Summary: inclusory constructions

[Bill Croft]

Dear list members,

Thanks very much for the overwhelming and immediate response.

The construction I was interested in, "Mary 
leave-1PL" ('Mary and I left'), is an instance of 
what Lichtenberk 2000 calls an implicit split 
inclusory construction. An inclusory construction 
is one in which the reference of one syntactic 
element is properly included in the reference of 
another syntactic element, the inclusory 
pronominal (in my example, the referent of "Mary" 
is included in the 1st plural referent set). If 
the two elements do not form a unit, Lichtenberk 
calls it split; if there is no overt linking 
morpheme, Lichtenberk calls it implicit. Some 
correspondents offered examples of other types of 
inclusory constructions, such as what Lichtenberk 
calls a (implicit) phrasal inclusory construction 
(the pronominal and included element form a 
phrase), as in Bislama (Crowely 2004:71):

Mitufala gel ia i stap wokbaot long sanbij.
'That girl and I were walking along the beach.' 
[Mitufala = first person dual exclusive]

Singer (2001) argues that in some Australian 
languages, nonaffixal inclusory pronominals do 
not form a phrase with the included nominal.

Another type is what Lichtenberk calls an 
explicit (phrasal) inclusory construction, as in 
Hungarian (example from Richard Madsen, COM = 
comtitative):

Elment-ünk Mary-vel
left-we Mary-COM

The usual etymological source of the explicit 
morpheme is a comitative or an NP coordinating 
conjunction.

This just gives an outline of the phenomenon; for 
details, here are the references offered me, not 
all of which have I been able to check at this 
point.

Bill Croft


--Earlier papers discussing inclusory constructions:

Mithun, Marianne. 1986. Disagreement: the case of 
pronominal affixes and nouns. Proceedings of the 
Georgetown University Round Table Conference on 
Languages and Linguistics 1985, ed. Deborah 
Tannen & James E. Alatis, 50-66. Washington, DC: 
Georgetown University Press.

Schwartz, Linda. 1988a. Conditions on verb-coded 
coordinations. Studies in syntactic typology, ed. 
Michael Hammond, Edith Moravcsik & Jessica Wirth, 
53-73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Schwartz, Linda. 1988b. Asymmetric feature 
distributions in pronominal 'coordinations'. 
Agreement in Natural Language, ed. Michael Barlow 
& Charles A. Ferguson, 237-49. Stanford: Center 
for the Study of Language and Information.

Aissen, Judith. 1989. Agreement controllers and 
Tzotzil comitatives. Language 65:518-36.

--Recent literature specifically on inclusory constructions:

Lichtenberk, Frantisek. 2000. Inclusory 
pronominals. Oceanic Linguistics 39:1-32.

Singer, Ruth. 2001. Inclusory constructions in 
Australian Languages. Honours thesis, Department 
of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, 
University of Melbourne. Available at 
http://www.student.unimelb.edu.au/~rjsinger/.

Bril, Isabelle. 2004. Coordination strategies and 
inclusory constructions in New Caledonian and 
other Oceanic languages. To appear in 
Coordinating constructions, ed. Martin 
Haspelmath. (Typological studies in Language.) 
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

--Other related references:

Barlow, Michael. 1999. Agreement as a discourse 
phenomenon. Folia Linguistica 33: 187-210.

Bickel, Balthasar. 2000. On the syntax of 
agreement in Tibeto-Burman. Studies in Language 
24:583-609.

Corbett, Greville G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. [pp 191-92, 232-33]

Haspelmath, Martin. To appear. Coordination. 
Language typology and linguistic description (2nd 
ed.), ed. Timothy Shopen. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press. Available at 
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/papers.html.

Moravcsik, Edith. 2003. A semantic analysis of 
associative plurals. Studies in Language 
27:469-503.

--Some grammars with examples mentioned by correspondents:

Crowley, Terry. 2004. Bislama Reference Grammar. Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press. [p. 71]

Evans, Nicholas. 2003. Bininj Gun-Wok: a 
pan-dialectal grammar of Mayali, Kunwinjku and 
Kune (2 vol.). (Pacific Lingusitics, 541.) 
Canberra:  Australian National University. [pp 
419-20]

Faarlund, Jan Terje. 2004. The Syntax of Old 
Norse. Oxford UP. (Due to appear in June) [pp. 
89-90]

François, Alexandre. 2001. Contraintes de 
structures et liberté dans l'organisation du 
discours: Une description du mwotlap, langue 
océanienne du Vanuatu. Doctoral dissertation, 
Université Paris-IV Sorbonne. 3 volumes.

Zuniga, Fernando. 2000. Mapudungun. Munich: LINCOM Europa.