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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Clitic doubling (in French)
Date: Wed, 28 May 2025 17:57:40 +1200
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On 28/05/2025 5:08 p.m., HenHanna wrote:
> 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."
> 
> 
> ____________________________
> 
> (dislocation or)     clitic doubling (in French)
> 
> 
>            Elle, je l’aime.          (“Her, I love [her].”)
> 
>            Lui, je l’ai vu.          (“Him, I saw [him].”)
> 
> 
> _______________________
> 
>   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.

No, neither the English nor the French is an example of clitic doubling.