There's one thing about it. Vocalic fusion is not required; we could say that it's an optional feature of the language, like many contractions are in English. However, when I don't use fusion, "vais" is automatically pronounced /vA/, unless I push further toward normalism (and sound less natural emotionally). So the whole "va à l'école" cluster seems to fuse in a single extra-long vowel (though it could be reduced to a normal long vowel).MadBrain wrote:Dunno, /Zma~vE::kOl/ is maybe pushing it a bit (wouldn't that be /Zma~vE E:kol/?), but yeah something is up with that particular combination ("va à" and "à l'école), probably because of the high frequency of those words.Yiuel wrote:Oddly enough, the odd triply lengthed vowel /E::/ does not seem to show any prosodic difference, except for its length. And quite frankly, I don't know how we can actually take out any meaning from such sentences, even though I can. That can be part of the whole polysynthetic hypothesis of QcFr, where we should analyse all that as a messy phrase incorporating many things.
Indeed, the triple length marks "present-tense to preceeding word WITH dative+definiteness+initial vowel to the following word" That's worse than Spanish's "-í".
I remember reading a bit on Inuktitut where they also incorporated many elements in their verb. They especially listed adverbial-like elements. So the inclusion of more than merely the verb and its many arguments might not be an accurate argument against analysing Quebec French as being polysynthetic.As for the polysynthetic French hypothesis, I think there are some arguments against that - mostly adverbs and adjectives landing in the middle of some of those clusters ("j'ai mangé"->"j'ai poliment mangé" for instance), or prepositions being matched with a too large variety of things to be affixes rather than words ("j'ai une télé pour toi", "je suis pour", "pour que tu viennes", "je suis dessus", "je suis au dessus", "Il parle de pourquoi tu veux pas", etc...)
Homonymy is relatively common around so that the presence of various meanings for a word-form that appears the same is not surprising. As others have said, cases if limited in number tend to spread in usage. Japanese is a quick example, where "-ni" marker can be used in so many ways that it's a hell for the learner to know exactly what it means.
If we look at the pronouns that can go before a verb (when describing French traditionally), you can see that you have 6 different markers. You have the four personal arguments (nominative, accusative, dative and benefactive) and you have, with them, the locative-allative "y" and genetive-ablative "en". Benefactive appears only with first and second person elements; others are not limited in appearance. (loc-all "y" and dative "lui" often merge : Je lui achète (au gars) /ZiaSEt/, J'y achète (au magazin) /ZiaSEt/)
My analysis tend to analyse a verb complex (incorporating all the particles around the verb) and then morphologically disconnected NPs. The numerous particles are not mandatory, but then again, it appears to be so in Sumerian, of all languages. The presence of both in French puts emphasis the argument :
Je parle au gars. (I'm speaking to the guy)
Je lui parle. (I'm speaking to him)
Je lui parle au gars. (I'm speaking with the guy already.)
Je mange du pain. (I'm eating some bread.)
J'en mange. (I'm eating some of it.)
J'en mange du pain. (I'm eating some bread already.)
You can also add "moi" after all that, to add yourself in the whole emphasis.
"J'en mange du pain moi."
"Je lui parle moi."
This led to my ugly example, rarely heard indeed (Je te le lui ai acheté pour toi le cadeau à son frère moi.) where I included four arguments, with both the particle and argument included. But that's kitchen-sinky, and you'll only hear partial uses (with one or two arguments, or only two or three particles).
So the whole thing is that I see that the various particles are all fused into the whole verb, leading to easy reduction. (Like Je te le lui ai acheté becoming /St9llHieaSte/, both Je and le loosing their vowel) That there may be phrases outside the verb is unsurprising (unless you want really lengthy sentences, you'll break down things), and that there may be more than arguments incorporated into the verb is hardly surprising as well, as world languages can tell us (negative conjugation? evidentiality?...).