LINGUIST List 10.776

Thu May 20 1999

Qs: Person Marking, Derivation vs Memorization

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  • mike_maxwell, Person marking in interrogatives
  • Andrew Wedel, Derivation versus memorization in word production

    Message 1: Person marking in interrogatives

     Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 15:07:17 -0400
    From: mike_maxwell <mike_maxwellSIL.ORG>
    Subject: Person marking in interrogatives


    In consulting with a linguist working on a Colombian language, I ran across something strange, and I thought I'd see if anything like this happens in other languages. (I looked through some of the typological literature, but came up empty handed.) The situation is this: person/ gender/ number marking on verbs seems to work in reverse in declaratives and interrogatives. Specifically, first person suffixes in declaratives are used as second person suffixes in interrogatives (in one tense only, out of several). Here are some examples (using 'u' for a high back unrounded vowel; phonemic nasalization not shown):

    (1) da-kaku come-1MSgNRP I came.

    (2) da-be-te-kaku come-NEG-DYN-1MSgNRP I didn't come.

    (3) da-kaku-ru come-2MSgNRP-2Q did you come?

    Either (1) or (2) is an appropriate answer to (3). The glosses are: 1MSgNRP = 'first person masculine singular nonrecent past', NEG= 'negative, DYN= 'dynamicizer' (an affix that shifts the verb between 'stative' and 'dynamic' forms--that's a whole 'nother story), and 2Q= second person yes-no question (a different suffix appears in first and third person interrogatives).

    The relevant morpheme is -kaku, which seems to mean first person in declaratives, but second person in interrogatives. The examples are all in masculine singular, but the same thing reportedly happens in feminine singular forms and in plural forms: you get -kako in 1st person feminine singular declaratives and 2nd person feminine singular interrogatives, and you get -kara in 1st person plural declaratives and 2nd person plural interrogatives. The corresponding second person declaratives are all da-awo 'you came' (or da-be-te-awo 'you didn't come'); note that number and gender are not differentiated in the second person declarative forms. First person interrogatives are not common (except for those of us who go around asking ourselves where we left our reading glasses), but when they do occur they apparently do not take any specific person markers, just a question marker (which is also used on the much more common third person interrogatives).

    The use of the same person marker for 1st person declaratives and 2nd person interrogatives only happens in the nonrecent past (well, also in the habitual aspect, but that's the other story I mentioned, having to do with stative and dynamic stems). The other tenses seem to use person markers consistently in declarative and interrogative, or none at all. (The recent past tense does something else odd with evidentials in interrogatives, which is yet another story...)

    In summary, there are several things odd here: why would the same person/ number/ gender markers be used in 1st person declaratives and 2nd person interrogatives? And why in just one tense? And why do the second person interrogatives distinguish gender and number when the declaratives don't?

    I must confess that my initial reaction was that the data was in error--I blamed it on elicitation techniques. But this appears not to be the case. Although I can't provide any person observations, the linguist working in this language assures me she's heard conversations between native speakers in which sentences like (3) served as a question, and (1) or (2) as a reply. Also, the -ru suffix that appears in example (3) appears only on second person interrogatives elsewhere in the system (although not on all second person interrogatives).

    As Hamlet said, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Or at least in my philosophy. Has anyone else seen something like this?

    Mike Maxwell Mike_Maxwellsil.org Summer Institute of Linguistics

    Message 2: Derivation versus memorization in word production

     Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 19:21:55 -0700 (PDT)
    From: Andrew Wedel <wedelbiology.ucsc.edu>
    Subject: Derivation versus memorization in word production


    Dear Colleagues.

    I am interested in the division of labor between memorization and derivation in production of related words. For example, on the one hand I can produce both 'am' and 'was' because I have memorized these irregular forms, and on the other if I have just learned the word 'syncretism', I can produce 'syncretic' by derivation. But what about 'cook' versus 'cooked'? They are transparently derivable from one another, but I use them with enough frequency that they should be both memorized as well.

    Can anyone point me to literature or experimental evidence bearing on the devision of labor between memorization and derivation in lexical retrieval?

    Thank you very much!

    Andrew Wedel