[Lingtyp] Query about constraints on co-referential arguments in matrix clauses

[John Du Bois]

There is a lot of information on similar phenomena in Mayan languages.
Early work includes:

Larsen, T. W. (1981). Functional correlates of ergativity in
Aguacatec. *Berkeley
Linguistics Society, 7*, 136-153.

Larsen, T. W. (1988). *Manifestations of ergativity in Quiché grammar.* PhD
thesis, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley.

Larsen, T. W., & Norman, W. (1979). Correlates of ergativity in Mayan
grammar. In F. Plank (Ed.), *Ergativity: Towards a theory of grammatical
relations* (pp. 347-370). New York: Academic Press.

Norman, W. M., & Campbell, L. R. (1978). Toward a Proto-Mayan syntax: A
comparative perspective on grammar. In N. C. England (Ed.), *Papers in
Mayan Linguistics* (pp. 136-156). Columbia, MO: University of Missouri.



For more recent work, see:

Aissen, J. (2017). Correlates of ergativity in Mayan. In J. Coon, D.
Massam, & L. D. Travis (Eds.), *Oxford handbook of ergativity*. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Clemens, L. E., Coon, J., Pedro, P. M., Morgan, A. M., Polinsky, M.,
Tandet, G., & Wagers, M. (2015). Ergativity and the complexity of
extraction: A view from Mayan. *Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 33*,
417–467. doi:10.1007/s11049-014-9260-x


Best,

John

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 4:29 AM Matthew Carroll <mattcarrollj at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I am curious about restrictions on arguments in matrix clauses that are
> co-referential with those in subordinate clauses.
>
> Restrictions on the role that a co-referential argument may play in a
> subordinate clause are well established in the literature (Keenan and
> Comrie 1977, and others). Rather I am interested in restrictions that may
> apply to the role that co-referential argument may play in the *matrix*
> clause.
>
> For example, in Ngkolmpu a Yam language spoken in West Papua that I have
> been working on, there is a relative clause strategy involving a right
> adjoined relative clause. The co-referential argument may serve *any role
> in the subordinate clause* but can only be the *absolutive argument of
> the matrix clause.*
>
> 1.     krar-w               irepe     pi         srampu             [ntop
> mi                     bori      ye]
>       dog-sg.erg      man      dist      he:will:bite:him  big       rel.abs
>          comp    is
>       'The dog will bite that man *who is big*’
>       ***’The dog, *who is big*, will bite that man.’
>
> Example (1) can only be interpreted as 'the man who is big' and never 'the
> dog who is big'. This has been confirmed through careful and systematic
> elicitation on this topic and confirmed by examples in my growing corpus
> (currently at about 1500 naturalistic utterances).
>
> Dixon (1977) notes similar restrictions in Yidiɲ. On page 323 of his
> grammar he posits the coreferentiality constraint: "*There must be an NP
> common to the main clause and subordinate clause, and it must be in surface
> S or O function in each clause." *
>
> Unlike the Ngkolmpu example, this applies to both the matrix NP and the
> subordinate NP which only applies to the matrix NP. Yet, importantly for my
> purpose, does place a restriction on the role of the matrix NP. I am
> curious to see if people know of other examples of these kind of
> constraints in matrix NPs? or perhaps there is a paper that I have missed
> in my (rather brief) survey of the literature on the topic.
>
> Regards,
> Matt
>
> Matthew J. Carroll
>
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-- 

=======================================

John W. Du Bois
Professor of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California 93106
USAdubois at ucsb.eduhttp://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/dubois/
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