Presence ou absence de l'objet: Limites du possible en francais contemporain (review)

Larjavaara states that the point of departure for her latest study of objectless and object-governing verbs in French is the observation that verbal ‘actance’ (valence) tends to be unstable in the contemporary language: Many French transitive verbs occur without objects while many verbs traditionally defined as intransitive are used transitively with direct objects (18). Using an extensive corpus of written texts to illustrate each ‘variant’ usage, L has divided her study into three chapters (Chs. 3–5) dealing, respectively, with transitive verbs used without objects, intransitive verbs used with objects, and verbs that have variable governance (‘verbes labiles’).

In Ch. 2, L makes passing reference to Lucien Tesnière (Éléments de syntaxe structurale, Paris: Klincksieck, 1988 [1959]), then attempts a definition of the terms actant and participant which is at odds with that actually used by Tesnière. For Tesnière, actants were syntactic constituents (subject, direct object, indirect object) while participants were semantic ones (agent, patient, recipient/beneficiary). For L, in contrast, ‘participant’ is synonymous with referent, and ‘argument’ is the term she uses for the semantic (‘theta’ or thematic) roles assigned to the actants: ‘agent, expérienceur, patient, destinataire, bénéficiaire, instrument, “goal”, “recipient”, etc.’ (27). Fortunately, L subsequently favors the term referent over participant, so her discussion is not as confusing as it might be otherwise. For example, L observes that the absence of a direct object with a transitive verb signals an ‘implicit referent’ which is ‘identifiable’, that is, semantically recoverable, in the mind of the speaker (50–51). L’s ‘implicit referent’ is accordingly reflected in the syntax by what she calls a ‘latent object’.

L makes the interesting observation that one of the reasons for the relatively high incidence of ‘latent objects’ in French (from the perspective of other languages, like English) is the lack of French pronouns that differentiate between human (or animate) and nonhuman (or inanimate) objects: French le, for example, is functionally equivalent to both him and it in English (87)—as well as so (cf. ‘I think so’, ‘I say so’). According to L, the latent object may have three different referents: propositions; nonpropositional, nonhuman referents; and humans. Propositions prove to be the most likely referents of latent objects in French while humans prove to be the least likely. L entertains the possibility that an additional factor contributing to the frequency of the ‘latent object’ is a restriction on the cooccurrence of third-person direct-object pronouns with indirect-object pronouns in earlier periods of the French language, particularly in conjunction with ditransitive verbs like donner ‘give’ and dire ‘tell’: je (les) lui donnerai ‘I will give him (them)’, il (le) lui dit ‘he told her (so)’ (95). L additionally maintains that in the contemporary language, the use of transitive verbs without a direct object serves to prompt a generic, habitual, or other noneventive reading (désactualisation) of the verb (112–24).

L arrives at the conclusion that a verb’s actance (transitivity or intransitivity) is less a question of grammaticality than one of convention. She appears to concur with Aurélien Sauvageot’s view (Français écrit—français parlé, Paris: Larousse, 1962) that the ability to transitivize an intransitive verb or to use transitive verbs without objects serves to facilitate communication among users of the language and promote concision.