nominal-internal person agreement

[Enrique L. Palancar]

Hello Pattie,
Here is my contribution to Steve Wechsler's query: 
Notions such as "all of us came back" in Otomi, a language family of Mexico, are conveyed by a construction involving two juxtaposed clauses, one being a depictive clause referring to the quantification of the subject "we being all" and a main clause "we returned".  Data from Northern Otomi, variety of San Ildefonso Tultepec (1)dí=ga’tho=he                          dá=penk=he1.INCPL.REALIS=be.all=PL.EXCL  1.CPL=return=PL.EXCL‘We all came back’
The lexical item which in (1) is a verb, in (2) is a determiner.
(2)pa                bi=’<y>a’= [ga’tho                                               nu=ya    khö’i]PURPOSIVE    3.CPL=<SECONDARY.STEM>bury.BOUND[3.OBJ]=all  DEF=PL   person‘To bury all people.’ The  treatment of "all" as a verb is an unsurprising one in Mesoamerican languages.       Hope this helps, 
Very best, Enrique
..............................................................................................................................................Enrique L. Palancar
SeDyL-CELIACNRS (UMR 8202)7 rue Guy Môquet 94801 Villejuif Cedex, France 
Surrey Morphology GroupSchool of English and LanguagesFaculty of Arts and Human Sciences (J1)University of Surrey,Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH
Tel. +44 (0)1483 682856<www.surrey.ac.uk/english/smg/people/><surrey.academia.edu/EnriquePalancar><enriquepalancar.weebly.com/>Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 23:10:11 -0500
From: pepps at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU
Subject: nominal-internal person agreement
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG


nominal-internal person
agreement
Hello all,



This query is on behalf of Steve Wechsler:



It has been noted that (at least some) Bantu languages have person

agreement inside certain Quantified Noun Phrases:



Thina s-onke   si-fik-ile
           (Zulu; Doke 1963:94, cited in

Baker 2008:115)

we     1pl-all
   1pl-arrive-perf

'We have all arrived.'



The quantifier onke 'all' agrees with thina 'we' in person (and

number).  This is said to be typologically rare since adnominals
such

as quantifiers do not normally agree in person.  I would be
interested

in any examples of such apparently nominal-internal person
agreement

in Bantu or other languages.  In particular, I wonder if phrases
like

[we 1pl-all] can occur in all nominal positions in the sentence
(such

as object position), or rather tend to be sentence-initial.



Thanks,

Steve Wechsler

wechsler at mail.utexas.edu 		 	   		  
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