ce panier, ça me débarrassera
toujours.
take
you me c’mon this basket it me will.relieve (of it) anyway “C’mon, take
this basket for me, that will at least lighten my load.”
However, such examples are distinct in other ways as well so, with regret, I shall have to ignore
them.
Returning to the mainstream clitics, we need a mechanism for rationing the clitics in any
hostform to one from each group. This is easily achieved by distinguishing four parts (other than the
host word), and assigning each group to one part. So we assign group A to ‘part A’, and so on. The
relevant part of the grammar is Figure 12. The label ‘0/1’ inside a box simply shows optionality –
either 0 or 1 (but not more than one); this notational trick was introduced in the explanation of
Figure 2.
host
clitic
group A
infl
group B
infl
infl
group C
group D
infl
infl
hf
hf
0/1
1
A
0
0/1
B
0/1
0/1
C
D
enclitic
hostform
Figure 12: A grammar for multiple enclitics
As noted previously, the order of enclitics is free within the hostform, so it should be
remembered that the labels ‘A’, ‘B’ and so on refer only to the clitic classification, and not at all to
the order in which they occur. However, we still have to deal with the one, exceptional, restriction
on the order of the clitics, which we can now generalise in terms of clitic classes: group A2 never
precedes group B. For example, donne-le-lui is possible, but not *donne-lui-le. This restriction is
easily stated in terms of a ‘landmark’ relation between the clitic forms, without affecting the syntax.
Figure 13 says that a group A2 affix follows a group B affix when they are both part of the same
hostform. Notice that the landmark relation (‘after’) has no implications for existence, so the
grammar does not imply that a group A2 affix needs a group B affix, or vice versa.
clitic
group A
group B
group A2
infl
infl
after
B
A
hostform
Figure 13: The one order rule for enclitics
There are a number of morphophonological details that are easily accommodated in this
network grammar. For example, the enclitic me has four possible realizations, depending on its
context. The ones in (42) and (44) are spoken and casual rather than written.
(41)
(42)
(43)
(44)
Donne-le-moi. ‘Give it me.’
Donne-moi-le. ‘Give me it.’
Donne-m’en. ‘Give me some.’
Donne-moi-z-en. ‘Give me some.’
However, these details are only marginally relevant to the main thrust of this attempt to understand
and formalize the syntax and morphology, so I shall not discuss them further.
There is one further detail which goes beyond this chapter: the fact that en, ‘of it’, may appear
to be ‘raised’ from inside a noun phrase, as in (21) to (23) (e.g. Marie en connaît la fin. ‘Mary knows
the end of it’). The same pattern is of course found in enclitics, but the earlier discussion showed
that a very similar pattern is found with the relative pronoun dont, as in examples (24) to (26), so I
assume that further research will find a non-raising analysis for both enclitics and proclitics.
This completes the grammar of enclitics What we have achieved in this section is to extend the
grammar for English simple clitics to accommodate the French enclitics, which are also simple clitics.
This extension has involved the addition of one further relation, the ‘hf’ relation between the host
word or the clitics and the hostform, and a subclassification both of the clitics and also of the ‘part’
relations between them and the hostform. This grammar will turn out to need further small
additions to accommodate the proclitics.
9 Proclitics as special clitics
The grammar so far deals with just one cell in the paradigm of French verbs: affirmative imperatives.
All other kinds of verb either forbid all clitics (past participles, discussed in the next section) or treat
them as proclitics rather than as enclitics. The examples in (41) to (44) contrast with both negative
imperatives and non-imperatives:
(45)
(46)
Ne me le donne pas!
not to.me it give not “Don’t give it to me!”
Tu me le donnes.
you to.me it give ‘You give it to me.’
(47)
Me le donnes-tu?
to.me it give
you ‘Do you give it to me?’
In these proclitic examples, there is absolutely no flexibility of position for the pronouns, except of
course for the subject pronoun (tu), whose position can be used (albeit rarely in spoken French) to
distinguish declarative and interrogative clauses.
The most intriguing question, of course, is why affirmative imperatives should be so
different from all other verb-forms. Is there a functional explanation for this distinction? Bearing in
mind that all functional explanations are mere speculation, the following explanation seems
plausible. The clitic clusters on affirmative imperatives are special because they contain neither a
subject pronoun nor a negative ne, both of which have good reasons for standing before the verb.
For the subject, this is important because its position before or after the verb carries the distinction
between declarative and interrogative clauses; and for ne it is important because a pre-verbal ne is
normally paired with a post-verbal element such as pas (not), personne (nobody) or jamais (never),
so the ne is an important early signal of negation. But the subject and ne are clitics depending on the
same verb as the other pronouns, so they all need to be integrated into a single cluster; so in a sense
the subject pronoun and ne ‘drag’ the cluster to their preferred position before the verb. the
affirmative imperatives have enclitics instead of proclitics.
Whatever the merits of this explanation, the fact remains that the pronouns in the enclitic
cluster are a subset of those in the proclitic cluster, so it would be reasonable to treat the enclitic
cluster as the basic, unmarked, pattern which is further elaborated in the proclitics – or, in default
terms, the enclitic hostform is the default, with the proclitic as an exception. But this conclusion is
strongly counterintuitive if we think of the verb classes concerned; proclitics are always presented as
the general case, with the enclitics of affirmative imperatives as the special exception. Fortunately,
the separation of syntax and morphology provides a way to resolve this apparent contradiction:
imperatives are exceptional in syntax, but their enclitic clusters are the default in morphology. This is
the arrangement shown in Figure 14.
hostform
verb
hf
enclitic
hf
imperative
proclitic
Figure 14: Proclitics as syntactic default and morphological exception
The main difference between proclitics and enclitics (apart from the position of the whole
cluster) is that proclitics are special clitics, with a rigid ordering different from that of syntax. The
ordering is based on the same clitic groups as enclitics, as listed in Table 1, but of course we now
have to include subject pronouns and ne. We discuss inverted subjects, which follow the host verb,
at the end of this section.
(48)
The proclitic template:
1. subject pronouns: je, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, ils, elles
2. negative: ne
3. group A1: me, te, se, nous, vous
4. group B : le, la, les
5. group A2 : lui, leur
6. group C : y
7. group D : en
8. the verb
This is a typical example of the kind of ordering often found in morphology which needs an analysis
in terms of a template like the hypothetical one in Figure 4. A template is the appropriate apparatus
in such cases not just because multiple morphemes can combine, but because their ordering is
transitive. For example, subject pronouns precede group A1 whether or not a negative ne is present.
But of course a template, in the form of a linear string of slots or cells in a table, is not possible in a
network, so we need the network equivalent: a set of positional relations with transitive ordering
imposed by a mixture of landmarks and isa relations, as shown in Figure 4.
It may not be a coincidence that French also needs a template for its ordinary verb
inflections, where multiple suffixes combine with each other in a fixed order as in vendrions, ‘(we)
would sell’, consisting of:




{vend} ‘sell’
{r} as in vendre, ‘to sell’
{i} as in vendiez, ‘(you) used to sell’
{ons} as in vendons ‘(we) sell’
The point of the example is simply to show that at least three suffixes may combine, suggesting that
French speakers use a four-slot template when constructing examples like this. If so, the template
for proclitics recycles the template in a different part of the grammar. More generally, we may
expect a typological link between template-based special clitics and template-based complex
inflectional morphology.
Returning to the details of French, therefore, we need a template with eight positional slots
for the realizations of the verb, the pronouns and ne, as listed in (48). These slots generally map
easily onto the clitic groups established to predict mutual compatibility for enclitics, but there is one
interesting exception. As with enclitics, group A reflects compatibility accurately, but, again as with
enclitics, it divides into A1 and A2 for ordering, because group A2 (lui, leur) has a special positioning
restriction. Even more interestingly, the effect of this restriction is precisely the same as the
restriction that applies to enclitics and which is stated in Figure 13: that group A2 (lui/leur) must not
precede group B le/la/les. The template accommodates this restriction by providing a separate slot
for group A2 after group B, but of course this means that group A pronouns are split between two
different slots. In spite of this split, group A still acts as a unified group for compatibility purposes.
For example, although me precedes le because it belongs to A1 and lui follows le because it belongs
to A2, the sequence *me lui is impossible.
Figure 15 shows the grammar for proclitics. It is based on the grammar for enclitics in Figure
12, with the new parts highlighted, so it is easy to see that the enclitics grammar is a subset of the
new grammar. The main change, apart from the addition of the subject and negative clitics, is the
change of label on the relations at the bottom, from the arbitrary labels ‘A’, ‘B’ and so on, to the
numbers. It should be understood that these numerical labels are only meaningful because they are
defined by a recursive network of landmark relations like the one in Figure 4.
host
clitic
subj
neg
ne
group
A2
infl
infl
infl
group A
infl
1
hf
-7
-6
0
Figure 15: A grammar for proclitics
infl
infl
0/1
0/1
0/1
0/1
-3
group B
proclitic
hostform
-4
infl
infl
0/1
-5
group D
group C
0/1
0/1
-2
-1
hf
When this grammar is applied to an example, it gives the structure in Figure 16 for (49),
which is displayed so as to make it as easy as possible to compare with the earlier Figure 11 for the
much simpler enclitic example Mange-le! Once again, the simpler structure is a subset of the more
complex one, and the additions are highlighted. For simplicity, this diagram omits most of the
‘mother’ and ‘hf’ relations as well as the repeated ‘infl’ labels.
(49)
Je ne le lui
donnerai pas.
I not it to.her will.give not ‘I won’t give her it.’
host
[1SG, sub]
[NEG]
[3M, dir]
[DONNE,
fut, 1sg]
[3sing, indir]
infl
infl
{je}
-7
{ne
}
{le}
{lui
}
-6
-4
-3
{je ne le lui donnerai}
mother
hostform
{donnerai}
0
hf
mother
hf
Figure 16: Structure of Je ne le lui donnerai pas
The grammar for proclitics is almost complete. There remain just two issues: subject
inversion, discussed now, and the major issue of clitic climbing, to which the next section is devoted.
Subject inversion is needed for written examples such as (50).
(50)
Le mangeras-tu?
it will.eat you ‘Will you eat it?’
However, subject inversion is much more limited than other proclitic patterns. For one thing, it is
‘marginal’ in casual speech (Martineau 2012, 193); and for another, most verbs forbid inversion
altogether if the subject is je, ‘I’ (Miller and Sag 1997, 577); for example, although both tu sors and je
sors (you/I exit) are possible, only sors-tu is grammatically possible. This curious restriction raises
similar issues to those raised by the English *I amn’t gap: why does it exist, and how do children
learn that it exists? (Hudson 2000) It calls for a theoretical explanation, but meanwhile we can at
least incorporate it into the growing grammar, along with the equally tantalising lexical exceptions
such as suis-je, ‘am I?’. The resulting grammar is as shown in Figure 17: exceptionally, inverted verbs
have an ‘inverted hostform’, which, exceptionally, has a ‘+1’ part for subject pronouns. Furthermore,
a ‘1sg’ subject pronoun (i.e. je, ‘I’) has a hostform whose quantity is ‘0’ – in other words, it has no
hostform, so it cannot be inverted; but there is one more exception to an exception: if the inverted
verb is suis (the 1sg of ETRE, ‘be’ – not the homophonous suis meaning ‘follow’!) then an inverted
hostform is possible after all.
host
clitic
inverted
verb
ETRE,
1sg
1sg
subj
+1
hf
hf
infl
hf
0/1
hf
0/1
0
-7
inverted
hostform
proclitic
hostform
Figure 17: Inverted subjects
The grammar presented so far has concentrated on the morphosyntax of clitic pronouns,
with very little discussion of either morphophonology or syntax. Morphophonology is responsible for
mapping the morphemes such as {je}, whose labels follow conventional spelling, onto phonological
structures, and for French clitics this mapping would have to include various morphophonological
mergers such as the merged pronunciation of {je} and {suis} as chuis – a pronunciation only found
when {suis} realizes the verb ETRE, ‘be’, and not when it realizes SUIVRE, ‘follow’ (Miller and Sag
1997, 578). Similarly, the object pronoun le or la can be omitted provided it would immediately
precede the pronoun lui (Bonami and Boyé 2007), as in (52):
(51)Paul la lui apportera.
Paul it to-him will-bring ‘Paul will bring it to him’
(52)Paul lui apportera.
The easiest explanation for this pattern lies in the morphophonology, with {le}+{lui} or {la}+{lui}
realized in the same way as just {lui}. The object pronoun must be present in the syntax, because it is
required by the valency of apportera, and its realization must also be present in the morphology,
because suppression is only possible ‘before lui’ – a condition on morphological structure. However
these morphophonological details present no special challenges for a clitic-based analysis because
precisely the same kinds of merger are found in English simple clitics, where you’re is homophonous
either with your or with an unstressed realization of just you, /jə/.
The next section turns to syntax, to discuss the details of clitic-climbing. The discussion will
focus on just one part of the grammar to which we have so far paid no attention: the ‘host’ relation
between the clitics and the host verb to which they are attached. The syntax hardly interacts at all
with the morphosyntax so this discussion will ignore the latter.
10 Clitic climbing
I have assumed so far that each clitic depends, in syntactic structure, directly on its host verb, but of
course this need not be so, as can be seen from the following.
(53)
Je les ai trouvés.
I them have found ‘I found them.’ (les depends on trouvés)
Tu la laisses les lire?
You her let
them read ‘Do you let her read them?’ (les depends on lire)
Tu les lui
laisses lire?
you them to.her let
read ‘Do you let her read them?’ (les depends on lire)
Jean lui
a été fidèle.
John to.her has been faithful ‘John has been faithful to her.’ (lui depends on fidèle)
Jean en mange beaucoup.
John of.it eats a.lot ‘John eats a lot of it’ (en depends on beaucoup, ‘a lot’)
(54)
(55)
(56)
(57)
(58)
(59)
La fin en est désagréable.
the end of.it is unpleasant 'The end of it is unpleasant’ (en depends on fin)
Je l’ai
entendu dire.
I it have heard say ‘I’ve heard it said’ (l’ depends on dire)
In each case, the underlined clitic pronoun is attached to a verb on which it depends only indirectly;
for example, in (53) les is the object of trouvés, but is attached to ai. In every case, the clitic ‘climbs
up’ the dependency structure. That means that it is attached to a verb which is a few links up the
dependency chain – the chain of dependencies that ultimately links it to the sentence root. Indeed,
in all of these five examples, the word to which the clitic attaches is the sentence root (the finite
verb), but of course this need not be so:
(60)
J’ai
visité la chambre où
je les ai
trouvés.
I have visited the room
where I them have found. ‘I visited the room where
I found them.’
The question is precisely what the relation is between the dependency structure and the clitic’s
choice of host verb, and why complications exist.
The ‘why’ question is easy. Only verbs can host clitics, so if a clitic depends, say, on an
adjective such as fidèle in (56), it has to find a verb to host it; and likewise en in (57). Moreover, past
participles cannot host clitics at all (Miller and Sag 1997, 594), so the object of trouvés in (53) has to
find a different verb as host. Though these restrictions themselves demand an explanation, once
they exist they create a problem to which clitic climbing is the solution.
There are four different patterns in which a pronoun P appears to climb:
1. P = any pronoun, climbing from past participle to auxiliary verb (e.g. les a trouvés,
‘has found them’)
2. P = object pronoun, climbing from infinitive to a higher verb (e.g. l’entends dire,
‘hear it said’)
3. P = Y/EN, climbing from predicative to verb (e.g. lui reste fidèle, ‘remains faithful to
her’)
4. P = EN, climbing from subject or object to verb (e.g. la fin en est,’the end of it is’, en
connaît la fin, ‘knows the end of it’)
However it could be argued that patterns 2, 3 and 4 can all be left to the ordinary syntax. If nonpronominal equivalents of the pronouns are raised to act as complements of the verb, then the
pronouns too are just ordinary raised, but non-climbing, complements. There is some evidence that
this is in fact so for all three patterns.
I have already mentioned the evidence in (21) to (26) regarding pattern 4, which shows that
en has the same distribution as the relative pronoun dont as in pairs like the following:
(61)
(62)
Marie en connaît la fin.
Mary of.it knows the end ‘Mary knows the end of it.’
... la seule histoire dont
Marie connaît la fin ...
... the only story of.which Mary knows the end ...
One interpretation of this evidence is that dont is always a dependent of the relative verb, and that
therefore the same must be true of en. If this is so, it follows that en is always a syntactic dependent
of the verb even if it is also a dependent of another dependent.
For patterns 2 and 3, the relevant data contain non-pronominal equivalents of the clitics. For
pattern 3, a relevant example would be (63):
(63)
Jean reste
à Marie plus fidèle que tous les autres.
John remains to Mary more faithful than all
the others
If this example is grammatical, then there must be some syntactic rule, unrelated to cliticization,
which raises the complement of fidèle so that it acts as a dependent of the verb and can move
before the adjective; and it is this raised dependency that justifies the use of the clitic in (64) (Miller
and Sag 1997, 604).
(64)
Jean lui
reste fidèle.
John to.her remains faithful ‘John remains faithful to her’
If native speakers accept (63), pattern 3 can be left to the syntax. If not, it will need an extension of
the clitic-climbing pattern offered below for Pattern 1.
Pattern 2 involves infinitives, which (unlike past participles) do allow hostforms. The typical
pattern with infinitives used as complement of a higher verb is shown in (65).
(65)
Ils peuvent nous le signaler dès
son arrivée.
they can
to.us it notify as.from his arrival ‘They can tell us about it as
soon as he arrives.’
Notice that the clitics that depend on the infinitive signaler alone are attached to this verb, whereas
ils, which is raised to act as subject of peuvent in addition to its role as subject of signaler, is attached
to the higher verb. In modern French (unlike earlier periods), the lower clitics cannot attach to the
higher verb. However, there are some apparent exceptions: a handful of verbs which take a bare
infinitive as complement and allow the latter’s pronouns to attach to them (Hawkins and Towell
2001, 70):
(66)
(67)
Je les lui
ferai
manger ?
I them to.him will.make eat ‘I’ll make him eat them’
Tu les lui
laisses lire?
you them to.her let
read ‘Will you let her read them ?’
(68)
Je le leur
ai
entendu dire
I it to.them have heard say ‘I’ve heard them say it.’
In each of these examples the direct-object pronoun (les or le) is the object of the infiniive but shares
its hostform with the higher verb, or even with the auxiliary on which the latter depends.
Although this looks like clitic climbing, it is noteworthy that the ‘top’ clitic – the one dependent
on the higher verb – has the form of an indirect object (e.g. lui, ‘to him/her’) rather than the
expected direct object which does in fact appear if the lower object is left un-raised, as is sometimes
possible in examples like these:
(69)
Tu la laisses les lire?
you her let
them read ‘Will you let read them ?’
As can be seen by comparing (69) with its synonym (67), the verb LAISSER, ‘let’, allows the object of
its infinitive to attach either to the infinitive or to LAISSER, but in the latter case la changes to lui.
This alternation is not peculiar to clitics, but is also found with full phrasal arguments as in (70) and
(71):
(70)
(71)
Tu laisses Marie lire Zola?
you let
Mary read Zola ‘Will you let Mary read Zola?’
Tu laisses lire Zola à Marie?
you let
read Zola to Mary ‘Will you let Mary read Zola?’
Seen as a syntactic phenomenon, the alternation has an easy explanation: the ‘Stratal Uniqueness
Law’ of Relational Grammar (Perlmutter and Postal 1983). In particular, no verb may have more than
one direct object. This principle also explains why English idiomatic constructions that add a direct
object, such as the WAY construction in He groped his way to the door, cannot combine with a verb
that already has an object (as in He ate his way to an early grave, but not *He ate burgers his way to
an early grave). Given this principle, it is easy to see that a lower direct object in the French
examples might be raised to act as a higher indirect object when the higher verb already has an
object; but this explanation only works if the ‘raised’ argument really is raised, so that it and the
higher direct object depend on the same verb. But if that is so, the direct-object clitics in (66) to (68)
must have been attached to the first verb by syntactic raising rather than by clitic climbing.
Returning to our list of four apparent cases of clitic climbing, I have argued that three of
them may involve syntactic raising rather than clitic climbing, but we are still left with one
inescapable example of clitic climbing: from a past participle to an auxiliary, as in (72).
(72)
Jean le lui
a envoyé.
John it to.him has sent ‘John has sent it to him.’
Here there is the usual strong evidence for the raising of the participle’s subject, but none for
syntactic raising of its other dependents. We must therefore treat it as a genuine example of clitic
climbing.
Before moving towards an analysis of this construction, it may be helpful to review what the
grammar built so far provides. Each clitic pronoun has two obligatory links: a ‘host’ link to the verb
on which it depends, and a ‘hostform’ (‘hf’) link to a hostform which (by default) is anchored on the
realization of this verb. It also provides some verbs with an optional ‘hf’ link, as required by any
dependent pronouns that happens to need a host. This little grammar is shown in Figure 18, which
also shows that past participles never have a hostform.
verb
dependent
host
1
clitic
past
participle
hf
hf
hostform
hf
0
Figure 18: Clitics and their host verbs
According to this grammar, a clitic’s host is also the verb on which it depends. But when we
apply this analysis to ‘climbing’ examples such as le lui a envoyé, this means that the clitics’ host is
the lower verb, the past participle – which is clearly the wrong analysis. To rectify this problem we
need a special arrangement for climbing which adds an extra ‘host’ relation to the auxiliary and
guarantees that this relation takes priority over the lower one. Provided the higher link ‘isa’ the
lower one, default inheritance will provide the necessary guarantee, so all we need is the little extra
grammar in Figure 19. This says that if a clitic’s host is a past participle which depends on an auxiliary
verb, then that auxiliary verb takes over as the clitic’s host. And of course if several clitics all depend
on the same past participle, they all take the same auxiliary verb as host.
auxiliary
verb
past
participle
dependent
clitic
host
Figure 19: Climbing to an auxiliary
These two networks complete our grammar for French clitics, which consists of a number of
individual sub-networks which, taken together, provide a coherent analysis of all the relevant cases.
11 Conclusions
I should like to draw five general conclusions about language, and two specific conclusions about
French clitics.
My first general conclusion is that even a linguistic phenomenon as complex as French clitics
can be modelled without assuming any formal apparatus other than what is probably needed for
everyday thinking outside language. In short, the chapter vindicates the cognitive assumptions of (2):
that a linguistic model is ultimately a model of the mental structures of a typical speaker, and that
these mental structures are ‘domain-general’ – not specific to language. The analysis therefore
supports the true minimalism of cognitive linguistics which reduces the special apparatus of
language knowledge to zero.
Secondly, this formal apparatus allows insightful analyses which accommodate both broad
generalizations and fine details. This flexibility is mainly due to the logic of default inheritance and
the ‘isa’ hierarchies which unify all categories, whether general or specific. When applied to French
pronouns, the same apparatus accommodates general categories such as ‘clitic’ and ‘verb’, as well as
specific categories such as [ETRE, 1sg] and {je}. But of course one important consequence of this
analysis is that there is no division between ‘grammar’ and ‘lexicon’, so there can be no question
about whether the clitics are handled ‘in the lexicon’.
My third general conclusion is that language is a network, and nothing but a network (Lamb
1998). It is not a collection of box-like modules, nor is it a network of complex units such as
constructions, signs, attribute-value matrices or lexical entries. Nor does it contain ‘rules’,
‘principles’ or ‘parameters’. All it consists of is a vast collection of links, with concepts at the points
where links meet – in other words, each concept (whether linguistic or not) is simply an atomic
meeting-point, whose content is defined entirely by its links to other such concepts. Every figure in
this chapter illustrates this general claim through a network fragment which ultimately forms part of
a single giant super-network; in such a network, the labels are redundant because they simply
duplicate the information carried by the links. On the other hand, although language is a network, it
is not a neural network but a symbolic one – part of the mind, not part of the brain – where each
node corresponds to a concept. It is because the mind is symbolic and mental that it can
accommodate structures that are as crystal-clear and as complex as those for French clitics.
Fourthly, this mental network distinguishes different kinds of relations. A few kinds are
probably hard-wired and universal; most obviously, the ‘isa’ relation underlies the very basic logic of
default inheritance, so it must be hard-wired. But alongside these built-in relations we also find
concept-like relations that are constructed as needed, just like ordinary concepts; so we have an
open-ended isa hierarchy of ‘relational concepts’. This idea is important for linguistic analysis
because the option of creating extra relations adds a new dimension of flexibility. For example, we
can create ad hoc relations such as ‘host’ and ‘hostform’ without worrying about justifying them as
part of a putative ‘universal grammar’.
My last general conclusion is that morphology is an autonomous level of analysis, separate
from both syntax and phonology though closely tied to both of these via ‘realization’ links – a very
traditional view, but because it is so often challenged, one that needs the support of cognitive
arguments. But the notion of ‘autonomous level’ needs to be reframed in a network model, because
it is traditionally presented in terms of separate modules. In a network, levels are defined by the
‘realization’ and ‘meaning’ relations in combination with a classification of linguistic entities as
words, morphemes and so on.
As far as French clitics are concerned, my first conclusion is that they are, indeed, clitics,
rather than inflectional affixes. Once again, the view is a familiar one, but its credentials are
strengthened by cognitive arguments. The cognitive view also favours the proposed definition of
clitics as syntactic words which are realized by morphemes, as against the vaguer tradition in which
clitics are somehow intermediate between words and affixes. In a network with levels defined by the
realization relation there is no place for such a unit, but there is plenty of room for exceptionality –
in this case, words which exceptionally map onto an affix.
My second conclusion about French clitics builds on this definition of clitics. I argue,
controversially, that enclitics are simple clitics because their position follows the ordinary rules of
syntax (with just one exception which reappears among the proclitics). In this sense, the hostforms
(aka clitic clusters) of enclitics are the default, to which proclitics add the extra apparatus of an
ordering template. On the other hand, affirmative imperatives are certainly not default verbs, so
they are non-default verbs whose realization in morphology appears inside a default hostform.
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