Summary Details
| Query: |
Development of Agreement Morphology - part 1
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| Author: | Eric Fuss | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Morphology
Syntax |
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| Summary: |
Some weeks ago I posted a query (LINGUIST 13.2217) asking for information on languages which currently show a development of subject agreement morphology from pronouns (or have undergone such a change in their recent history). I want to thank all who responded for their very helpful and in many cases detailed messages, which provided me not only with a lot of interesting data but also helped me to gain new insights in my topic (the development of agreement morphology and its syntactic consequences). Thanks a lot! Several people (Werner Abraham, Stefan Ploch, and Helmut Weiss) referred me to the well-known phenomenon of complementizer agreement which is found in a variety of southern German dialects. Here, the relevant agreement morphology developed out of enclitic subject pronouns which attach to the second clausal position (occupied by the finite verb in main clauses and the complementizer in subordinate clauses). The fact that the inflected complementizer co-occurs with another subject shows that the former pronoun has been reanalyzed as an agreement marker, thereby losing its argument status. Interestingly, in some dialects, weak pronouns of this kind also developed into a new marker of verbal agreement, which can be seen from the fact that the relevant morphology spread to finite verbs in clause final position as well (only 1st & 2nd ps): (1)wa'ma doch zwou kei kod hama because-2pl particle two cows had have-2sg '...because we had two cows' Wolfgang Schulze turned my attention to the East Caucasian languages, where very interesting developments are underway. The languages spoken in the Eastern Caucasus are often characterized by a system of noun classes which are marked on the verb in an Erg/Abs fashion. Apart from this kind of (ergative) noun class agreement, however, many languages (e.g. Lak, Tabasaran, Awar, Dargwa) have developed (and still develop) an additional agreement paradigm of person (and sometimes number) marking on the verb. Interestingly, this new agreement paradigm is often Nom/Acc oriented. The degree of grammaticalization of this new paradigm varies greatly from language to language. The first distinction that arises is apparently first person vs. non-first person agent. Finer-grained systems referring to other person/number distinctions may develop subsequently. Bill Morris took considerable time to give me some detailed information on Kapampangan (Northern Philippines) which has undergone a shift from pronouns to obligatory ergative and absolutive agreement. The resulting agreement cluster is usually in second position right after the verb, but it can appear in front of the verb in some contexts. Furthermore, the agreement cluster can be divided into ergative and absolutive agreement clitics by a particle meaning 'just now'. These facts suggest that the agreement cluster has not yet developed into a verbal affix. Mark Donohue reported that Skou (North-Central New Guinea) is currently developing a second cycle of agreement markers. Skou exhibits a bewildering number of different strategies to mark agreement with a subject (pronominal agreement clitics, vowel and consonant alternations on the verb, as well as combinations of these). In a recent paper, Donohue shows that the kind of multiple exponence/agreement found in Skou can be attributed to repeated cliticization of pronominal subjects in the history of this language: the consonant alternations on the verb are apparently the result of an earlier process in which subject pronouns fused to the verb. The subsequent reduction of this kind of distinctive agreement morphology is in turn compensated by a second wave of cliticization in the present day language. To be continued in Part 2. |
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| LL Issue: | 13.2514 | |
| Date Posted: | 02-Oct-2002 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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