[Lingtyp] Verbal person-number indexing reconstructed for a family/deeper subfamily?

[g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk]

Your usage was fine. There’s no need to turn the clock back and talk about agreement as “copying”. We’ve seen since at least Mike Barlow’s thesis (1988) that it makes sense to think of agreement as the cumulation of (partial) information. Then the presence of nominal elements is a separate issue. We know that there are plenty of situations between obligatory presence and obligatory absence of such elements, so we shouldn’t tangle up the two things.  So your term was fine (and it’s certainly not the case that the terminology depends on English or German). But this is a change of topic, and it would be good to leave it and to get back to the interesting one.
Very best, Grev

On 20 Jun 2018, at 17:18, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:


In my previous posting, my use of the term "person agreement" was imprecise, as I think Martin is implying: in the Austronesian cases that I am familiar with, the "conominal" (to use Martin's term from his "Argument Indexing" paper) is indeed optional, not obligatory as in German and English.

On 20/06/2018 13:38, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
Changing the topic a bit: I'm glad that the term "person(-number) indexing" is being used in this discussion, because "agreement in person" seems to be extremely rare in the world's languages (found only in Germanic, Romance, and Anejom, according to Siewierska 1999: 239).

Many linguists use the term "agreement" in situations like Spanish "yo quier-o“, even though in almost all languages with person indexes the independent personal pronoun is only used to emphasize the referent. This seems to be motivated primarily by the situation in German and English, where the pronoun is indeed obligtory and the verb can be said to copy its person-number features from the pronoun.

Or am I missing something? Are there other reasons to use the term "person agreement", e.g. in the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia that David mentions?

Best,
Martin

*********

Reference

Siewierska, Anna. 1999. From anaphoric pronoun to grammatical agreement marker: Why objects don’t make it. Folia Linguistica 33(1–2). 225–252.


On 20.06.18 09:36, David Gil wrote:
Ilja,

This is not exactly what you're asking for, but perhaps close enough to be of interest.  Austronesian languages typically do not have verbal person-number subject indexes; however, in many Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia, verbal agreement has arisen, and, for the most part, the markers in question are clearly reconstructable to the earlier Austronesian independent pronouns.

Best,

David


On 19/06/2018 21:52, Ilja Seržant wrote:
Dear all,

I am looking for families (or subfamilies with a larger time depth) for which verbal person-number subject indexes / "agreement" affixes (featuring the intransitive subject for ergative lgs.) are reconstructed. (I already have data on Dravidian, Semitic, Indo-European, Maya, Finno-Ugric and Turkic but I need more for my study on the dynamics of these).

I would be very grateful for any reference.

Best,

Ilja





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David Gil

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