Right dislocation?

Can anyone explain this French structure for me, please? The context is that a group of people are looking to take up an apprenticeship and don't know which of those on offer at the employment office to choose. One says to the other, "Tu n'as qu'à en choisir un pour toi d'apprentissage." I think this means something like, " All you need to do is choose one of the apprenticeships for yourself." I think this is an example of what the grammarians call "right location" with the pronoun en anticipating d'apprentissage. However, I can't understand why, since it's a choice of several apprenticeships (and en means "of them"), the phrase isn't des apprentissages. In other words, why the singular and why no definite article?

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on January 22, 2011 at 9:16pm

One thing I'm curious about-- when you say "incorrect" what exactly do you mean?-- in the sense that a particular style guide author ha an objection to it ( ie it's a prescriptive preferemce) or just that it "sounds odd"?

According to the same criteria, how would you judge for example "Ils y vont, les enfants a l'ecole"?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ed la mouette on January 23, 2011 at 8:28am

Hi, Neil,

As Megumi said, "Ils y vont, les enfants, à l'école" is not a correct sentence because "à l'école" is redondant with "y". Plus, "les enfants" is redondant with "Ils".

Imagine a conversation between a mother and a childhood inspector (you know, the people who looks if you tend well your kids)

- Madame, vos enfants ne savent pas bien lire, il faut les scolariser.

- Mais ils y vont, à l'école !

Here, the mothers uses the redondance to emphasize what she says. In english, you say "but they do go to school !"

Now, imagine that the father can't read either(it is a poor family from remote countryside lol).

- Madame, vos enfants et votre mari ne savent pas bien lire, il faut les scolariser.

- Mais ils y vont, les enfants, à l'école !

Here, the sentence is correct because the woman does two things :

- dissociate the father from the kids

- use the redondance to emphasize that the kids are already scholarised.

Hope i'll be understood.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on January 23, 2011 at 4:23pm

I think I'm still not clear about the label "incorrect" (which I think it's really best to avoid because it often ends up meaning different things). You start off labelling the sentence incorrect, but then give an example of a situation where it would actually be used- as you say, essentially for some type of focus/emphasis. So... to the original sentence, which was also labelled "incorrect", my question is whether what was meant by "incorrect" was also "needs a special context" or if the other sentence had some different property that made you say it was "incorrect".

▶ Reply

Key StudentPermalink Reply by Curt Jugg on January 23, 2011 at 5:40pm

Thanks for your replies. Unfortunately, I'm still not clear about how to analyse sentences like the one I quoted. I assumed it was correct, by which I mean that it would be used by a native French speaker; I wanted help on how it should be analysed. Megumi has quoted a similar sentence to mine - "Tu n'as qu'à en choisir une, de voiture." It seems to me (and I accept I could easily be wrong; I'm only a beginner!) that this could be rephrased as, "Tu n'as qu'à choisir une des voitures." I assume that en (in Megumi's sentence) stands for des voitures, so I would have expected the original sentence to be, "Tu n'as qu'à en choisir une, des voitures." Obviously I'm wrong, and I'd be grateful if someone could analyse this type of sentence for me.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on January 23, 2011 at 7:43pm

Ah I see what you mean. I think you could see things as follows: if you say des voitures in this case it would mean "you only need to choose one of these cars", whereas in the singular it implies "one car in general out of all cars in the universe".

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ed la mouette on January 23, 2011 at 7:12pm

You're right, i'll be careful in the future.

It sounds odd and you won't find it in literature.

▶ Reply

Key StudentPermalink Reply by Curt Jugg on January 23, 2011 at 9:40pm

So, if I understand correctly, one way to translate, for example, "I am going to buy one of the cars" would be, "Je vais en acheter une, de voiture." Is that correct?