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Andrew asked:
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<pre>Is anyone aware of work that has been done on grammatical agreement and
frequency? For example, if a verb agrees with an object (variably) by
(variably)adding some sort of verbal inflection, at what point is there
generally considered to be "agreement." Is it at 50%, 75%, 100% of the
time?</pre>
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<pre>The particular phenomenon that I am working with is indirect object
clitic-doubling in Spanish. This has been called agreement by many
working in formalist and functionalist frameworks. I am interested in
at what point clitic-doubling ceases to be doubling and begins to be
grammatical agreement.</pre>
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<p><br>In this context, statistics appears to be a rather problematic indicator,
at least to me. The grammaticalization of clitics (or what-so-ever) as
agreement markers has a high functional value (e.g., focus, anaphoric or
cataphoric (pragmatic) reference (clefting), assignment of syntactic functions
(grounding)...). In case a language system is 'on the way' to develop agreement
techniques we should expect that the occurence or 'missing' of agreement
elements correponds to the activation degree of such functional properties.
Consider the following example from Udi (South East Caucasian):
<p>(1) chowal-ay tur-e sa cac baIq'-ec-e
<br> sparrow-gen foot-dat one
thorn stick-intrans-perf
<br> 'In the sparrow's foot there
was stuck a thorn.'
<p>(2) chowal sa karna-n-a-ne tac-i
<br> sparrow:abs one old=woman-sa-dat-3sg:s
go:past-aor
<br> 'The sparrow went ('flew')
to an old woman.'
<p>(3) chowal t'ia ar-i p-i-ne s^o-t'-u
<br> sparrow:abs there come:past-aor
say-aor-3sg:a dist-sa-dat
<br> 'The sparrow came there
[and] said to her...'
<p>In (1) AGR is mssing, in (2) it is present, and in (3) it is missing
with the first verb, but present with the second one. The distribution
of both patterns is conditioned by functional aspects: In (1) we have a
stative construction without a distinct focus constituent, in (2) the 'old
woman' is focused (constituent focusing) [note that we have floating agreement
clitics in Udi!], in (3) _ari_ and _pine_ are chained which conditions
that only the last part of such a chain is marked by a clitic. If we count
all occurences of agreement elements in an Udi text, we would arrive at
perhaps 60% (depending on the kind of text you choose, some text go up
to 95%). This figure would tell us that agreement techniques in Udi have
strong functional properties in a synchronic perspective (which can also
be inferred from the 'floating' technique).
<br> The problem Andrew addresses is associated with
the presence or absence of pronominal referents (that is agreement is trigerred
by personal pronouns or something like that). Only in such instances we
can describe 'doubling' techniques, scugh as Udi
<p>(4) zu kala-zu
<br> I big-1sg:s
<br> 'I [am] big (foc).'
<p>(5) zu-zu kala
<br> I-1sg:s big
<br> 'I (foc) am big'
<p>It sounds logical (to me) to call such a technique an 'agreement' technique
if the pronominal constituent can be deleted, cf.
<p>(6) kala-zu
<br> big-1sg:s
<br> 'I am big' (no constituent
focus here)
<p>In such cases, the clitic does not have an overt (textual) antecedent
but serves to identify a given actant on the verb. But I do not think that
this assumption is adequate in the opposite sense.
<br> A language has (pronoun based) agrement if the clitic
in question can appear without its antecedent (but not necessarily does).
<br> A language has a system of pronominal doubling,
if the antecedent can appear without the clitic (but not necessarily does).
<br> [Note that I superficially use 'antecedent' for
any kind of pronominal trigger ('ante-cedent' (anaphoric) as well as 'post-cedent'
(cataphoric)]
<p>Wolfgang
<br>--
<br>*****************************
<br>Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
<br>Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
<br>Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München
<br>Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
<br>D-80539 München
<br>Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345
<br>Email: W.Schulze@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
<br><A HREF="http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/">http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/</A>
<br>*****************************
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