What's-his-name's car
"[The man I met yesterday]'s car"
__________________
Stacked clitics in rapid speech:
"He'd've thought that.........."
"They'll've finished by now."
"The boys'll've been playing football."
The book offers many reasons to recommend it.
Yes, the last “it” in “The book offers many reasons to recommend it” functions similarly to a French clitic in a doubling construction.
In French, you might say, Le livre offre beaucoup de raisons de le recommander (“The book offers many reasons to recommend it”), where le
is a clitic pronoun doubling the object already implied by “the book.”
In both English and French, the pronoun is used for clarity and to avoid ambiguity, even though the referent (“the book”) is already clear from context.
This is a good example of how English sometimes mirrors the clitic
doubling pattern found in French.
Sysop: | Keyop |
---|---|
Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
Users: | 493 |
Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
Uptime: | 189:43:34 |
Calls: | 9,707 |
Calls today: | 2 |
Files: | 13,740 |
Messages: | 6,179,888 |