object pronouns with être

I assume the sentence:

Il nous est hostile

means: He is hostile to us

Nous looks like an object pronoun. When I queried a slightly different example on another forum, a French speaker said nous was indeed an object pronoun.

But être cannot have an object. Here nous seems to serve as an adverbial. None of my three grammar books mention this usage.

I'd be interested to hear what other people think.

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EducatorPermalink Reply by George Hunt on August 18, 2013 at 12:47pm

Hi there.

"Nous" is the form of both the direct and indirect pronoun and can mean "us" or "to/for us" (it is also the same form as that used as the subject ="we")

So with être you might use it as in "c'est nous" ="it is us" and so être can have a direct object in my opinion (even if the subject and object are the same thing in a way)

In your own example "nous" is an indirect pronoun and so the phrase can be translated as "he is hostile to us"

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Permalink Reply by Steve Davies on August 18, 2013 at 3:05pm

Thanks for responding George. You are not the first to tell me that it is an indirect pronoun. It certainly looks and functions very like one.

Perhaps it comes down to whether or not one accepts that être cannot have an object. I find the fact that nothing is acted on, and there is no recipient, quite persuasive. I think at least some linguistics experts would categorise your example: C'est nous as a noun-verb-"subject complement" construction expressing identity, rather than as a subject-verb-object construction.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on August 18, 2013 at 6:52pm

Don't worry too much about fluffy notions about things being 'acted on'.

The key thing is that it is a different syntactic structure. Normally, an 'object' in French must, when it is a pronoun, be one of the 'special' pronouns ('me', 'te' etc) that come before the verb. So e.g.:

Il me regarde.

Not: *Il regarde moi.

Il nous voit.

Not: *Il voit nous.

But with occasional cases like être, this situation is reversed:

*Ce m'est.

*Ce nous est.

C'est moi.

C'est nous.

*Il m'y a.

Il y a moi.

So you have clear, concrete evidence that with "C'est..." (and "Il y a ...."), you have 'something special' rather than a normal direct object.

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Permalink Reply by Steve Davies on August 18, 2013 at 9:20pm

Thanks for the response Neil.

As you say, être is a special case. The standard grammatical rules don't fit well, which is what has interested me.

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EducatorPermalink Reply by George Hunt on August 18, 2013 at 6:53pm

It is more complicated than I thought.

I have no training at all in linguistics.

Maybe others on this forum are better placed to express an opinion on this than myself.