heralds the contemporary one, and which is still to be found in the archaic
language of ballads.
Syntax also evolves at its own pace, slowly but perceptibly. Contemporary
English knows a solecism called the ‘unattached participle’, which makes it
possible to use a participial proposition without a subject, whose implicit
subject is not the same as that of the verb of the main clause, thus contravening
one of the sacrosanct rules of deletion of grammatical subjects, which are no
doubt inscribed in the genetic inheritance of the species – at least if Chomsky’s
naturalism is accepted. ‘When writing, the paper should be kept flat’: En
écrivant, le papier doit rester à plat. My translation is deliberately clumsy, so
that we can grasp what does not work: logic (the logic which the grammarian
seeks to impose on the language) prompts me to think that it is the paper –
not me – which does the writing. But I note that the ambiguity is artificial:
in reality, this sentence is understood straight away. And the recent history
of the language tells us that, up to the end of the eighteenth century, use of
the unattached participle was so common that it could pass for the norm. It
is precisely the grammarians who, by codifying their rules and imposing this
straitjacket on the diversity of usages, transformed an innocent construction
into a ‘solecism’. (In English, this word is used more widely than in French
and also refers to a gaffe committed in company: we are dealing with social
and hence historical constraints, not with laws that are natural or dictated
by the logic of the system.) So, if one is interested in the history of syntax,
one will have to take an interest in the history of the grammars that have
sought to codify, and thus alter, it – and sometimes succeeded in so doing.
Obviously, change is not always deliberate: we shall also interest ourselves
in the phenomena that linguists call ‘grammaticalisations’ – for example, the
appearance in French of two-term negation, the ne...pas, where pasoriginally
meant ‘a step’, in the sense ‘would you like to take a few steps?’. It was
therefore what is called a ‘natural complement’ of a verb of motion: il n’avance
pas[he is not advancing] meant il n’avance (même pas) d’un seul pas[he is not
even advancing by a single step]. The history of the construction would show
us how this pashas been generalised to all verbs, losing its lexical meaning
and acquiring a grammatical sense of negation. We still find a trace of the
old construction in il n’y voit goutte[he does not see a thing], whose literal
meaning (readers will agree) is obscure, but which becomes clearer if we
regard it as a corruption of il ne boit goutte[he does not drink a drop].
154 • Chapter Six