Rime Transformation and Person Agreement in Tangut Verbs

2020 ◽  
pp. 396-432
Keyword(s):  
Person Agreement

Null referential subjects in the history of Swedish

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Håkansson
Keyword(s):  
Subject Position ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Movement Strategies ◽  
Old Swedish ◽  
History Of ◽  
Striking Change ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Person Agreement

This article is concerned with null referential subjects in Old Swedish (ca. 1225–1526), and addresses the problem of why the scope for such subjects has been reduced during the history of Swedish. Within diachronic syntax it has been a common assumption that syntactic change is caused by changes in morphology. However, this study shows that deflexion only to a limited extent can explain the loss of null referential subjects in Old Swedish, since the most striking change in their use seems to take place during Early Old Swedish (ca. 1225–1375) before the loss of person agreement: whereas referential subjects could be omitted from verb-second main clauses and subordinate clauses in Early Old Swedish, in Late Old Swedish corresponding subjectless clauses are uncommon. Within the framework of generative grammar it is argued that this is an effect of changes in movement strategies to the subject position, [Spec, IP]: whereas movement to the subject position is syntactically determined in Modern Swedish, in Early Old Swedish the corresponding move is pragmatically determined. The study is based on a corpus of approximately 193,400 words, collected from 12 Old Swedish texts.

Ergativity in Nakh–Daghestanian

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Forker
Keyword(s):  
Language Family ◽  
Semantic Roles ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Person Agreement

This chapter presents an analysis of ergativity and more general alignment in the Nakh-Daghestanian (or East Caucasian) language family. The surveyed constructions are gender and person agreement on verbs, case marking, valency changing operations, imperatives, reflexive and reciprocal constructions, conjunction reduction, complement control and the lexicon. In accordance with previous studies on this topic, I show that the evidence for ergativity is mainly to be found in the morphology. The syntactic alignment shows tendencies towards accusativity or neutral, but clearly no indications for ergative subjects. This is in line with researchers such as Kibrik who describes Nakh-Daghestanian languages as dominated by (semantic) roles.

A relativized probing approach to person encoding in local scenarios

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doreen Georgi
Keyword(s):  
Person Features ◽  
Vocabulary Insertion ◽  
Non Local ◽  
Person Hierarchy ◽  
Person Agreement ◽  
Empirical Generalizations

In this paper I discuss three empirical generalizations about local scenarios: (i) four different realization strategies found cross-linguistically, (ii) an asymmetry in the number of arguments encoded on the verb in languages with person hierarchy-effects in non-local scenarios and (iii) the fact that person portmanteaux are particularly prominent in local scenarios. I claim that all three generalizations can be derived if Agree is relativized to target only positively valued person features on a goal. (ii) falls out directly from the Agree mechanism. (i) is a purely morphological phenomenon arising from the specification of local person exponents. Person portmanteaux are analyzed as inclusive markers in a derived inclusive context. Such a context can only emerge in local scenarios, which derives (iii). In general, the paper addresses the question how morphological theories that rely on discrete slots can handle portmanteaux by vocabulary insertion, without additional mechanisms like e.g. fusion. Keywords: Agree; relativized probing; person agreement; local scenarios; portmanteau morphemes; hierarchy effects; underspecification

The development of person agreement and the cliticization of personal pronouns in Batsbi

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-296
Author(s):  
Yasuhiro Kojima
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Finite Form ◽  
Indirect Object ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Noun Class ◽  
Person Agreement

Abstract Most Nakh-Daghestanian languages have gender (or noun class) agreement in the verb, but do not have person agreement. This is the case with Chechen and Ingush, which are genetically the closest to Batsbi. Batsbi, by contrast, has developed person agreement with the subject in the verb along with gender agreement. This is assumed to be due to the strong influence of Georgian, which has long been the second language of Batsbi speakers. In Georgian, the verb shows person agreement with the subject as well as with the direct or indirect object. Present-day Batsbi, presumably inspired by the polypersonal agreement of Georgian, further develops the cliticization of non-subject personal pronouns. To put it simply, it seems as though Batsbi attempts to express what a Georgian verb may encode in a single, finite form by means of a verb and a personal pronoun that is cliticized to it.

Subject pronoun doubling in Agul

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timur A. Maisak
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Clitic Doubling ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
Doubling Construction ◽  
Person Agreement

The paper describes the doubling of free personal pronouns in Agul, an East Caucasian language spoken in Daghestan, Russia. The doubling construction consists of a subject pronoun in the canonical preverbal position, paired with an identical instance of the same pronoun immediately following the verb. The first pronoun is usually adjacent to the “verb–pronoun” combination, though it can optionally be separated by another constituent. In the oral corpus consulted for the analysis, the construction is found most often with the primary verb of speech in clauses introducing a quote (e.g. ‘I said I, …’). I argue that the doubling pattern originated as the conflation of a preverbal subject with a very frequent “verb–subject” word order used with highly topical referents. The function of the doubling construction is therefore postulated to draw additional attention to the referent. A brief comparison of Agul doubling and related phenomena in other languages (e.g. person agreement and clitic doubling) is also offered.

scholarly journals Rara and theory testing in typology: The natural evolution of non‐canonical agreement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Round
Keyword(s):  
Main Clause ◽  
Theory Testing ◽  
Natural Evolution ◽  
Retrospective Case ◽  
Successful Development ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
General Schema ◽  
Person Agreement ◽  
Retrospective Case Study

In typology, rara provide valuable tests for theoretical hypotheses. Here I consider the rarum of PERSON inflection in Kayardild, which has only two surface contrasts but is found across all words in complementized subordinate clauses. I introduce a general schema for reasoning about the diachronic emergence of rara, and reconstruct the evolution of Kayardild subordinate PERSON agreement, from an earlier state in which a main‐clause inverse system was coupled to a system of complementizing CASE agreement. Serendipitously, the same synchronic facts have been analysed twice earlier without the benefit of the full diachronic backstory, and so present a retrospective case study in what diachrony offers for the analysis of rara, structures which by definition are difficult to contextualize using synchronic typology alone. I argue that since rara are so valuable for the testing of typological theories, and since diachrony may offer the only source of convincing explanation for them, it follows that typological science will need to refer to diachrony for the successful development of theory. It cannot rely on synchrony alone .

Variable subject pronoun expression in Cabo-Verdean Creole

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Rodríguez-Riccelli
Keyword(s):  
Subject Domain ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Subject Pronoun ◽  
Subject Clitics ◽  
Subject Expression ◽  
Person Agreement ◽  
Formal Category ◽  
Person Marking

Abstract The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed (Baptista 1995, 2002; Pratas 2004). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro-drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013), and when a semantically referentially deficient (Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers (Siewierska 2004) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression (Wratil 2009; Baptista & Bayer 2013).

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