The Conjunction 'que' used in comparative sentences

[Kolya Aleksandrovich]

In English, 'than' is a conjunction. As far as I know, in French, 'que' also a conjunction and is equivalent to than in all of it's English senses.

 

In english these two sentences mean different things:

You love Paris more than them.
(You love Paris more than you love them)

You love Paris more than they.
(You love Paris more than they love Paris)

But in French, even under strict perscriptive grammar, the pronoun proceeding the conjunction is always in the objective/accusative case.

'Vous aimez Paris plus qu'eux.'
(Means: You love Paris more than you love them; OR: You love Paris more than they love Paris.)

If 'que' is truely a conjunction, what explains why 'eux' is necessarily in the objective/accusative?

[Neil Coffey]

I think the problem is with your overall logic (which, in fairness, is the kind of faulty logic that prescriptive grammar encourages you to adopt).

Before looking at the actual evidence, you've assumed that there's some category called "conjunction", and that that category for some reason cannot take the objective/accusative case, as well as assuming that English that and French que are always of this same category, which must always have exactly the same features. Then you're posing as a problem why the available evidence doesn't support these assumptions. But there's really no decree from God stating that either of these assumptions is true. If you just don't make those assumptions in the first place, then the problem goes away...

This sounds a bit flippant, but it reallymakes more sense to look first at what the language actually does, and then try and build up a model/theory about what you observe, if it's useful. Whatever model you come up with, you would have to take account of observations such as:

- in French, the subject pronouns (je etc) basically never occur in isolation -- only every before a conjugated verb; on the other hand, English I etc can be used in "isolation" i.e. come in places where they don't come directly before a verb
- in French the subject pronouns don't generally mark a contrast on their own, because they can't be emphasised-- to emphasise them, you usually insert one of the "objective" pronouns alongside them (eux, ils le font/ils le font, eux = they're doing it)
- in French it's uncommon to use an equivalent of English do as in They help more than I do
- the data you present for English isn't accurate: in English, You love Paris more than them. is also ambigous: it can also (and commonly would) mean "...more than they do"
- in English, it's probably fair to say that You love Paris more than they. isn't natural English for many speakers (though You love Paris more than they do. is). Whatever model you come up with, it probably doesn't make sense to base it on things that sound odd/unnatural.

So one way of looking at things (but it's not a complete picture obviously) is that in French, you end up using eux because there's essentially "nothing else" that you can use. Obviously this is in no way a complete explanation, but the above gives you the idea of the kind of things to start thinking about.

I'm also not sure in this case that whatever "explanation" you come up with will necessarily explain very much for the practical purposes of learning French.

[Kolya Aleksandrovich]

Note that none of the above observations really hinge on particular dialects: I think you'd get pretty much the same observations among all speakers of "French" and "English". I think it's possible to make observations about what subset of the language is genearlly considered non-dialectal: I'm not sure why a prescriptive approach is really necessary for that.

Re the existence of a category called "conjunction": actually, not all grammatical models do propose such a category. Chomskyan frameworks tend not to, for example, so e.g. pendant would be a preposition whether or not it takes a noun phrase or an embedded sentence, just as a the verb said would still be averb in both the sentences he said nothing new and he said that he'd be late, and que (and indeed that in English) are regularly posited as being something called a "complementiser", which effectively belongs to the start of a sentence. If you tihnk about it, it's a bit inconsistent that traditional grammar proposes that before is calld a "preposition" in before the meal and a "conjunction" in before he came, yet verbs and said to become a different category of "verbjunctions" just bceause their complement is a sentence or clause and not a noun phrae. And English that and French que have properties clearly distinct from "conjunctions" generally. Now, I'm not saying you should hold this particular model up on a pedestal -- I'm just saying it's an example of how you could see things from a different perspective, so that we shouldn't just blindly assume that saying there's a category of "conjunction" and that que falls into this category is necessarily the most appropriate analysis.

So my question really is, then: to what sort of category can we assign the French word que, taking into account this usage?

Well, one approach is to say that que is a complementiser (or "sentence-introducer"), and to say that in comparatives, the thing after "que" is a "reduced" form of the equivalent sentence. If you take that view (which is essentially close to the traditional view anyway), then you also need to take into account transformations that can take place between the comaprative version and the version of the sentence that it "stands in for". Traditional grammar seems to have a problem wanting to account for "...than I do" > "...than me" , but there are clearly cases where you have to admit that a word can "stand in for" a phrase if you use this model (think about a phrase like there aren't as many trains as all that -- if "all that" can stand for a phrase such as "there appear to be", "as you'd expect there to be" etc, then what's the big problem with than me being equivalent to than I do?)

[Neil Coffey]

In some models of grammar...

(P.S. complementiser is usually called complémenteur in case anyone interested wants to look for associated literature.)