Prosody and independence: free and bound person marking

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Mithun
Keyword(s):  
Person Marking

Towards a typology of change in person marking reference

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (s42-s1) ◽  
pp. 87-110
Author(s):  
Jonah Bates
Keyword(s):  
Specific Marker ◽  
Real Change ◽  
Person Marking

Abstract Previous studies of person marking referent shifts posited directionality: pl > sg and 3rd > 2nd > 1st person. The current study expands the documentation of person shifts, finding possible counter-examples to any directionality if all shifts represent the same phenomenon. However, comparison of shift trajectories allows them to be separated into two categories: paradigm-dependent and paradigm-independent shifts, analogous to the stages of known cycles like Jespersen’s Cycle for negation. Dependent shifts are context restrictions that occur after the introduction of more specific contrasting person markers. Independent shifts are context extensions. I analyze both shift types using a model of competition between referent-specific and referent-general markers causing pragmatic restriction of the more general form. Dependent shifts occur when the innovation of a referent-specific marker pragmatically restricts a general one to a subset of its original uses with no real change in reference. Independent shifts begin when some speakers use a referent-specific marker non-prototypically in more general contexts, triggering reanalysis of the marker’s reference by reducing specification to match the broader context. Crucially, using a general marker in more specific contexts would not trigger reanalysis, naturally resulting in directionality similar to ‘bleaching’.

scholarly journals Tedim verb person marking

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jade Mroueh
Keyword(s):  
Person Marking

Person-Marking Prefixes of Purum

2011 ◽  
pp. 3-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Surmangol Sharma ◽  
N. Gopendro Singh
Keyword(s):  
Person Marking

scholarly journals Referential hierarchies: A new look at some historical and typological patterns

Linguistics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Spike Gildea ◽  
Fernando Zúñiga
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Asymmetrical Pattern ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Grammatical Change ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Constituent Ordering ◽  
Person Marking

AbstractThis paper proposes a diachronic typology for the various patterns that have been referred to as Hierarchical Alignment or Inverse Alignment. Previous typological studies have tried to explain such patterns as grammatical reflections of a universal Referential Hierarchy, in which first person outranks second person outranks third person and humans outrank other animates outrank inanimates. However, our study shows that most of the formal properties of hierarchy-sensitive constructions are essentially predictable from their historical sources. We have identified three sources for hierarchical person marking, three for direction marking, two for obviative case marking, and one for hierarchical constituent ordering. These sources suggest that there is more than one explanation for hierarchical alignment: one is consistent with Givón’s claim that hierarchical patterns are a grammaticalization of generic topicality; another is consistent with DeLancey’s claim that hierarchies reflect the deictic distinction between present (1/2) and distant (3) participants; another is simply a new manifestation of a common asymmetrical pattern, the use of zero marking for third persons. More importantly, the evolution of hierarchical grammatical patterns does not reflect a consistent universal ranking of participants – at least in those cases where we can see (or infer) historical stages in the evolution of these properties, different historical stages appear to reflect different hierarchical rankings of participants, especially first and second person. This leads us to conclude that the diversity of hierarchical patterns is an artifact of grammatical change, and that in general, the presence of hierarchical patterns in synchronic grammars is not somehow conditioned by some more general universal hierarchy.

Uralic Languages

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Abondolo
Keyword(s):  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Relative Complement ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Phonological Reconstruction ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Person Marking

All but three of the thirty-nine Uralic languages are endangered, most of them seriously so; of the family’s ten main branches, only two have members considered safe (Finnish and Estonian of the Fennic branch, plus Hungarian). This chapter surveys a selection of phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of the Uralic languages; the emphasis is on presenting aspects that are usually ignored, oversimplified, or misrepresented. Among the topics broached are vowel harmony; consonant gradation, which in the Uralic context is of four distinct kinds, three of them quite old; less-than-agglutinative (i.e. fairly fusional features of several languages); problems of phonological reconstruction; the inflection of personal pronouns; person marking on nouns and Subject, Agent, and Object marking on verbs; and kinds of relative, complement, and support clauses.

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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