LINGUIST List 20.3621

Tue Oct 27 2009

Diss: Lang Documentation: McGill: 'Gender and Person Agreement in...'

Editor for this issue: Di Wdzenczny <dilinguistlist.org>

---

        1.    Stuart McGill, Gender and Person Agreement in Cicipu Discourse

---

Message 1: Gender and Person Agreement in Cicipu Discourse
Date: 26-Oct-2009
From: Stuart McGill <sm112soas.ac.uk>
Subject: Gender and Person Agreement in Cicipu Discourse
E-mail this message to a friend

Institution: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Program: Department of Linguistics Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2009

Author: Stuart McGill

Dissertation Title: Gender and Person Agreement in Cicipu Discourse

Dissertation URL: http://www.cicipu.org/linguistics.html

Linguistic Field(s): Language Documentation
Subject Language(s): Acipa, Western (awc)
Dissertation Director:
Peter K. Austin
Dissertation Abstract:

The Cicipu language (Kainji, Benue-Congo) of northwest Nigeria has the kindof robust noun class system characteristic of Benue-Congo languages -GENDER agreement is found on a great many agreement targets inside andoutside the noun phrase. For a number of these targets, gender agreement isin competition with a separate paradigm, that of PERSON agreement. Thedissertation focuses on the distribution of this alternation with respectto subject prefixes, object enclitics, and pronouns, based on a corpus of12,000 clauses of spoken language.

The alternation proves to be complex to describe, involving a constellationof lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmaticfactors. In particular, both animacy and topicality are CONDITIONS (Corbett2006) on agreement.

While inanimate or animal participants normally trigger gender agreement,if they are topics then they may trigger person agreement. Likewise whilehuman nouns typically trigger person agreement, this is not always thecase, and gender agreement is more likely if the referent is of incidentalimportance to the discourse. Furthermore it is argued that this alternationis sensitive to discourse topic (e.g. Dooley 2007) rather thansentence topic (e.g. Lambrecht 1994).

Both gender and person subject prefixes are ambiguous agreement markersaccording to the typology of Bresnan and Mchombo (1987) and Siewierska(1999), since both can take part in grammatical or anaphoric agreement.Thus the Cicipu data supports Culy's (2000) contention that topicality isan independent dimension for the classification of agreement markers,rather than derivative of the grammatical vs. anaphoric agreementdistinction, and leads us to re-evaluate the common assumption thatdependent person markers (Siewierska 2004) cannot vary with respect totheir discourse function.

Since Cicipu is otherwise undescribed, a major part of the dissertationconsists of a phonological and grammatical sketch.

---