LINGUIST List 13.2566

Tue Oct 8 2002

Sum: Development of Agreement Morphology/Pt2

Editor for this issue: Steve Moran <stevelinguistlist.org>

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Message 1: Summary, Part 2

Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2002 17:36:56 +0200
From: Eric Fuss <fusslingua.uni-frankfurt.de>
Subject: Summary, Part 2

This is the follow-up to the first part of my summary (Linguist 13.2514) 'development of agreement morphology'.

First, I want to thank Suzanne Alberse for pointing out a typo in the first part of my summary. In the gloss of the Bavarian example, it should have been 1pl (twice), that is

(1) wa'ma doch zwou kei kod hama because-1pl particle two cows had have-1pl '...because we had two cows'

Various Northern Italian dialects represent another case in point. Cecilia Poletto pointed out to me that in some Lombard and Rhaeto-romance varieties, subject clitics occur not only in preverbal, but also in postverbal position. Furthermore, these postverbal forms appear to be completely morphologized, as they are obligatory in all environments, do not change their position and are never split from the verb by any other type of element. As in many other languages (cf. the East Caucasian and Southern German data), these elements are only found in the first and second person (singular and plural) but never with the third person. Furthermore, Cecilia Poletto took the time to work out some generalizations on the distribution of these postverbal markers, for which I am very grateful. Her findings are: (i) enclitics of the morphologized type are often found in the present and imperfect but very rarely in the future tense (apparently, they develop first in the imperfect) (ii) they are generally found with the indicative (iii) they are generally found with main verbs, less with auxiliaries.

David Kaiser provided another example of a language that possibly exhibits an early stage in the development of subject-verb agreement morphology. In Macedonian, clitics are fusing to the verb, resulting in what some people call a "poly-personal" verb.

Mira Ariel was so kind to provide references to her most recent work where she discusses the development of a new series of agreement markers in the future tense of colloquial Hebrew. Her basic observations are: (i) in contrast to other tenses, overt subject pronouns apparently begin to be obligatory in the future tense; (ii) there's a high frequency of reduced forms (proclitics on the verb) for first and second person pronouns (in contrast to third persons) in the colloquial future tense (again paralleling developments in other languages, see above). Ariel argues that the reduced forms develop into a new way of subject agreement marking on the verb, thereby reinforcing the existing agreement markers. She attributes this development to the fact that in the future tense, the pronominal origin of the "old" agreement markers is not transparent anymore. Therefore, they are not considered to be referential and do not license zero subjects, giving rise to obligatory overt pronouns. These are in turn reduced to clitics (and, ultimatively, agreement morphology).

Finally, Larry Hutchinson pointed out to me that not all cases of apparent (developing) subject-verb agreement are what they seem to be at first sight. He argues that Temne (Sierra Leone) has no subject-verb agreement, but requires the presence of a obligatory subject pronoun in all instances, even if there is also a full subject NP:

(2) a. i fumpo. 'I fell.' b. o fumpo. 'He fell.' c. obai o fumpo. 'The chief he fell'

Analyzing the preposed person/number markers as agreement morphology requires either that verbs don't agree with pronominal subjects (only with nominal ones), or that verbs agree with pronominal subjects which then undergo obligatory pro-drop. Note that Marianne Mithun (in various papers) reports similar facts for many Northern American indigenous languages. Here, bound pronominal affixes are obligatory as well. Furthermore, these pronouns seem to be the actual arguments of the verb, whereas full noun phrases are merely optional appositive elements.

An extended version of this summary including (selected) references is available at: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/fb10/fuss/summary.pdf

Eric Fuss Institut fuer deutsche Sprache und Literatur II University of Frankfurt Germany