nominal-internal person agreement
Eitan Grossman
eitan.grossman at MAIL.HUJI.AC.IL
Sat Sep 29 14:01:16 UTC 2012
Regarding Hebrew, I'm not sure that the analogous structures would always
be adverbial, since person-indexed quantifiers (and other kinds of
elements) can also occur in fairly straightforwardly nominal environments,
e.g.,
1. kul-anu po (the morphemic division here is a bit arbitrary, and
probably some would render it kula-nu)
all-1pl here
'We're all here.'
2. hu diber im kul-am
3sgm spoke with all-3pl
'He spoke with everyone'
3. kul-i ozen
all-1sg ear
'I'm all ears.'
4. ra'iti et kul-am
I.saw DOM all-3pl
'I saw everyone.'
Similar is rub- ('most):
5. rub-o Stuyot
most-3sgm nonsense
'It's mostly nonsense.'
It's true that when occurring with a lexical noun phrase or another person
marker, the usual analysis would be adverbial, but then one would say that
these person-indexed quantifiers have different analyses when occurring
with a lexical noun phrase and when occurring without one.
6. anaxnu kul-anu po
we all-1pl here
'We're all here.' (compare ex. 1 above).
In any event, there's no need to posit a missing person marker or lexical
noun phrase in the above examples to preserve an adverbial analysis.
Perhaps not incidentally, in colloquial Hebrew there's a pretty strong
preference for invariable quantifiers (without person indexing) when the
quantified element is a lexical noun phrase:
7. ha-sfarim kul-am/rub-am (less frequent)
the-books all-3pl/most-3pl
'all/most of the books'
8. kol/rov ha-sfarim (more frequent)
all/most the-books
'all/most of the books'
Just to name another language with person indexing on quantifiers: in
Coptic, there's an analogous construction, which is usually analyzed as
adverbial, e.g.,
9. p-kosmos têr-f
the-world all-3sgm
'the whole world'
10. ntôtn têr-tn
you all-2pl
'all of you'
In some respects, such elements seem to pattern like intensifiers in both
Hebrew and Coptic (König & Gast, *Linguistic Typology* 10/2: 223-276).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20120929/3acb6be1/attachment.htm>
More information about the Lingtyp
mailing list