Can Spanish "lo" be a pronoun in the nominative case?

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Cainntear
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Re: Can Spanish "lo" be a pronoun in the nominative case?

Postby Cainntear » Wed Sep 08, 2021 9:51 pm

Iversen wrote:I can't see the point in merging (direct) objects and subject predicatives.

It's not a matter of whether there's a "point" or not -- it's simply whether it has happened or not.

The distinction between direct objects and the predicatives is found in all the languages I know, and even though the consequences of mixing them up may seem minor in English because of its minimal use of cases ("me" in "it's me" has the same form - the oblique - as the object in "he saw me"), the consequences would be unbearable with languages that distinguish nominatives and accusatives (mixing the instrumental into the soup in the case of Russian).

Except that English is not Russian, and just because something exists in Russian, doesn't mean it exists in English. The distinction in English is nominative-oblique, not nominative-accusative. Subject predicatives are a feature of n-a languages, not n-o languages.

So I don't feel any urge to drop the distinction - I like my categories to be functional across language borders unless there are compelling reasons not to do so

One of the simplest patterns in linguistics is this: if there is no difference between two things, then they are one thing. The mind of a monolingual doesn't care that these things would be translated differently in a language they don't speak.

There is no such thing as a subject predicative in ergative-transitive languages either.

And what then about your example "soy yo"? Well, if it had been an object you would expect "me". So either it is the subject or a subject predicative.

I gave a possible explanation for that, but here's another one: fossils.

English "there is" is a fossil of the Germanic "verb second" rule, but that doesn't make English a verb second language.
Similarly, a lot of English speakers don't use the subjunctive any more, except in the phrase "if I were you" -- the existence of that single form doesn't mean there's a true subjunctive in their dialect.

And subjects can be dropped in Spanish, but not the subject predicative that comes with a form of the copula verb "ser". So let's cross the border and look at French that doesn' practice subject dropping. Here the parallel would be something like "c'est moi", where "ce" hardly can be anything but the subject .

Including a subject in Spanish is essentially emphatic. "Soy yo" is effectively "I am". (And "I am" is a possible response to "who's there?" in English too, of course.)
And the comparison to French doesn't really prove much of anything, because French is a different language.

So I have to insist that subject predicatives do exist, even in Spanish, and that the form "lo" can be that thingy as well as an object - but I salute a Cainntear for asking the bold question whether there really is any reason to retain the distinction.

Again, it's not about a "reason" -- it's whether the language in the wild does retain the distinction or not. English doesn't and French doesn't (hence "c'est moi", not "c'est je") -- Spanish may not have fully lost it yet, but it's well on its way.
Last edited by Cainntear on Thu Sep 09, 2021 9:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Can Spanish "lo" be a pronoun in the nominative case?

Postby Iversen » Wed Sep 08, 2021 11:32 pm

And it hasn't happened in a way that forces anybody to abandon the traditional distinction between objects and subject predicatives.

You can probably get away with merging the two if you disregard the semantics, and Cainntear apparently thinks in terms where it wouldn't be a problem. But it doesn't seem that the Spaniards share his way of thinking - otherwise their dictionaries would catalogue "ser" as a transitive verb, and as far as I know they don't. Actually it's not just a question about semantics: there are still a few syntactic differences, even though the pronoun used with "ser" ("lo") is the same as with a transitive verb. For instance that there isn't a preposition "a" with human whatever-it-is after "ser" - "Juan es un hombre", not "Juan es a un hombre".

And then there is the question about nomenclature across languages. Let me first say that if it is irrelevant that Russian uses the nominative AND the instrumental (but not the accusative), then it is even more irrelevant to mention that ergative languages don't operate with subject predicatives. No, of course they don't - by definition they don't operate with transitive verbs in opposition to intransitive ones (English has a number of verbs with similar behaviour - witness "to ring" and "ring a bell"), instead they have absolutive verbs that can't have objects. Unfortunately I don't know how for instance Basque or Georgian deal with situations where something 'is' something else, but it might be interesting to find out about it.

Long ago the grammarians AND the teachers had a tendency to analyze all languages as if they were Latin. People like de Saussure changed that by demanding that every language be analyzed as an independent entity. And that's in principle fine. But the risk is that the descriptions become so idiosyncratic that you can't see the parallels. Pure monoglots may not care (maybe they don't even care about grammar), and Cainntear apparently doesn't care either, but I do - if "Juan es un hombre" looks and feels like a parallel to "Johannes ist ein Mann" (and not "einen Mann") then I prefer to stick to the analysis that accepts that they are parallel. Ditto for "Soy yo" and "c'est moi" because there is a reason for the "ce" in French and absence of a subject in Spanish. And finally: for me there is one hell of a difference between eating a beef and being a beef, and for me that's not irrelevant at all - even in Spanish. You can't just sweep all that under the carpet.

But it is clear that the erosion of the case system (even with pronouns) removes some of the pressure to retain the distinction on the theoretical level - for Spanish. So if Cainntear wants to write a Spanish grammar that makes "ser" transitive then he is welcome to do so.
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Re: Can Spanish "lo" be a pronoun in the nominative case?

Postby Cainntear » Thu Sep 09, 2021 12:53 pm

Iversen wrote:And it hasn't happened in a way that forces anybody to abandon the traditional distinction between objects and subject predicatives.

If there is not evidence within a language for a distinction, the native speaker's language model will not have that distinction.

For example, the classic "it's not me and him went there it's he and I" is built on the argument that English should make a distinction that in reality it doesn't. English has lost all case marking in nouns, so we're moving slowly beyond nominative-oblique into an entirely caseless language. To the average native speaker, a "subject pronoun" is only used where a single pronoun replaces the entire subject -- "we went there" expands to "me and you and him and her and... went there".

The vestigial case marking in the language is simply not enough for a native speaker to develop an understanding of case marking matching what some people say it should be.

You can probably get away with merging the two if you disregard the semantics, and Cainntear apparently thinks in terms where it wouldn't be a problem.

I'm sorry, but that's a nonsense and a strawman.
There is a difference in semantics between instrumental, dative and benefactive, and yet there are plenty of languages without a grammatical distinction between the three of them. I have no problem with using the terms to describe a semantic function ("I did it for you"=benefactive, "I went there by bus"=instrumental etc) but "subject" and "object" are syntactic terms, not semantic ones.

But it doesn't seem that the Spaniards share his way of thinking - otherwise their dictionaries would catalogue "ser" as a transitive verb, and as far as I know they don't.

The existence of a "predicative verb" does not require the existence of a "subject predicate", just as the existence of "transitive verb" does not require the existence of an accusative case (or indeed a transitive case).

Actually it's not just a question about semantics: there are still a few syntactic differences, even though the pronoun used with "ser" ("lo") is the same as with a transitive verb. For instance that there isn't a preposition "a" with human whatever-it-is after "ser" - "Juan es un hombre", not "Juan es a un hombre".

That is an interesting point, which I'll have to mull over. Is the lack of personal "a" enough to prove existence of subject predicative...?

Certainly, there's a clear difference in both syntax and semantics between "me parece un buen hombre" and "me parece a un buen hombre [que conozco]"

So yeah... that's what I mean about what the language does, not what it should do -- argue from within the language like you do here, not outside like you did before.
And then there is the question about nomenclature across languages. Let me first say that if it is irrelevant that Russian uses the nominative AND the instrumental (but not the accusative), then it is even more irrelevant to mention that ergative languages don't operate with subject predicatives.

No, it's not more irrelevant, it's an asymmetric thing. One counterexample proves that the feature you're talking about is not "language universal", so its existence in any number of arbitrarily-chosen languages is irrelevant.

Disproof is easier than proof!

Long ago the grammarians AND the teachers had a tendency to analyze all languages as if they were Latin. People like de Saussure changed that by demanding that every language be analyzed as an independent entity. And that's in principle fine. But the risk is that the descriptions become so idiosyncratic that you can't see the parallels.

And the danger of the other approach is that you invent parallels that aren't there.
This leads to describing things the same even though they behave differently.

For example -- subjunctives. Hardly anyone goes to the point of discussing the difference between a "grammatical subjunctive" and a "semantic subjunctive" (Spanish "creo que es" vs "creo que no sea"), and a lot of people end up believing that "subjunctive" means specifically "semantic subjunctive" and then get confused when they hit a language with a grammatical subjunctive, or possibly the grammatical subjunctive is never described as such.

There are always limits to how transferrable terms are across languages.

But it is clear that the erosion of the case system (even with pronouns) removes some of the pressure to retain the distinction on the theoretical level - for Spanish. So if Cainntear wants to write a Spanish grammar that makes "ser" transitive then he is welcome to do so.

To repeat:
I'm not interested in theory, but in practical language; you're the one talking who's previously put theory over practice.
"Ser" is a predicative verb, and that's a useful distinction (that I wish I'd been toldabout earlier in my language learning) but that doesn't necessarily imply that there's a subject predicative. But your point about personal "a" does, and I will think about it.

Anyway, I was never saying you categorically wrong and me right, I was talking about breadth of possibility and the existence of doubt and room for interpretation.
The truth is, none of us have anything other than a fuzzy idea of how a particular language works, so the only thing that is definitely wrong in language is believing you know something for sure.
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Re: Can Spanish "lo" be a pronoun in the nominative case?

Postby Iversen » Thu Sep 09, 2021 2:00 pm

I'm not going to comment on everything once again, but just take up a few points. And the first is that we agree that "lo" can't be a pronoun in the nominative case in Spanish. The second is that I never have declared the existence of a subject predicative to be a linguistic universal (neither in Chomsky's, nor in Greenberg's version). Russian is relevant because it has an accusative, but it doesn't use it with neither the explicit, nor the implicit copula ('-') - but then it often uses the instrumental, and that's interesting. It is actually such an unexpected feature that I seriously wonder whether the Russians are sliding away from the semantical model that lies behind the notion of copulas and subject predicatives. But it doesn't use the accusative, and that's the main point. And as far as I know every other language that still has an nominative and an accusative uses the nominative for its subject predicatives.

However some Germanic and most Romance languages has switched to a nominative-oblique model for pronouns and to a no-case-distinctions-at-all model for nouns, and that removes one obstacle to putting objects and predicatives into the same bucket. So why don't the Spaniards then declare that "ser" is as transitive as "haber" or "comer"? If "ser" was classified as a transitive verb there would be no reason to talk about "predicative verbs' at all (even Cainntear uses that term - why?).

Cainntear writes that "If there is not evidence within a language for a distinction, the native speaker's language model will not have that distinction." OK, we both have native languages that have dropped most of the old case systems, just like Spanish. In Danish we say "det er mig" and "hun ser mig" (it's me - she sees me), so by Cainntear's logic I should never have developed the notion of subject predicative as a child - but here I am defending it, so something apparently went wrong along the way. And Spanish linguists and teachers must also have felt something similar going on in their language since they haven't just dropped "ser" into the big bucket with all the transitive verbs. And ultimately that must be a sense of a semantical deep structure, which it isn't too important to mark at the surface because everybody knows how it works, and with which verbs.

By the way, you could discuss why the Spaniards feel a need to have a preposition with nominal objects (or why the Romanians feel a similar need, but just pad their "pe" to impersonal nouns) - are these languages both in the process of redefining the notion of transitive verbs? Why this pressure to mark the objects - but not the subject predicatives?

Addenda:
PS1: right now I'm thinking about "to be"-verbs that are used with the meaning "there are..." - like "Il est des étoiles dans l'univers" in French or "ci sono stelle nell'universo" in Italian. In therse constructions I would definitely NOT claim that "to be"resp. "être" resp. "essere" were copulas with a predicative attached - I would be more inclined to opt for the "to be"-verb as an intransitive verb coupled with a dummy subject and .. well, maybe the real subject. However many languages including Spanish have chosen to say that something impersonal has got something hidden somewhere: "Hay estrellas en el universo" - or in other words, they use an impersonal transitive verb to express that something exists. Case closed.

PS2: And now I'm asking myself when and how a form of a "to have"-verb plus a past passive participle ever got redefined as a standardized past tense - to me the only reasonable explanation seems to be that a construction with an object plus an object predicative somehow got automatized and depleted of its original meaning long ago (somebody 'had something' in a certain state, indicated by the participle used as an object predicative). However some languages (like Danish and Italian) use a "to be"-verb with certain verbs (including, but not restricted to the copula), which suggest that the participle here originally was used as a subject predicate - and then some language like Spanish simplified the system by generalizing the use of "haber". But now I'm probably digressing too far from the original simple question about Spanish "lo" ...
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