Clusivity
Typological Studies in Language (TSL) A companion series to the journal Studies in Language
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Clusivity
Typological Studies in Language (TSL) A companion series to the journal Studies in Language
General Editor
Michael Noonan
Assistant Editors
Spike Gildea, Suzanne Kemmer
Editorial Board Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Bernard Comrie (Leipzig) R. M. W. Dixon (Melbourne) Matthew Dryer (Buffalo) John Haiman (St Paul) Bernd Heine (Köln) Paul Hopper (Pittsburgh) Andrej Kibrik (Moscow) Ronald Langacker (San Diego)
Charles Li (Santa Barbara) Edith Moravcsik (Milwaukee) Andrew Pawley (Canberra) Doris Payne (Eugene, OR) Frans Plank (Konstanz) Jerrold Sadock (Chicago) Dan Slobin (Berkeley) Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara)
Volumes in this series will be functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language typologies. The orientation of the volumes will be substantive rather than formal, with the aim of investigating universals of human language via as broadly defined a data base as possible, leaning toward cross-linguistic, diachronic, developmental and live-discourse data.
Volume 63 Clusivity: Typology and case studies of the inclusive–exclusive distinction Edited by Elena Filimonova
Clusivity Typology and case studies of the inclusive–exclusive distinction
Edited by
Elena Filimonova University of Konstanz
John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia
8
TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Clusivity : Typology and case studies of the inclusive–exclusive distinction / edited by Elena Filimonova. p. cm. (Typological Studies in Language, issn 0167–7373 ; v. 63) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Grammar, Comparative and general--Clusivity. 2. Typology (Linguistics) I. Filimonova, Elena. II. Series. P299.C584C58 2005 115.61--dc22 isbn 90 272 2974 0 (Eur.) / 1 58811 644 1 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)
2005045386
© 2005 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Contents Preface
vii
Introduction Elena Filimonova
ix
Part 1 Case studies on special problems of the inclusive–exclusive distinction 1. Understanding inclusives Michael Daniel
3
2. Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols
49
3. Syncretisms involving clusivity Michael Cysouw
73
4. Only you? Philological investigations into the alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural Horst J. Simon
113
5. Inclusive and exclusive in free and bound person forms Anna Siewierska and Dik Bakker
151
6. Inclusive imperative Nina Dobrushina and Valentin Goussev
179
7. A typology of honorific uses of clusivity Michael Cysouw
213
8. Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language Kearsy Cormier
231
Part 2 Areal and family portraits of the inclusive–exclusive distinction 9. Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian: An opposition of unequals Frantisek Lichtenberk
261
10. The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages Randy J. LaPolla
291
vi
Contents
11. Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken 12. Inclusive and exclusive in Turkic languages Irina Nevskaya 1 3. Development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction: A possible loan scenario in Mosetenan Jeanette Sakel
313 341
359
14. The inclusive and exclusive in Shuswap: A background investigation Jan P. van Eijk •
381
15. Clusivity cross-linguistically: Common trends and possible patterns Elena Filimonova
399
Index
425
Preface The idea for this book came up at a typological workshop on personal pronouns which we had in Konstanz in December 2000 (partly supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)). One point of departure for this workshop had been the collection of generalizations about person marking as documented in the Konstanz Universals Archive (http://ling.uni-konstanz. de/pages/proj/sprachbau.htm). Amongst others we got several papers focusing on the inclusive–exclusive opposition, and these seemed sufficiently interesting to continue along these lines. Though this is a widespread feature familiar from descriptive grammars and frequently figuring in typological schemes and diachronic scenarios, no comprehensive exploration of it was available so far. Revised versions of these conference contributions are complemented by several chapters that have been solicited afterwards. I believe we received a well-balanced and coherent collection dealing with inclusive–exclusive from typological, diachronic, and areal viewpoints. It is hoped that the book will become a standard reference for the inclusive–exclusive opposition, filling the longstanding gap in the typology of person marking. Apart of the authors, a few people contributed in particular to make the present volume possible. I am indebted to Frans Plank for his encouragement and valuable advice especially at the initial stage while compiling the volume. I thank Michael Cysouw for his help in organising the workshop and particularly for careful reading and incisive remarks on the earlier drafts of the chapters. Many thanks to Mikhail Daniel for detailed, vivid and fruitful discussions of person marking that we had over the last few years. This book benefited a lot from his painstaking comments. The editor
Introduction Elena Filimonova
The terms “inclusive” and “exclusive” are traditionally used to denote forms of personal pronouns which distinguish whether an addressee (or addressees) are included in or excluded from the set of referents which also contains the speaker. Referentially, both inclusive and exclusive forms are non-singular, but some inclusives may structurally count as a solitary unit and align paradigmatically with referentially singular pronouns. In such cases, the paradigmatic opposition shifts from singular vs. non-singular to unit vs. augmented. Although unattested in western Eurasia, at least synchronically, an inclusive– exclusive distinction in pronominal systems is quite common in other areas of the world (cf. Schmidt 1926, Nichols 1992, Plank 2003; even for Proto-Indo-European it has been assumed by Ivanov 1981, among others). It seems to have been first recognized in the 16th century in Spanish grammars of Indigenous South American languages (Haas 1969, Hardman-de-Bautista 1972). However, despite this long tradition and much improved descriptive work on individual languages showing this distinction, much remains unclear about its crosslinguistic distribution, diachrony, typological connections, and theoretical significance. It is precisely these issues that will be addressed in the present volume. The volume consists of two parts. The first part is devoted to theoretical questions, including case studies on special problems of the inclusive–exclusive distinction, while the second part presents in-depth areal and family surveys. In particular, the following topics are discussed. The first issue of interest is the paradigmatic status of the opposition. Traditionally, the inclusive–exclusive opposition has been considered a subdistinction within the first person. The question is whether this is semantically and structurally well substantiated, and whether it is universally invariant. An alternative would be to categorize inclusive and exclusive forms as separate categories in person paradigms, or else to associate them with non-first persons (inclusive with second person and exclusive with third person). Mikhail Daniel’s chapter starts off the volume by presenting a thorough study that argues against aligning the distinction as an appendage within the first-person non-singular. Daniel attempts a cognitive analysis of the inclusive. Building on Plank (1985) he presents the person hierarchy (locutive hierarchy in his terms) that underlies the absence/presence of inclusive within the pronominal system of a language. In contrast to Daniel, Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols are less rigorous in their analysis of the inclusive–exclusive distinction. They propose a tripartite classification of inclusive–exclusive oppositions considering the way the contrast may
Elena Filimonova
refer to person and number categories. Based on a sample of 293 languages, they trace the distribution of the three types across the globe and see the explanation for the current distributional patterns as lying in the migration of different peoples around the Pacific. Michael Cysouw undertakes a morphological analysis of inclusive and exclusive forms. He presents a collection of possible syncretic patterns in the paradigms with the inclusive–exclusive distinction, i.e. of the cases where inclusive or exclusive share the same form with any other personal pronoun or person marker. His research aims to show that a widely recognized connection between inclusive and second person is exaggerated, and at least morphologically the inclusive could equally be associated with all other persons. Horst J. Simon considers the question of whether a distinction of inclusive and exclusive is limited to forms referring to the speaker plus/minus the addressee or whether there is also an analogous contrast for second person, distinguishing between inclusion and exclusion of non-participants of the speech act. Such secondperson inclusive–exclusive forms have occasionally been claimed to exist, but the validity of such claims is not beyond doubt. Anna Siewierska and Dik Bakker present a detailed study of the inclusive– exclusive contrast in free pronouns vs. bound person markers. Based on a sample of 394 languages, they account for the observed patterns using grammaticalization theory. They also attempt to find a correlation between the presence of the opposition with independent and bound pronominal forms, coming to a (possibly disillusioning) conclusion that there is none. An in-depth study of the bound markers is continued by Nina Dobrushina and Valentin Goussev. They examine how the inclusive–exclusive opposition relates to mood; in particular, whether imperatives are especially conducive to this distinction. They suggest a few generalisations distinguishing person marking in imperative from that of indicative. Like other personal pronominal forms, inclusive and exclusive can be used non-literally, for instance as honorifics or as generic pronouns. Michael Cysouw presents a cross-linguistic survey of honorific usages of inclusive and exclusive forms, demonstrating positive and negative connotations of the forms used with first- and second-person references. His study aims to refute one of the earlier generalizations about extended meanings of the inclusive–exclusive forms which asserts that inclusives express less social distance, when used honorifically, than their exclusive counterparts. The next intriguing question is whether inclusive–exclusive is limited to spoken language or whether it is also found in sign language. The evidence found confirms that sign languages can have this distinction too. This raises the question of whether such a distinction in a sign language is dependent on the same distinction in a corresponding spoken language, and whether generalizations made for spoken languages can be extended to sign languages. Kearsy Cormier presents a unique study of the opposition in American Sign Language, demonstrating that the dis-
Introduction
tinction there is based on quite another principle than in the spoken language. The chapters in the second part of the volume are intended to shed light on the areal typology and diachrony of the inclusive–exclusive opposition. The areal and family surveys of the opposition can be divided into two subgroups. The first group of chapters present general areal and family portraits of the opposition, where each individual study examines the contrast from a new perspective. Surveying Austronesian languages, Frank Lichtenberk questions the equal status of inclusive and exclusive members of the opposition and supports his argument with an analysis of additional meanings of the inclusive and exclusive forms, and also of the course of historic changes of the opposition. Randy J. LaPolla presents a survey of Tibeto-Burman languages and focuses on morphological patterns of inclusive and exclusive forms in terms of markedness. His study of 170 Tibeto-Burman languages and dialects reveals that within this family the exclusive is mostly less marked and historically prior to the inclusive form. He also determines that the inclusive–exclusive contrast cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Tibeto-Burman or mid level groupings and is therefore an innovation. Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken’s contribution surveys central-western South American languages. They focus on an alignment of the inclusive in the pronominal paradigm to ascertain how it coheres with the other three persons, in an attempt to reconstruct a four-person system. Considering the morphological structure of the distinction, they also speculate on the unidirectional historical development of the opposition in these languages, in line with the First Person Hierarchy suggested by Cysouw (2003). The chapter by Irina Nevskaya is of a different kind. She aims to dispel the confusion in the usage of inclusive and exclusive terms in the descriptions of Turkic languages. According to her, the only grammatical sphere where these terms are applicable are the imperatives. The other studies use areal and family perspective to analyse the inclusive–exclusive distinction in separate languages and families. Jeanette Sakel examines the first person plural inclusive cross-reference marker in an unclassified language family Mosetenan consisting of two languages Mosetén and Chimane and argues that this marker entered the family by diffusion. She discusses several possible loan scenarios. Jan P. van Eijk investigates the background of the opposition in Shuswap that stands alone in Salish languages because of its inclusive–exclusive contrast. He evaluates different versions of how it may have originated, and in particular, whether it goes back to Proto-Salish or possibly results from a diffusion or spontaneous internal development. Finally, a concluding chapter by Elena Filimonova sums up the major results of the volume as well as the observations of the earlier typological literature, particularly emphasizing universals implicating the distinction of inclusive and exclusive. Before we proceed to the substantial part of this volume, a note on terminology used in the book is due at this point. As mentioned above, this volume was preceded
xi
xii
Elena Filimonova
by a pronominal workshop. The discussions we had there were unusually stimulating and productive, resulting in, among other things, the birth of a new term denoting the phenomenon of inclusive–exclusive distinction and comprising simultaneously both members of the opposition. The new term is clusivity. As with many other felicitous terms, it is difficult to assign authorship to a particular person now, but most people from the workshop say Viktor Elšík first coined the term. In any case, the term seemed so apt that it was readily accepted by all discussants who participated in the debates. Most contributors to the present volume who attended the workshop use this term in their chapters. And may be after the launch of this book it will become generally accepted.
References Cysouw, M. 2003. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haas, M. 1969. ‘Exclusive’ and ‘inclusive’: A look at early usage. International Journal of American Linguitstics 35: 1–6. Hardman-de-Bautista, M. 1972. Early use of inclusive/exclusive. International Journal of American Linguitstics 38: 145–6. Ivanov, V.Vs. 1981. Slavjanskij, baltijskij i rannebalkanskij glagol: Indoevropejskie istoki (The Slavic, Baltic and Early Balkan verb: Indoeuropean sources). Moskva: Nauka. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plank, F. 1985. Die Ordnung der Personen. Folia Linguistica 19: 111–76. Plank, F. 2003. The selective elaboration of nominal or pronominal inflection. In F. Plank (ed.), Noun phrase structure in the languages of Europe, 253–87. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Schmidt, P. W., S.V. D. 1926. Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde. Heidelberg: Winter.
Part 1
Case studies on special problems of the inclusive–exclusive distinction
Chapter 1
Understanding inclusives Michael Daniel Moscow State University
The chapter introduces a model of pronominal number, person, and clusivity. The model places pronominal number among various non-singular categories and explains the difference between languages with and without inclusives by positing different hierarchies of speech act roles (locutive hierarchies) underlying pronominal marking mechanisms. The hierarchies suggested are {Speaker = Addressee} for inclusive systems and {Speaker > Addressee} for pronominal systems lacking inclusives. Inclusives are treated as a separate person. Rare systems with apparent ‘inclusive = second person’ homophony (Nama, Algonquian, Otomi, Sanuma) are explained by the {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy. Keywords: inclusive, clusivity, person, pronominal number, locutive (personal) hierarchies
1. Introduction The inclusive is traditionally explained as an elaboration of the meaning of the firstperson plural pronoun ‘we’. When present in a language (inclusive languages below), the opposition of ‘we’ inclusive and ‘we’ exclusive, it is said, is intended to specify whether the reference of ‘we’ includes (inclusive) or excludes (exclusive) the addressee. The same difference is disregarded, at the level of the pronominal marking, in other languages (non-inclusive languages below). Apparently, this approach assumes that both ‘we’ inclusive and ‘we’ exclusive are first-person pronouns. My main point is to show that this assumption is not true. The idea that the inclusive may not be a first-person pronoun is not new. Many have admitted that the ‘first-person assumption’ is not universally true. My point, however, is that it is universally false. In other words, inclusive in all inclusive languages should be considered not as a subcategory within the first person, but as a person on its own, separate from what is traditionally called ‘we’ exclusive in the same way as ‘you.pl’. This claim will essentially be based on an analysis of personal reference in general and inclusive reference as its particular occurrence. As I am going to show that the inclusive is not a first-person pronoun, I will adhere to an existing, though somewhat peripheral, practice, using the term inclusive or inclusive person instead of the more widely adopted term first-person inclusive. I will also claim that, from the point of view of what personal pronouns mean, ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages corresponds, so to speak, to ‘we’ exclusive in inclusive languages. Although ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages is used instead of
Michael Daniel
both inclusive and ‘we’ exclusive in inclusive languages, it should not, I will argue, be viewed as merging of the inclusive and ‘we’ exclusive. Therefore I will not refer to ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages by the occasionally used term neutral ‘we’, which in a way assumes such a neutralizing merging. I will refer to it simply as ‘we’, when necessary adding in non-inclusive languages. Accordingly, I will argue that ‘we’ exclusive is in a way the only real first-person plural in inclusive languages (which follows from the inclusive not being the first person) and corresponds to ‘we’ in noninclusive languages. In other words, I will try to show that, despite functional distinctions, ‘we’ exclusive is basically the same linguistic unit as ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages. However, calling traditional ‘we’ exclusive simply ‘we’ would certainly confuse the reader, who is used to the traditional way of calling things. I will thus have to refer to what is commonly called ‘we’ exclusive in inclusive languages by the awkward ‘we’ in inclusive languages (traditional exclusive). To sum up terminological complications, I will use inclusive instead of firstperson inclusive, ‘we’ (in non-inclusive languages) instead of neutral ‘we’ and ‘we’ in inclusive languages (traditional exclusive) instead of ‘we’ exclusive. I hope that these choices, although generating some inconveniences to readers, will in the end seem justified. To prove my point, I will briefly discuss data from different languages showing that there is not enough typological evidence of the formal connection between the inclusive and ‘we’ (Section 2). I will try to provide a model of the pronominal number and person categories which is both logically and typologically consistent (Sections 3 and 4). I will show that there are problems and phenomena which can not be acceptably tackled from within the traditional approach and which are explained by the suggested model (Section 5, on the person-asymmetry paradox, and Section 7, on inclusives apparently homophonous with second-person plural). I will show (Section 6) that the questions of the difference between pronominal reference in inclusive and non-inclusive pronominal systems and the question of the reason for the presence of the inclusive in some languages and its absence from others make sense for this model and can be answered by introduction of hierarchical ordering of the speech act participants basically identical to Plank’s ReferenzHierarchien in Plank (1985) or, in the terms of this chapter, locutive hierarchies (Kibrik 1997). Most of the chapter deals with independent pronouns, and I refer to affixal pronominal marking only occasionally. Although I see no apparent reason why my arguments should fail in case of pronominal affixes, a special study would be needed to prove this claim (cf. Filimonova, this volume).1
2. Morphological evidence If the traditional approach to the inclusive were correct, one could expect that in many languages the inclusive pronoun and the first-person singular and/or plural
Understanding inclusives
(traditional exclusive) pronoun would be in a regular morphological connection. To match the traditional model, they should ideally be produced from one pronominal stem (first person) by adding special markers (exclusive and inclusive); data from languages that derive inclusives from the first-person singular would also be helpful. An examination of inclusive morphology cross-linguistically would be a worthy topic for a separate investigation; cf. Forchheimer (1953), who addresses this problem. A major complication is that morphological relatedness is a vague notion, especially in pronominal systems. Registering the presence of phonological material common to two items is not in itself very informative. First, it is unclear how much of this material suffices an argument in favor of morphological relatedness: one phoneme, two phonemes, more? Second, the two items may have a significant common segment, while the correlation is not regular and the rest of the inclusive pronoun is not identifiable with any meaningful morphological element (irregular relatedness). Finally, even when the morphemes involved are identifiable and occur outside the inclusive–exclusive distinction, the derivation may be irregular in the sense that inclusive (exclusive) meaning is not predictable from the morpheme combination in question. It is hard to draw a natural line to delimit morphologically independent inclusives from inclusives that are irregularly derived from other pronouns. The results presented below are thus rough and preliminary. My language sample, which is basically a subset of the 200+200-language sample of the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil & Comrie 2005, below referred to as WALS) and includes not quite one hundred inclusive languages, shows that there is no typologically consistent connection between inclusive and first person. Inclusives are morphologically independent in more than 80 languages. This figure, however, includes both languages in which the inclusive has nothing in common with other pronouns and those in which the presence of some common material seems to be occasional and irrelevant, at least synchronically. The rest of the sample manifests some kind of morphological analyzability of inclusives. In Otomi (Oto-Manguean, South America), the inclusive is produced by adding second-person affixes to the first-person stem (Hekking & Andrés de Jesús 1984). In Nama (Khoisan, Africa) it is the other way round, with the first-person suffix being added to the second-person stem (Hagman 1977). In various Algonquian languages, the inclusive is formed by a combination of the second-person prefix with a first-person suffix (e.g. Ojibwa and Passamaquoddy) or the second-person prefix with the inclusive suffix (e.g. Plains Cree); the stem is person- and number-indifferent (Bloomfield 1956; Leavitt 1976; Wolfart 1973). In Pitjantjatjara (Glass & Hackett 1970), and less clearly in Yuchi (Wagner 1933–8) and Lealao Chinantec (Rupp 1989), inclusives are formed by the addition of an inclusive possessive affix to the first-person stem. All these languages show a similar pattern, which can be summarized as follows. Pronominal forms are combinations of segments (suffixes, prefixes, and stems)
Michael Daniel
iffering as to the pronominal reference they specify. The reference of the form is d a function of the references of its components, defined differently in different languages. In the case of the inclusive in Pitjantjatjara, for instance, the stem indicates the inclusion of the speaker, while the affix is more specific, indicating the inclusion of both the speaker and the addressee (Glass & Hackett 1970: 47, 49). The reference of the whole form is as specific as its most specific component, thus being inclusive. (Languages like Otomi and Nama, where inclusives are not so easy to analyze, are examined in greater detail below in Section 7.) Although not all combinations of stems and suffixes (or prefixes and suffixes) are possible, their references are best viewed as independent. Therefore, although inclusives do use a first-person component in e.g. Nama or Otomi, I do not consider such systems as instances confirming that the inclusive is a first-person category. In Lahu, a Tibeto-Burman language of China, the inclusive stem is a compound of the first‑ and second-person singular stems (in this order) and thus is regularly related to both persons (Matisoff 1973). This is not the same case as e.g. Nama above, because compounding of pronominal stems is not a regular way to form pronouns in Lahu. The reverse order of the stems is attested in Tok Pisin, an Englishbased creole (Dyachkov 1987). In Garo (India, also Tibeto-Burman), the inclusive also seems to be a combination of the second-person singular pronoun ‘you.sg’ and the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’, though the relatedness in this case is not completely regular (Burling 1961). Even if we admit that compounding is a regular morphological process in these languages, they do not confirm the thesis of a special connection between inclusive and second person, because the second person is equally involved. In the Carib language Macushi, uurîkon ‘you.sg and I’ is produced by suffixing a collective suffix ‑kon to the first-person singular uurî. The first-person plural (traditional exclusive) anna is morphologically independent. The pronoun uurînîkon ‘you.sg, I, and other(s)’ is produced from uurîkon ‘you.sg and I’ by insertion of a suffix -nî- between the stem and the collective pluralizer. A slightly different process is observed in the second person: cf. singular amîrî vs. plural amîrî nîkon. The collective suffix ‑kon is primarily used on possessed nouns to indicate the plurality of the possessor, although it is also used in nominalizations and in some other contexts. The first vowels of the pronouns of the respective persons are identical to possessive prefixes. That suggests that the inclusive and second-person pronouns probably represent the ‘possessive’ pattern of pronominal forms, with the person coded as possessor, at least diachronically (Abbott 1991: 99). In Limbu, a Tibeto-Burman language in Nepal, ani ‘you.sg, I, and other(s)’ is independent (although perhaps related to the first singular aŋga ‘I’). The inclusive anchi ‘you.sg and I’ is derived from ani by a nominal dual affix ‑chi. Now, the firstperson non-singular pronouns (traditional exclusive) are derived from the inclusive non-singulars of the same number by an ‘exclusivizer’ ‑ge, also found in the first-person non-singular (traditional exclusive) verbal forms (van Driem 1987:
Understanding inclusives
25). In the closely related language Kulung, the situation is similar, except that kas ‘you.sg and I’ is not regularly derived from the kei ‘you.sg, I, and other(s)’ (Tolsma 1999: 30). Interestingly, Dumi, another closely related language within the same group (Kiranti), displays a much more widespread pattern, with the first-person non-singulars (traditional exclusives) aŋkɨ (plural) and antsɨ (dual) probably related to, but not derived from, the inclusives iŋki and intsi. Cf. also the first-person singular aŋ (van Driem 1993: 80). The famous special case is Gooniyandi. Here, the same pronoun is used for ‘you.sg, I, and other(s)’ and first-person dual (with no difference as to whether it is inclusive or exclusive). It is questionable whether this pronoun is inclusive at all; see the discussion in McGregor (1989), and see also Filimonova (this volume). In other words, the inclusive is derived from the first person in only three languages of the WALS sample (which does not include Kulung). These languages are Macushi, Limbu and Gooniyandi. Schematically, this derivation is represented in Table 1. Note that there is only one language that derives the inclusive from the first-person singular: Macushi. This is in a drastic contrast with the first-person plural (traditional exclusive) formation. Out of my sample of about 250 languages, some 20% derive the first-person plural from the first-person singular by a regular morphological process (Daniel 2005). Assuming inclusives are first-person pronouns does not explain the data from Limbu and Gooniyandi better than assuming they are a separate person. Another relevant observation is that in inclusive languages with no number correlation (e.g. Imonda (Seiler 1985)) or optional number marking (e.g. Aymara (Hardman-de-Bautista, Vásquez & Yapita Moya 1974)) the unmarked first-person pronoun with plural reference is exclusive, inclusive being coded by a separate pronoun. To sum up, from the typological perspective traditional ‘we’ exclusive is, so to speak, much more a plural of ‘I’ than is the inclusive. Sections 3 and 4 are attempts at a rigorous definition of the categories of pronominal number and person. As I will try to show, building a consistent model of pronominal reference leads to the conclusion that the inclusive is not a first-person pronoun, thus providing the empirical data presented above with a robust theoretical framework. Table 1. Inclusives derived from the first person Macushi
a. ‘you.sg and I’ ← ‘I’ b. ‘you.sg, I, and other(s)’ ← ‘you.sg and I’
Gooniyandi
c. ‘you.sg and I’ = ‘I and one other person’
Limbu
e. ‘you.sg, I, and other’ → ‘I and other but not you’ (‘exclusivizer’) f. ‘you.sg, I, and others’ → ‘I and others but not you’ (‘exclusivizer’)
(collective suffix)
Michael Daniel
3. Definition of the pronominal number Number in personal pronouns is not identical to number in nominals. Number in nominals is typically additive,2 i.e. a plural noun typically refers to a set formed by summing up one and the same object (dogs = ‘dog + dog +. . .+ dog’). In referential terms, the plural reference of the form dogs is homogeneous, where each element of the plural form is referred to by its singular correlate (the singular form of the word).3 Pronominal number is different, as has been pointed out by numerous scholars (e.g. Jespersen 1924; Benveniste 1966; Corbett 2000 and many others). The pronoun ‘we’ is universally called first-person plural, which suggests it is a plural of the first-person singular ‘I’. However, the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ does not mean ‘speaker1 +. . .+ speakern’, but ‘speaker + other people’. The second-person plural ‘you.pl’ can be interpreted both as ‘addressee1 +. . .+ addresseen’ or ‘addressee1 +. . .+ addresseen + other people’ or as ‘addressee + other people’. Thus, pronominal number lacks additive-ness (referential homogeneity); rather, it is referentially heterogeneous. The problems are as follows: (a) whether ‘we’ is a plural of ‘I’ and (b) if it is, in what sense (same for ‘you.sg’ ~ ‘you.pl’). Let us consider these problems in turn.
Is ‘we’ a plural of ‘I’? The easiest way to solve the problem would be to suggest that ‘we’ is not a plural of ‘I’. First, one could say that differences between singular and plural reference do not constitute a pronominal category at all (see section a of Table 2). This is supported by the pronominal systems of languages in which singular and plural pronouns are not morphologically analyzable, e.g. Lezgian, North-Caucasian (zun ‘I’ ~ čun ‘we’; wun ‘you.sg’ ~ kün ‘you.pl’ (Haspelmath 1993: 184)). Lezgian personal pronouns behave as if they were totally unrelated lexical items. It would not make much sense, on the basis of Lezgian alone, to introduce pronominal person and number categories. Second, one may admit that singular vs. plural number is a lexical category of personal pronouns, i.e. one can argue that personal pronouns split into singular and plural lexical items, but there is no correlation between singular and non-singular personal pronouns. In other words, ‘we’ is plural but not a plural of ‘I’, ‘you.pl’ is plural but not a plural of ‘you.sg’ (see section b of Table 2). Indeed, there are numerous languages in which the plural personal pronouns use a stem different from that of the singular pronoun of the respective person, but attach nominal (or dedicated) plural suffixes, e.g. Russian (ja ‘I’ ~ m‑yNomPl ‘we’; ty ‘you.sg’ ~ v‑yNomPl ‘you.pl’).4 It is obvious that each of these two approaches is based on data from different languages, in both cases quite numerous. As far as our problem is concerned, their evidence is contradictory. More than that, there is a (relatively small) number of languages which contradict both solutions in that the plural personal pronouns are formed from the singular personal pronouns of the same person by adding a plural suffix (e.g. Mandarin Chinese woˇ ‘I’ ~ woˇ‑menPl ‘we’; nıˇ ‘you.sg’ ~ nıˇ‑menPl ‘you.pl’
Understanding inclusives Table 2. Morphological coding of number in personal pronouns a. Lezgian (−number, −person)
b. Russian (+ number, −person ) Sg
‘I’, ‘you.sg’, ‘we’, ‘you.pl’
c. Mandarin Chinese (+ number, + person) Sg
Pl
1
‘I’
‘we’
2
‘you.sg’ ‘you.pl’
Pl
‘I’, ‘you.sg’ ‘we’, ‘you.pl’
(Li & Thompson 1981: 40, 134)), and thus the existence of both pronominal number and person is morphologically coded in the language. Table 2 shows that various languages provide contradictory evidence as to the existence of person and number categories in personal pronouns. Mandarin Chinese pronouns suggest that there is both number and person. Russian consistently marks number (singular vs. plural personal pronouns) but lacks any regular pattern of person marking. Finally, Lezgian does not show a regular pattern of marking of either of the two categories. A tempting solution would be to say that different languages vary in that they can have categories of pronominal number and/or person, or they can have neither of the two, depending on the pronominal morphology. The categories of pronominal number and person would then become language specific, as shown in Table 2. This solution is hard to refute. Nevertheless, it is traditionally assumed that number and person exist in all languages (except those in which pronouns are number-indifferent, like Imonda (Seiler 1985)), independently of whether plural pronouns are derived from singular pronouns or the two sets are completely unrelated. In other words, most linguists assume that the underlying categorial structure of e.g. Lezgian pronouns is essentially the same as that of Mandarin Chinese pronouns; it is just that Mandarin Chinese reflects this structure in its morphology while Lezgian does not. Though it seems that this assumption has not been effectively proven, I share this assumption and adopt it in the rest of this chapter. Once there exist pronominal forms which convey the meanings ‘we’ and ‘I’ and/or ‘you.pl’ and ‘you.sg’, the pronominal number (as well as person) opposition does exist, and I will consider it to be a grammatical category. In what follows, I suggest a universal model of plural personal pronouns, taking this assumption for granted.
(1) Assumption: ‘we’ is a plural of ‘I’; ‘you.pl’ is a plural of ‘you.sg’.
Relation between pronominal and nominal plurality Once Assumption 1 is adopted, the second problem arises: in what sense is ‘we’ a plural of ‘I’? A tempting but simplistic approach would be to say that pronominal plurals are basically the same category as nominal plurals. It could be argued on one hand that a referentially homogeneous, or additive, interpretation is also available for ‘we’, e.g. when several people are speaking in
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chorus, or when a paper is written by several people together, or, to put it in a more general way, when several persons are co-authors of the same speech act (see Corbett 2000; Cysouw 2001 for discussion). For ‘you.pl’, the homogeneous interpretation seems to be quite frequent. This provides one of the possible solutions to the problem. The homogeneous plural reading of a plural personal pronoun is the core one, while the heterogeneous plural reading is a secondary one (we should, further, try to investigate the reasons why this secondary reading emerges).5 Then pronominal number is only different from nominal number in having an additional, peripheral meaning. However, this choral usage of ‘we’ (‘mass-speaking’ in terms of Cysouw 2001) is itself so obviously peripheral that it is by no means likely to be the core reading. It is limited to few pragmatic types of situations, as texts written by several people or speaking during common prayers. One can not even be sure that these pragmatic contexts exist in all cultures.6 Furthermore, it is hard to provide any strong arguments in favor of the secondariness of the non-additive reading of ‘you.pl’ (‘addressee + some other people’). Unlike heterogeneous and homogeneous readings of ‘we’, of which the latter is most unusual if exists at all, neither of the two readings seems to be more expectable for ‘you.pl’.7 Arguing that plurals of personal pronouns are primarily additive does not seem to be the correct way to solve the problem. Non-additive readings are either default (in the first person) or at least equally probable (in the second).8 Another way to solve the same problem would be to say that plurality is in fact a wider category which covers both homogeneous nominal and heterogeneous pronominal number. This category would be an opposition of singular vs. plural reference, independently of the referential homo- or heterogeneity. Thus, both dogs and we are plurals in that they refer to a set comprising more than one element. Homogeneous and heterogeneous plurals are indeed subtypes of plurality understood in this wider sense. However, there are several arguments against saying they constitute a single grammatical category. First, pronominal and nominal plurals are different both from the point of view of their respective meanings, or, to be more precise, their reference structure (heterogeneous vs. homogeneous plural reference) and formally (in most languages pronominal plurality is not coded in the same way as nominal plurality). Typologically, there seems to be no reason to combine different meanings expressed by different linguistic means in one grammatical category. Second, if homogeneous and heterogeneous plurals are members of the same category, what triggers the choice between homogeneous and heterogeneous plural interpretation? One could explain why ‘we’ is referentially heterogeneous. Indeed, there is typically one speaker, and a homogeneous, or additive, interpretation (‘speaker + . . . speaker’) is not likely. On the other hand, it is totally unclear why nominal plurals are typically additive: certainly the heterogeneous reading ‘dog and someone/something else’ is not incompatible with the lexical meaning ‘dog’; cf. Daniel & Moravcsik (2005).
Understanding inclusives
The issue is further complicated by two facts. The second-person plural apparently has homogeneous readings (cf. however, n. 7). On the other hand, there are actually many cases of heterogeneous plural reference with nouns. The famous case is that of the so-called associative plurals (known by a great many other terms).9 In a vast number of languages, a proper name or kin term or, more rarely, a common human noun X plus a basic (additive) plural marker or a dedicated associative plural marker designates a set including the referent of the noun X and some other people associated with him or her. Schematically, it is ‘X and his/her associate(s)’ (Moravcsik 2004; Daniel & Moravcsik 2005). Other relatively widespread examples of non-homogeneous nominal plurals are similatives, forms which designate a class of objects whose prototypical member is the referent of the stem (Daniel 2000), and dyadic kinship terms (Merlan & Heath 1982; Evans, forthcoming). All of these forms have plural reference10 and designate sets some of whose elements are not referred to by the stem. Thus all of them are referentially heterogeneous plurals. Use of a cover term designating all these heterogeneous plurals has been suggested. This term could be representative11 plurals (for a general discussion of these forms see Daniel 2000; Daniel & Moravcsik 2005). In the most general terms, a representative plural form designates a group which includes the referent of the singular correlate of this form. In other words, heterogeneous (alias representative) plurality is not restricted to pronominal plurals. It is also available for some nominals, an example being associative plural formation. Because of this similarity, some scholars have even claimed that plural personal pronouns are instances of associative plurals (Barulin 1980; Cysouw 2001: 66–7). A nice argument in favor of this point of view is found in Cantonese. Associative plurals are formed by combining a proper name with the thirdperson plural pronoun kéuihdeih (as in Mandarin). This pronoun, however, may be contracted to -deih, which is identical to the dedicated personal pronoun plural marker; cf. ngóh ‘I’ ~ ngóhdeih ‘we’, léih ‘you.sg’ ~ léihdeih ‘you.pl’. Thus, the same marker is used to express pronominal and associative plurality (Matthews & Yip 1994: 79, 83). Similarly, plurality of the first (but not the second) person pronoun in Marind is optionally marked by an otherwise associative plural marker ke; cf. nok ‘I’ ~ nok (ke) ‘we’, Jasu ke ‘Jasu and his children, his family, or his friends’ (Drabbe 1955: 28, 138). However, the meaning ‘the speaker and his/her associate(s)’ is by no means the most frequent reading of the pronoun ‘we’, which makes a straightforward identification of the pronominal plurals with associative plurals dubious. The pronoun ‘we’ may refer to any set of persons in which the speaker is one of the elements. Plurals of personal pronouns cover a wide range of different pragmatic meanings,12 of which the associative reading is just one element. In a typology of plurals, plurals of personal pronouns are representative rather than specifically associative. The typological survey of representative plurals carried out in Daniel (2000) allows the formulation of a preliminary distributional display of the homogeneous and heterogeneous types of plurality among personal pronouns and different
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Table 3. The availability of additive vs. representative readings of plural in different lexical classes First Second person person Additive (homogeneous)
?
Representative ‘we’ (heterogeneous)
Proper names
Kin terms
Common Non-human human nouns ‘object’ nouns
‘you.pl’ ‘you.pl’
associative, associative, similative similative, dyadic
associative, similative
(associative?) similative
classes of nouns. This distribution is shown on Table 3.13 Deep gray marks areas in which the relevant reading is always available to the lexical class in which it is so to speak its typologically default option of plural reference (given that its plural exists at all). Thus, second person, if the pronoun is not number-indifferent, can always have both additive and representative readings. This is why it is shown in deep gray in both rows.14 Light gray marks areas in which the relevant plural of the lexical item is present in some languages, but absent from others. This is the case of e.g. kin terms, which may or may not have representative plural forms. The question mark indicates that the additive reading of ‘we’ is highly peripheral. As this table shows, there is an obvious overlap in the distribution of additive and representative plurals. The fact that many lexical classes have both additive and representative plurals (quite often conveyed by different markers) shows that, typologically, these two types of plurality are better be considered as separate categories. Before providing a definition of pronominal plurality, let us sum up this section. I assume that plural personal pronouns are plurals of the respective singular pronouns of the same person. However, this plurality can not be identified with the additive plurality typical of nominals. It is a manifestation of a separate category of representative plurals (often, though not universally, also present in nouns in the guise of associative plurals and similar categories). Thus, a definition of pronominal plurals should be based on a definition of representative plurals:
(2) Definition: A representative plural designates a set which includes the referent of the respective singular form (focus) and some other elements.
The representative number correlation is then ‘X’ ~ ‘a set which includes X’ (as opposed to additive ‘X’ ~ ‘a set of Xs’). I will call X the focus or the focal referent of the pronominal plural form. The focus of a pronoun is a referent (defined in terms of speech act roles) whose presence is indispensable in all usages of the pronoun (except some displaced usages; cf. discussion in Zwicky 1977). The other members of the group will be called non-focal referents of the pronoun. Now consider the correlation between ‘I’ and ‘we’. Since ‘we’ designates a group of people which includes the referent of ‘I’, according to this definition the relation between ‘we’ and ‘I’ qualifies as singular vs. representative plural, the speaker being
Understanding inclusives
the focus of ‘we’. The same is true for ‘you.sg’ ~ ‘you.pl’; the focus of the latter is the addressee.
(3) Statement (follows from the Definition 2 and Assumption 1): ‘we’ is a representative plural of ‘I’ whose focus is the speaker; ‘you.pl’ (in its nonadditive reading) is a representative plural of ‘you.sg’ whose focus is the addressee.15
4. Definition of the category of person In the singular, the person is determined by the role of the referent of the pronoun in the speech act. It is the first-person singular if the pronoun refers to the speaker, the second-person singular if the pronoun refers to the addressee, and the third person if the pronoun does not refer to any of the speech act participants. The person of the plural pronoun is a slightly more complicated issue because it refers to a group of people who may relate to the speech act in different ways. For instance, a group designated by ‘we’ can include the speaker and a non-locutor,16 and it has to be made explicit why its person should be first (because the speaker is included) rather than third (because a non-locutor is included). The model of pronominal plurality suggested above gives a convenient way to define the person of the plural pronoun. One should apply the same rules as in the singular — only to the focus of the pronoun.
(4) Definition: The person of the plural pronoun is determined by its focus. It is first person if the focus is the speaker, second person if the focus is the addressee, and third person if neither.
Now the person of ‘we’ and ‘you.pl’ is determined in a consistent and intuitively natural way. According to Statement 3 above, the pronoun ‘we’ (= ‘a group including the speakerFocus’) is first person because its focus is the speaker, and the pronoun ‘you.pl’ (= ‘a group including the addresseeFocus’) is second person because its focus is the addressee.17
(5) Statement (follows from definition 4 and statement 3): ‘we’ is a first-person pronoun; ‘you.pl’ is a second-person pronoun.
From this point of view, to determine what the person of the inclusive pronoun is is the same as to determine what its focus is, given that ‘inclusive’ equals ‘a group including the addressee and the speaker’. To start with, the inclusive is not a representative plural of ‘I’ or ‘you.sg’, because it is not sufficiently defined either as ‘a group which includes the speaker’ or as ‘a group which includes the addressee’. For the inclusive, neither definition suffices. Therefore, within our system of definitions, it is neither a first nor a second-person pronoun. To put it differently, the first-person plural is a pronoun designating a group which includes the speaker and the second-
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person plural is a pronoun designating a group which includes the addressee, without any further specifications. The inclusive indicates that the group includes both the speaker and the addressee and thus does not qualify as either.
(6) Statement (follows from definition 4 and definition 3): The inclusive is neither first nor second person.
This conclusion is less intuitively obvious than Statement 5. It contradicts the traditional approach, even though both statements follow from the same definitions. Out of the two components of the inclusive, the traditional approach focuses on the inclusion of the speaker and considers the inclusion of the addressee as a secondary feature. The structure of the inclusive is then ‘[a group which includes the speaker]1st Plural, [which also includes the addressee]Inclusive. It is not clear what supports foregrounding the speaker while backgrounding the addressee (obviously, not typological evidence on morphological relatedness between inclusive and the first person; see Section 2 above). In Section 6 below I will show that this idea is probably at odds with the very nature of inclusive languages. Statement 6 provides no positive clue as to what the focus of the inclusive pronoun is. One could suggest that it has no focus at all, being crucially different from other personal pronouns. In this case, we should either admit that inclusive can not be characterized in terms of person or we should try to make the definition of person more sophisticated (Definition 4 above). However, there is a much more natural way to explain what inclusive is if one admits that the focus should not necessarily consist of only one element. The focus of the inclusive pronoun comprises both the speaker and the addressee: ‘inclusive’ = ‘a group including {the speaker and the addressee}Focus’.18 This definition of inclusive focus would make it remarkably similar to the first‑ and second-person foci. The set {speaker, addressee} is obligatorily included in any inclusive reference, and the definition of the inclusive as ‘speaker, addressee, and other(s)’ may easily be rewritten as ‘{speaker and addressee} and other(s)’. This approach is well supported by the data from languages with singular alignment of ‘you.sg and I’ pronoun (minimal vs. augmented number systems). Some inclusive languages formally distinguish between two inclusive meanings, ‘you.sg and I’ vs. ‘you.sg, I, and other(s)’. A number of papers (Conklin 1962; Greenberg 1988, and many others) describe systems in which the first-inclusive meaning is best viewed as a member of the singular rather than the non-singular pronominal paradigm. In McGregor (1989) this phenomenon was felicitously called singular alignment of the dual inclusive. It has been suggested that in these languages the category of pronominal number is replaced by another category distinguishing between minimal vs. augmented. Indeed, any set referred to by a first-person pronoun includes {speaker} as its subset, on one hand, and there is no smaller subset of the set {speaker} which can be referred to by a first-person pronoun, on the other. In this sense, ‘I’ is the minimal first person. Similarly, ‘you.sg’ is the minimal second person. Note that in both
Understanding inclusives Table 4. Weri personal pronouns (adapted from Greenberg 1988: 5) Minimal ~ augmented system
Viewed traditionally Sg
1 Incl 2 3
ne tepir në pë
ten‑ip tëar‑ip ar‑ip pëar‑ip
ten tëar ar pëar
1 Excl ne Incl 2 në 3 pë
Du tenip tepir arip pëarip
Tri tëarip
Pl ten tëar ar pëar
the first (traditional exclusive) and the second person, minimal means singular. It is different with inclusives. Obviously, for the inclusive, the minimal category is {speaker, addressee}. Augmented pronouns are pronouns that, apart from the minimal subset, also include other referents. Table 4 shows that the Weri pronominal system is much more adequately described in terms of minimal vs. augmented than in traditional number terms. In pronominal systems like that of Weri, it is especially clear that the focus of the inclusive is bicomponential. In these systems, the notion of minimal is basically identical to that of the focus. I have said above that the focus is an element whose presence is obligatory for all occurrences of the pronoun. Obviously, there is a oneto-one correspondence between this definition and the definition of the category of minimal.19 The data from Weri and similar languages are useful because they make the fact that the inclusive focus is bicomponential and consists of both the speaker and the addressee clear at the level of morphological paradigms.20 In this section, I have defined the person of plural personal pronouns on the basis of the notion of focus, an element whose presence is obligatory for all occurrences of this pronoun. This resulted in rather natural and intuitive conclusions for the first‑ and second-person plural pronouns. However, the same method, when applied to inclusives, produced a result that is not in line with the traditional analysis and thus is much less natural and intuitive. Indeed, the inclusive proves to be a separate person rather than a subcategory of the first person. For a paper attempting a formalization of the existing terminological apparatus, the fact that this result goes against the intuition of many linguists is in itself a very good reason to doubt the approach. However, later in Section 9 I will show why I think that this is one of the rare cases where intuition is better admitted to be wrong and based on false implicit assumptions of the universal character of language-specific concepts and thus should be rejected.
5. Person-asymmetry paradox and related problems There is a problem which I have tried to avoid until now. In non-inclusive languages, the reference structure of the plural pronouns is as follows. The pronoun ‘we’ may refer to any group which includes the speaker. The pronoun ‘you.pl’ refers to any
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Michael Daniel Table 5. Reference structure of plural pronouns in non-inclusive languages (traditional view) ‘I’ (= ‘the speaker’)
‘we’ (= ‘a group which includes the speaker’)
‘you.sg’ (= ‘the addressee’)
‘you.pl’ (= ‘a group which includes the addressee but does not include the speaker’)
group which includes the addressee but does not include the speaker. This is reflected in Table 5. In non-inclusive languages, there is an apparent asymmetry between the pair ‘I’ ~ ‘we’ and the pair ‘you.sg’ ~ ‘you.pl’. The first-person plural pronoun, i.e. ‘we’, indicates only that the referent of the corresponding singular pronoun, i.e. ‘I’, is included in the reference. The second-person plural pronoun, ‘you.pl’, apart from conveying a similar meaning, also seems to indicate that the speaker is not included. Presumably, the personal pronoun encapsulates two grammatical categories, pronominal number and person. The ‘non-inclusion of the addressee’ component of the meaning should then be attributed to either of these two categories. The distribution of person and number component is clear in the first-person plural: it is ‘group which includesNumber the speakerPerson’. If one now says that the non-inclusion of the speaker in the second-person plural (‘group which includesNumber the addresseePerson but not the speaker?’) is conveyed by the number category, that would cause an asymmetry in our pronominal number model. The meaning ‘group which includes X’ is additionally specified by saying that the speaker is not included. In this case, we are forced to admit that the number correlation is not identical in the two persons and the category of pronominal number does not exist. If we say that the non-inclusion of the speaker is conveyed by the category of person, what becomes asymmetrical is the person category in the first vs. second person. In addition, we actually admit that this component is also present in the second-person singular, i.e. ‘you.sg’ = ‘the addressee, but not the speaker’, which does not seem to be a natural solution. Let us see now what happens in inclusive languages, as presented in Table 6. The semantic component of ‘non-inclusion’ is common to both ‘we’ (traditional ‘we’ Table 6. Reference structure of plural pronouns in inclusive languages (traditional view) ‘I’ (= ‘the speaker’)
‘we’ (= ‘a group which includes the speaker but does not include the addressee’) inclusive (= ‘a group which includes the addressee and the speaker’)
‘you.sg’ (= ‘the addressee’)
‘you.pl’ (= ‘a group which includes the addressee but does not include the speaker’)
Understanding inclusives
exclusive) and ‘you.pl’ and can be defined as ‘but not including the other locutor’. Thus, the correlation between ‘I’ and ‘we’ is identical to that between ‘you.sg’ and ‘you.pl’, so that the asymmetry present in non-inclusive languages is avoided. However, it is still necessary to attribute this component either to the category of pronominal number or to that of person. If one admits that the exclusion of the other locutor is a component of the pronominal number category, one has to reconsider the notion of pronominal number which we have constructed in the previous sections. Indeed, ‘but not including the other locutor’ component is by no means predictable from the general representative model ‘group which includes X’. Another option would be to say that it is contained in the person category. Although this approach is more robust,21 it does not solve the problems arising in non-inclusive languages (see Table 6). Is there any way to preserve the categories of number and person as we have defined them above for both inclusive and non-inclusive languages?
6. Locutive hierarchies22 The obvious solution is the ordering of person assignment rules. Cf. the two sets of rules in Table 7, with (a) and (b) responsible for non-inclusive and inclusive languages, respectively. This approach is apparently effective in that it correctly and in a plain way describes the use of person categories. Essentially, it was used in e.g. Hollenbach (1970) (although in the guise of a Venn diagram rather than as spelled-out hierarchical rules). It was also considered in Zwicky (1977) as an option, and then rejected. In the most of the linguistic literature, however, the rules of person assignment remain implicit (see discussion in Plank 1985). However, the category of person as a result of the application of hierarchical assignment rules is very different from other grammatical categories. Above, I have defined the grammatical person of the plural pronoun as its focus’s speech act role. With assignment rules, it is unclear where exactly the notion of person is hidTable 7. Hierarchical person assignment rules a. Non-inclusive languages.
b. Inclusive languages
1. If the group includes the speaker, assign 1st person 2. If the group includes the addressee, assign 2nd person 3. Assign 3rd person
0. If the group includes both speaker and addressee, assign inclusive 1. If the group includes the speaker, assign 1st person (traditional exclusive) 2. If the group includes the addressee, assign 2nd persona 3. Assign 3rd person
a The mutual ordering of the rules 1 and 2 for inclusive languages is irrelevant.
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den. Person as assigned by means of hierarchical rules, although not contradicting Definition 4 above, does very well without any definition altogether. Table 7 efficiently and sufficiently defines what person is — except that person thus defined does not look like a grammatical category. It is a result of an operation of assignment rules rather than a semantic grammatical category such as number or tense. Is there any way to avoid this complication and to preserve the category of person in its ‘grammatical category’ version? Following Zwicky (1977) and Plank (1985), I make an attempt to extract the hierarchical component from Table 7 and then to introduce it as a separate hierarchy. This hierarchy would be used as a rule controlling the applicability of plural personal pronouns instead of forming a part of the definition of person, ordering the application of the assignment rules. As I pointed out before, the focal referent of a representative plural form often displays some kind of dominance within the group this form designates. This is most clearly seen in the case of the associative plural forms that are typically formed on the nominals referring to the male or female head of the family, with male referents preferred to female referents in some languages, or referring to the leader of a group rather than to one of its dominated members (Daniel 2000; Moravcsik 2004). Similative plurals are formed on a nominal which is considered to be a prototypical and most salient element of the class (e.g. tiger rather than fox for predatory animals). In each case, there is a dominance-based rule which chooses one of the elements of the group to be the focal referent of the representative plural form. In other words, all representative plurals tend to be based on some kind of hierarchy controlling the choice of the focus. A similar model can be suggested for plural personal pronouns. As I have argued above, the focus of the first-person plural pronoun is the speaker, and the focus of the second-person pronoun is the addressee. The focus of the inclusive is both the speaker and the addressee. If a group includes the speaker but not the addressee and if it is necessary to designate this group with a plural personal pronoun, this pronoun will be ‘we’. To put it differently, out of a group which includes the speaker and non-locutors, the only element that may become a focal referent is the speaker, while non-locutors may not. This can be generalized as a hierarchical rule {Speaker > Non-Locutor}. If a group includes the addressee but not the speaker, it is only the addressee who may become the focus, while non-locutors may not. This corresponds to a rule {Addressee > NonLocutor}. Finally, in a non-inclusive language like English, if a group includes both the speaker and the addressee, the plural personal pronoun which is applicable is again the first-person plural ‘we’. That means that the addressee may not be chosen as a focus in the presence of the speaker, or, in the form of a hierarchy, {Speaker > Addressee}. A combination of the segments of the hierarchy obtained so far (cf. a similar buildup of a hierarchy in Plank 1985) gives the following result: {Speaker > Addressee > Non-Locutor}
Understanding inclusives
In inclusive languages, the rules for designating the group which, of the two locutors, includes only the addressee and the group which, of the two locutors, includes only the speaker are exactly the same. The rule which is applied when the group includes both locutors is, however, different. In this case, both the speaker and the addressee are included in the focus of the pronoun. In other words, the addressee may not become the only focus in the presence of the speaker (as in non-inclusive languages), but (unlike the pattern in non-inclusive languages) the speaker may not become the only focus, either. This is interpretable as the following fragment of the hierarchy: {Speaker = Addressee}. Merging it with the two other fragments, we come to the following hierarchy: {Speaker = Addressee > Non-Locutor} These hierarchies of (non-)locutors, alias locutive hierarchies, are actually the rules for the choice of the focal referent. As I show now, this allows the extraction of the ‘other locutor’s non-inclusion’ component of pronominal meaning from the model of reference structure of the plural personal pronoun (see Tables 5 and 6 above), making these structures parallel in the first‑ and second-person plural and thus preserving the categories of pronominal number and person as defined in the above sections. In other words, this allows us to avoid dealing with ordered assignment rules as listed in Table 7. The second-person plural pronoun ‘you.pl’ is not applicable to a group which includes both the speaker and the addressee not because its reference structure contains an additional component ‘but not the speaker’ (see Table 5 above) or because it is applied after the rule 1 (see Table 7) but because its application would require choosing the addressee to be the focus of the group, while it is hierarchically impossible in the presence of the speaker. One could say that the pronoun ‘you.pl’ indicates the inclusion of the addressee but is only applied in the absence of the speaker because the latter is the preferred focus, and the pronoun ‘we’ should be used in this case. The fact that the second-person plural pronoun may not include the speaker in its reference must not be built into the definition of the plural pronoun itself, nor is it necessary to order the rules of person assignment. All one has to do is to follow the general principle of representative plural reference structure, which says that it is only the dominating element of the set which may be chosen to be the focus. Similar rules, but based on a different hierarchy, explain the use of personal pronouns in inclusive languages. The first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ (traditional exclusive) or the second-person plural pronoun ‘you.pl’ may not be applied to a group including both the speaker and the addressee, not because they include the component ‘but not the other locutor’ (cf. Table 6), or because they are applied after the rule 0 in Table 7 but rather because applying them would violate the locutive hierarchy presumably at work in these languages. Just as with the ‘you.pl’ pronoun, firstperson plural pronoun in an inclusive language indicates only the inclusion of the speaker, without any specific claims made as to the exclusion of the addressee. However, it is actually applied exclusively in the absence of the addressee. Using it to des-
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ignate a group which includes the addressee would mean choosing the speaker to be the focus in the presence of the addressee and thus would violate the {Speaker = Addressee} hierarchy. An interesting corollary of the above argument is that the traditional ‘we’ exclusive is, grammatically, a complete analogue of ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages. Traditionally, ‘we’ exclusive is described as ‘a group including the speaker, but not including the hearer’. The suggested model allows it to be represented simply as ‘a group including the speaker’, the non-inclusion of the addressee being derived from the locutive hierarchy at work in inclusive languages.23 Thus, both ‘we’ in noninclusive languages and the traditional ‘we’ exclusive in inclusive languages are described as ‘a group including the speaker’. However, because of the differences in the locutive hierarchies, ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages is applied to any group which includes the speaker, while in inclusive languages it is applied only in the absence of the addressee. In other words, they are grammatically (semantically) identical without being so functionally. This is the reason why I designate ‘we’ exclusive as ‘we’ (traditional exclusive) throughout the chapter. This terminological suggestion is in complete accordance with the data from those languages in which the traditional ‘we’ exclusive is a formal plural of ‘I’ (as in Barasano (Jones & Jones 1991: 20, 31)). It is unclear why a lexical item referring to ‘a group including the speaker but not the hearer’ should be coded as a formal plural of the lexical item referring to ‘the speaker’. Locutive hierarchies are to be distinguished from personal hierarchies. In several studies, personal reference is described in terms of the ordering of personal categories. The hierarchy here is {I person > II person} (for non-inclusive languages). What was suggested above is a hierarchy of speech act participants, not persons. Personal hierarchies are used by Hollenbach (implicitly) and Zwicky (Hollenbach 1970; Zwicky 1977). It seems that only Zwicky and Plank (1985) are fully aware of the difference between personal and locutive hierarchies; Plank considers locutive hierarchies to be the primary notion and uses it to define person hierarchies. Cf. the two approaches in Table 8. The difference between ordering locutors and ordering persons is crucial (although only Zwicky and Plank explicitly discuss this choice). To define person as an ordinary grammatical category, one needs to get rid of hierarchical assignment Table 8. Person-assignment rules (for non-inclusive languages) Locutive hierarchies (Plank)
Personal hierarchies (Zwicky)
If the group includes the speaker, assign 1st person Otherwise, if the group includes the addressee, assign 2nd person Otherwise assign 3rd person
First attempt to assign 1st person If not applicable, attempt to assign 2nd person Otherwise assign 3rd person
Understanding inclusives
rules. To get rid of them, one has to have the hierarchy deal with the speech act participants, not persons. Otherwise, the definition of person remains bound to the hierarchical relations between them: to explain what person is, it is necessary to explain how it is assigned, which would involve a personal hierarchy. In this chapter, only locutive hierarchies are used; they control the choice of the focal member of the group and thus the applicability of pronouns. Within this approach, no personal hierarchies are needed at all. In this section, I have argued that there is a hierarchy controlling the choice of the focal referent that underlies any kind of person marking device, including the independent personal pronouns analyzed in this chapter. The hierarchy is defined in terms of the speech act roles Speaker, Addressee, and Non-Locutor and is referred to as locutive hierarchy. It is supposed to replace the structural ordering of the rules suggested in Zwicky (1977) and Plank (1985), considered at the beginning of this section. Definition 4 in Section 4 above states that the person of the plural pronoun is determined by the person of its focus. When a group of people is to be referred to by means of a pronoun, the speaker follows the hierarchy in choosing one of the members of the group as the focal referent. In turn, this choice determines the appropriate grammatical person category. Crucially, the hierarchy is different in inclusive and non-inclusive languages. The former use {Speaker = Addressee},24 while the latter use {Speaker > Addressee}. Now, the natural question is whether these two options of locutive hierarchies exhaust all possibilities of arranging locutors. Why are there no languages which display a pattern opposite to that present in the non-inclusive languages, viz. {Addressee > Speaker}? Such a language would use one pronoun (or pronominal marker) for any group which includes the addressee, irrespective of whether the speaker is included or not. In the model suggested above, that would be ‘a group including the addressee’ with the addressee in focus, thus by definition simply second-person plural. The other pronoun (or pronominal marker) would be used to designate a group which includes the speaker but does not include the addressee. In the traditional model, this pronoun would be ‘we’ exclusive. In the model suggested above, that would be ‘a group including the speaker’ pronoun with the speaker in the focus, thus first-person plural by definition. Using only two pronouns, such languages would lack the inclusive. The difference from the non-inclusive languages considered above would be which of the two pronouns is used to designate a group including both the speaker and the addressee. The hierarchy {Addressee > Speaker} would make the addressee the preferable focus, and thus the second-person pronoun would be used. Obviously, a diagnostic feature of these languages in traditional terms would be apparent homophony of the second-person plural and inclusive. See Figure 1. A somewhat unexpected answer is that these languages do exist, and the pioneering importance of Zwicky (1977) and Plank (1985) is exactly that both considered Algonquian data, discussed below, from the point of view of their impact on the general theory of personal reference. I will start by considering the systems with ‘hybrid inclusives’, in which the ‘homophony’ in question is reflected only in affixal
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SpeakerBoth Addressee
a. Speaker > Addressee
Speaker Both Addressee
Speaker
Both Addressee
b. Speaker = Addressee
c. Addressee > Speaker
Figure 1. Locative hierarchies: does the third option exist?
marking, and then I will proceed to the only language I know of which displays the same pattern in morphologically simple independent pronouns. I then consider some more disputable cases. Michael Cysouw (Cysouw 2001; Cysouw, this volume, a) presents a collection of examples of what he calls ‘inclusive = second person’ syncretism. Cysouw’s sample includes all of the languages of my own sample except Otomi. The interpretation of the data is different (see discussion below).
7. {Addressee > Speaker} North America: pronominal prefixes in Algonquian Algonquian languages show a (statistically) unusual pattern of forming independent personal pronouns of different persons and numbers from the same stem. This pattern of pronominal morphology occurs in the Americas but is rare elsewhere (exceptions are Koromfe, Mundari, Aleut and some other languages, see Daniel 2005). In Algonquian, an independent pronoun consists of a number-indifferent person prefix, a person- and number-indifferent stem, and a plural person suffix (absent in singular pronouns). Independent personal pronouns distinguish between an inclusive and a first-person plural (traditional exclusive) form. However, it is neither prefixes nor suffixes that convey this distinction. The inclusive meaning results from a combination of the second-person prefix with a first-person plural suffix. See the independent personal pronouns and pronominal marking in Table 9. Suffixal marking works as follows. One and the same suffix is used in first-person plural (traditional exclusive) and inclusive. The other is used in second and third person plural. This is the same scheme as applied in non-inclusive languages like Russian or English (except that, once the speaker is not included, there is no difference between a group which includes the addressee and non-locutors and the one that includes non-locutors only, and the same suffix ‑wa· is used). The resulting hierarchy for the suffixes is {Speaker > Addressee = Non-Locutor}. The prefix n‑ is used in first-person singular and plural (traditional exclusive). It can be seen that the prefix k‑ is used in the second-person singular, the second-
Understanding inclusives
erson plural, and the inclusive. As traditional Algonquian studies put it, the affix p k‑ is used whenever the addressee is referred to (see an overview of the many useful formulations suggested by Algonquianists in Zwicky 1977), minimally the addressee alone, and irrespective of whether the speaker is included or not. The other prefix is used when the group (which may again consist of only one member) includes the speaker, but not the hearer. This is apparently what we are looking for to posit a locutive hierarchy {Addressee > Speaker}, except that there is no difference between plural and singular reference. We thus have two different orderings of the two locutors in the systems of suffixes and prefixes. In neither of them are the speaker and the addressee equally important, and thus there is no special inclusive suffix or prefix. However, a combination of a second-person prefix which indicates the presence of the addressee with a first-person (plural) suffix which indicates the presence of the speaker gives an inclusive meaning to the whole form. This leads Mithun to call such inclusives ‘hybrid’ (Mithun 2000: 70–1), meaning hybridization of the first‑ and second-person meanings. This term will be applied below to similar data from other languages. Other Algonquian languages show variations on the same theme. Potawatomi has similar structure of the inclusive, according to Hockett (1966). Passamaquoddy shows the same structure of personal pronouns except in the third person (Leavitt 1996). Fox pronouns are either (emphatic pronouns) structurally identical to those given by Bloomfield for Ojibwa or (elsewhere) different in having a special increment (suffix) in all singular forms (Dahlstrom 1988). (Alternatively one can say the stem is reduced in the plural). Plains Cree has the same system of prefixes. However, the plural suffixes are different in the first person (traditional exclusive) and inclusive pronouns (Wolfart 1973: 15–16). The locutive hierarchy in Plains Cree is thus {Addressee > Speaker} for prefixes, but {Speaker = Addressee} for suffixes (as in inclusive languages). By the way, this shows that the peculiar morphological structure of the Algonquian independent pronoun is by no means a special device to convey Table 9. Independent personal pronouns of Eastern Ojibwa (based on Bloomfield 1956)
1st inclusive 2nd 3rd
Sg
Pl
n‑i·n 1‑pron
n‑i·nu‑wi 1‑pron‑1.pl k‑i·nu‑wi 2‑pron‑1.pl k‑i·nu‑wa· 2‑pron‑non.1.pl w‑i·nu‑wa· 3‑pron‑non.1.pl
k‑i·n 2‑pron w‑i·n 3‑pron
Note: The gloss ‑pron stands for the number- and person-indifferent stem ‑i·n(u)‑ which is used in all person–number forms. The plural suffix -wa· is used in both second- and third-person plural and is glossed as ‑non.1.pl.
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inclusive meaning, as might seem at first glance. Indeed, the {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy in prefixes is active in Plains Cree, although the inclusive meaning does not need a hybridization to be manifested, as it is already displayed by the plural suffixes. It seems that there is no alternative, equally consistent analysis of the Algonquian data. One could suggest that the person–number meanings are conveyed by a circumfix, or claim that the prefix k‑ is homophonous between inclusive and second person. Both these approaches are based on the traditional view that pronominal systems may be either inclusive or non-inclusive of the European type and the inability to abandon this view in order to analyze unusual linguistic structures. As soon as we try to isolate the prefixes and start to consider the effects of the prefixes on the reference of the plural pronouns, the only model applicable is that of the {Addressee > Speaker} locutive hierarchy. This model led to a correct description of the Algonquian pronominal studies as early as Bloomfield’s grammar (Bloomfield 1956), although he was probably unaware of the theoretical value of his rules; one must also mention Hockett (1966). As far as I know, the first linguist who considered the impact of the existence of such systems on the general theory of pronominal systems was Zwicky, followed by Plank, see discussion of Zwicky (1977) and Plank (1985) below.
South America: pronominal suffixes in Otomi The system of personal pronouns of the Oto-Manguean language Otomi (Hekking & Andrés de Jesús 1984) is different but is also best explained in terms of an interaction of two different locutive hierarchies. The pronoun consists of a person stem and a person–number suffix. Unlike Algonquian, Otomi distinguishes between two non-singulars: duals and plurals. One and the same stem is used in both non-singular numbers. This stem is clearly though irregularly related to the singular stem of the same person, being its reduction (first-person singular nugögi, nonsingular nug[ö]‑; second-person singular nuäi, non-singular nua‑). The same stem is used in the first person (traditional exclusive) and inclusive pronouns. The other stem is used in the second non-singular forms only. The non-singular personal suffixes are, on the contrary, common to the inclusive and the second-person plural forms (‑wi in the inclusive and the second-person dual, ‑hu in the inclusive and the second-person plural, ‑be in the first-person dual, and ‑he in the first-person plural, traditional exclusive). The same rules govern the structure of the personal possessives. One possessive marker (apparently, a proclitic) precedes a possessed nominal in the first person and the inclusive (ma). Another marker precedes a possessed nominal to mark second-person possession (ir). The markers are number-indifferent. (See Table 10. For each person/number, the possessive marking pattern and the independent pronoun form are given. stem indicates the position of the nominal stem in a possessive construction. The glosses 1nonsg and 2nonsg designate nonsingular stems of personal pronouns.)
Understanding inclusives Table 11. Independent pronouns and possessive markers in Otomi (adapted from Hekking & Andrés de Jesús 1984) Sg 1
Pl
Possessive
ma stem‑[gö]‑be ma stem‑[gö] 1poss stem‑1poss 1poss stem‑1poss‑1du
ma stem‑[gö]‑he 1poss stem‑1poss‑1pl
Pronoun
nugögi 1sg
nug[ö]‑be 1nonsg‑1du
nug[ö]‑he 1nonsg‑1pl
ma stem‑[gö]‑wi 1poss stem‑1poss‑2du
ma stem‑[gö]‑hu 1poss stem‑1poss‑2pl
nug[ö]‑wi 1nonsg‑2du
nug[ö]‑hu 1nonsg‑2pl
Incl Possessive Pronoun 2
Du
Possessive
ir stem‑[ge]‑wi ir stem‑[ge] 2poss stem‑2poss 2poss stem‑2poss‑2du
ir stem‑[ge]‑hu 2poss stem‑2poss‑2pl
Pronoun
nuäi 2sg
nua‑hu 2nonsg‑2pl
nua‑wi 2nonsg‑2du
In other words, for any group which includes the speaker, irrespective of the inclusion or the exclusion of the addressee, the stem nug[ö]- is used. For any group which includes the addressee but does not include the speaker, a second-person non-singular stem is used, nua-. The choice of the stem of the personal pronoun is controlled by the {Speaker > Addressee} locutive hierarchy. The same hierarchy controls the choice of the preposed possessive marker. On the other hand, the same non-singular personal suffix is used for any group which includes the addressee, irrespective of whether it does or does not include the speaker (‑wi in the dual, ‑hu in the plural). Any group which includes the speaker, in case it does not include the addressee, is designated by another non-singular suffix (‑be in the dual, ‑he in the plural). This rule is applied in the choice of person–number suffixes in both independent pronouns and possessive constructions and is apparently based on the locutive hierarchy {Addressee > Speaker}. As in Algonquian, no inclusive function can be ascribed to any particular affix, the inclusive meaning resulting from the combination of the first-person non-singular stem with the second-person nonsingular suffix. Otomi is thus another example of hybrid inclusive systems.
South Africa: pronominal stems in Nama The third example of a hybrid inclusive system is from yet another area, the South African language Nama (Khoisan). Its pronominal morphology recalls the Otomi personal pronoun system just considered, except that the hierarchies exchange their morphological loci (Hagman 1977: 86–8). Nama pronouns distinguish three numbers plus feminine vs. masculine vs. common gender, except in the first-person singular, where the gender opposition
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is not present.25 Singular pronouns do not display regular correlations with nonsingular stems. Non-singular stems consist of a person–number stem and a person– number–gender suffix. The same stem is used in second-person non-singular and inclusive forms (saá‑). Another stem is used in all first-person non-singular forms (traditional first-person exclusive, sií‑). The affixes sharing the same number and gender meanings are common to first-person non-singular (traditional exclusive) and inclusive forms (‑kxm ` for masculine dual, ‑m ` for feminine or neutral dual, ‑ke for masculine plural, ‑se in feminine plural, ‑tà in common plural).26 See Table 11. In other words, one and the same non-singular stem (saá‑) is used for any group including the addressee, irrespective of whether the speaker is or is not included in it. Another stem (sií‑) is used for all groups which include the speaker but do not include the addressee. The choice of the stem is thus directed by the {Addressee > Speaker} locutive hierarchy. On the other hand, one and the same suffix is used for Table 11. Independent personal pronouns in Nama (adapted from Hagman 1977) Sg
Du
Pl
1masc
tiíta 1sg
` sií‑kxm 1nonsg‑1du.masc
sií‑ke 1nonsg‑1pl.masc
1fem
tiíta 1sg
sií‑m ` 1nonsg‑1du.fem
sií‑se 1nonsg‑1pl.fem
1com
sií‑m ` 1nonsg‑1du.com
sií‑tà 1nonsg‑1pl.com
incl masc
saá‑kxm ` 2nonsg‑1du.masc
saá‑ke 2nonsg‑1pl.masc
incl fem
saá‑m ` 2nonsg‑1du.fem
saá‑se 2nonsg‑1pl.fem
incl com
saá‑m ` 2nonsg‑1du.com
saá‑tà 2nonsg‑1pl.com
2masc
saáts 2sg.masc
saá‑kxò 2nonsg‑2du.masc
saá‑kò 2nonsg‑2pl.masc
2fem
saás 2sg.fem
saá‑rò 2nonsg‑2du.fem
saá‑sò 2nonsg‑2pl.fem
saá‑rò 2nonsg‑2du.com
saá‑tù 2nonsg‑2pl.com
2com 3masc
//i~ip 3sg.masc
//i~i‑kxà 3nonsg‑2du.masc
//i~i‑ku 3nonsg‑2pl.masc
3fem
//i~is 3sg.fem
//i~i‑rà 3nonsg‑2du.fem
//i~i‑tì 3nonsg‑2pl.fem
//i~i‑rà 3nonsg‑2du.com
//i~i‑n` 3nonsg‑2pl.com
3com
Understanding inclusives
any group including the speaker, irrespective of whether the addressee is included or not, and another one for any group which includes the addressee in case it does not also include the speaker (of course, for the same number and gender). The hierarchy is {Speaker > Addressee}. Thus, the logic of the paradigm is the same as in Otomi, except that in Otomi it is the choice of the suffixes which is governed by the {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy, while the {Speaker > Addressee} hierarchy works on stems. Yet another system produces inclusives by combining the second-person non-singular category with the first-person non-singular. Note also the interpretation of Haacke (1977: 53): “the semantic feature ‘communicatory status’ which indicates involvement in discourse, makes allowance for the possibility to interpret sa [+speaker/+addressee] and sa [-speaker/+addressee] according to their common feature: the addressee is always involved, regardless of the involvement of first or second person.” He then continues: “This fact alone should be cause enough to accommodate these so-called ‘pronoun-stems’ as lexical formatives”, most probably meaning that in no language can a pronominal element have second-person reference irrespective of the (non)inclusion of the speaker. He is therefore unlikely to be familiar with the Algonquian data. Hence it is all the more amazing how similar his description of the personal reference of ‘formative’ sa (Hagman’s saá) is to the classical description of the reference of the prefix k- in Algonquian.
A note on hybrid inclusives The empirical data considered in this chapter overlap significantly with the data examined in (Cysouw, this volume, a). As sometimes happens, the conclusions of the two analyses are very different. In particular, there are two arguments that Cysouw puts forth against analyzing the hybrid inclusives discussed above as based on an ‘inclusive = second person’ homophony. First of all, Cysouw proposes that in some of the languages under analysis affixes which I consider to be person–number markers can in fact be considered as number markers with limited distribution over persons, or person-restricted number markers (Cysouw, this volume, a; Cysouw, p.c.). For instance, Otomi ‑hu (‑wi) is interpreted not as a marker of second-person plural (dual), but as a plural (dual) marker whose usage is restricted to the second person and the inclusive. Consequently, these markers are not homophonous between inclusive and second person simply because they are not person markers at all. For Cysouw, the decision whether the marker is a person–number marker or a restricted plural marker depends on the diachronic analysis of the data in question. Consider however the Otomi plural pronouns nug[ö]‑he ‘we’ (traditional exclusive) and the inclusive nug[ö]‑hu. These two pronouns, different in person, are distinguished only by suffixes. Whatever these suffixes used to be, it seems that now they convey person meanings (i.e. mark personal reference). Similar examples are easy to find in Tables 9 and 11 (Ojibwa and Nama, respectively).
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you and us
Addressee and probably others
Speaker and probably others
Algonquian (‘added reference’ approach)
Algonquian (‘simultaneous reference’ approach)
k‑i·nu‑wi
k‑i·nu‑wi
Addressee and probably others
Speaker and probably others
Addressee and probably others
Speaker and probably others
Figure 2. Various hybrid inclusives analyses
Even when he admits that the relevant markers are person markers, Cysouw does not consider hybrid inclusives to be a convincing case of connection, or syncretism, between the second person and the inclusive. The inclusive meaning of such forms is produced, he argues, by a combination of first‑ and second-person markers, so that one does not need to posit inclusive reference for the second-person marker. As I understand this argument, Cysouw claims that in hybrid inclusive formations the second-person morpheme refers to a group including the addressee, not the speaker, the speaker being referred to by the first-person morpheme. The reference of the form on the whole is, then, distributed between affixes and results from the addition of the references of the morphemes included in it. Cf. the inclusive reference of the English you and us. The reference of this NP is inclusive, but nobody would claim that the second-person English pronoun is inclusive. Thus, for Cysouw, hybrid inclusives appear to be essentially similar to coordination in that their references are summed up to form the reference of the whole pronoun (see Figure 2). However, the ‘summed reference’ approach does not seem to simplify matters, and sometimes may even be inapplicable to hybrid inclusives. Why should a double person marking scheme be used in first person (traditional exclusive) and second person? Surely we do not say that I and we convey exclusive meaning. Why should the second-person k‑ rather than the first-person n‑ be used in Algonquian inclusives? This needs special rules no less complicated (if not more so) than the locutive hierarchies suggested above (cf. Plank 1985 on ordering of pronominal coordinands). A further complication is that the Algonquian k‑i·nu‑wi can refer to ‘speaker and addressee’. The suffix ‑wi is plural and thus refers to both the speaker and the addressee. This shows that simple summing-up is not enough to explain what happens. Indeed, the addressee is referred to twice, by the number-indifferent second-person prefix (for which the addressee is the focal referent) and by the first-person– number suffix (for which the addressee is the non-focal referent), as in Russian constructions of the type my s toboj (lit. “we and you” = ‘you and I’). These con-
Understanding inclusives
structions are widely know (under the names of plural pronoun coordination (Schwartz 1985; Schwartz 1987), inclusory pronominals (Lichtenberk 2000; Haspelmath, forthcoming; etc.), but have been posited only for syntactic constructions, not word forms such as hybrid inclusives. Third and most important, there are cases in which there is direct evidence that the second-person element in a hybrid inclusive does include the speaker in its reference. For instance, the Otomi pronoun nug[ö]‑wi ‘speaker and addressee’ uses the affix -wi. Assuming that this affix is a dual second-person marker rather than a dual marker restricted to the second person (see the discussion above), its reference includes the speaker as a non-focal referent, because otherwise it could not be dual (see Table 10). Similarly, the reference of the second-person non-singular stem saá‑ in Nama necessarily includes the speaker when this stem is used in the pronouns saá‑kxm ` ‘speaker and addressee (both male)’ and saá‑m ` ‘speaker and addressee (not both of them male)’ (see Table 11).27
Back to South America: independent pronouns in Sanuma We have seen the hierarchy {Addressee > Speaker} working on the morphological level in Algonquian prefixes, in Otomi suffixes, and in Nama stems. However, the resulting word form on the whole can always be successfully described as first-person (traditional exclusive), inclusive, or second person. Let us now proceed to the case in which the looked-for hierarchy is manifested most clearly because there is no necessity to look into the morphological structure of personal pronouns. In the Amazonian language Sanuma (Yanomam), the pronominal system is described as manifesting three person categories: exclusive, inclusive, and second person. The grammatical statement observes, however, that the inclusive pronoun is homophonous with the second-person plural pronoun28 (Borgman 1990: 149). Sanuma pronouns are morphologically unanalyzable (see Table 12). Instead of positing homophony of two separate lexemes, one could say that (ka)makö is used for any group that includes the addressee, irrespective of whether it does or does not include the speaker. We can simply call this pronoun secondperson plural. If the group includes the speaker, and only if it does not include the addressee (who assumes the highest position in the locutive hierarchy), the speaker is chosen to be the focus, and the other personal pronoun (which we may call firstTable 12. Sanuma personal pronouns: two approaches kamisa, sa ‘I’
kamisamakö, samakö ‘we’ kamakö, makö ‘inclusive’
kawa, wa ‘you.sg’ kamakö, makö ‘you.pl’ Traditional Approach
kamisa, sa ‘I’
kamisamakö, samakö ‘we’
kawa, wa ‘you.sg’ kamakö, makö ‘you.pl’ {Addressee > Speaker} Approach
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person plural) is chosen. Thus, the choice of the pronoun to be used is controlled by the {Addressee > Speaker} locutive hierarchy. Just as in case of Algonquian and other hybrid inclusives, there seem to be no way to avoid ‘homophony description’ except positing an {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy. Borgman declares kamakö to be homophonous between the inclusive and the second person. However, when describing the use of ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages a speaker of an inclusive language would probably claim that this pronoun is homophonous between the first person (traditional exclusive) and the inclusive. The locutive hierarchies model exposes the similarity between these two approaches and shows that Borgman’s suggestion is inadequate.
Sulawesi. Inclusive shift? In the languages considered above, the locutive hierarchy {Addressee > Speaker} is manifested in the morphology of basic independent personal pronouns. In some Sulawesi languages, the same hierarchy can be applied to explain the usage of personal pronouns in the polite register. I will consider pronominal marking in Konjo. Similar systems are reported in Macassarese and Buginese, which are closely related to Konjo (Friberg 1996).The Konjo personal pronouns are number-indifferent. The first-person singular category is identical to the first-person plural (traditional exclusive). The first-person inclusive is also used for second-person honorific. Two more pronominal categories are second-person familiar and third person (see Table 13). Now, let us consider Konjo pronominal marking as encompassing two different sub-systems, polite and familiar registers. See Table 14, where the two registers are Table 13. Konjo personal marking (Friberg 1996: 138)
1sg/1pl.exc 1pl.inc/2hon 2f 3
Ergative proclitics
Absolutive enclitics
Free pronouns
Possessive
ku‑ ki‑ nu‑ na‑
‑a ‑ki ‑ko ‑i
nakke gitte kau ia
‑ku ‑ta ‑nu ‑na
Table 14. Politeness shift in Konjo
1 Inclusive 2 3 Hierarchy
Informal speech
Polite speech
nakke gitte kau ia {Addressee = Speaker}
nakke gitte gitte ia {Addressee > Speaker}
1 2 3
Understanding inclusives
put in two different columns (the table only shows free pronouns, but other person marking devices can be presented in the same way). As follows from the data shown in Table 16, again, in polite speech the pronoun gitte is used for any group which includes the addressee, irrespective of whether the group to be designated does or does not include the speaker. In polite speech, the addressee is the preferred focus as against the speaker. Therefore, both uses of gitte in polite speech can be considered to be instances of second person. The pronoun nakke is the first-person pronoun, indicating the inclusion of the speaker but applied only in the absence of the addressee. The Konjo pronominal system in the polite register is thus identical to the pronominal prefix system in Algonquian: both are number-indifferent and both are controlled by the {Addressee > Speaker} locutive hierarchy. In Konjo, the choice between the two hierarchies ({Addressee = Speaker} vs. {Addressee > Speaker}) depends on the register (informal or polite, respectively). It is not surprising at all that the polite register switches to the {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy, increasing the rank of the addressee. It is important to make the following note. I argued that in the cases of Algonquian, Otomi, Nama, and Sanuma positing the hierarchy {Addressee > Speaker} is the only consistent way to account for the pronominal morphology, at least synchronically. This is not the case with Konjo (and other Sulawesi languages). The use of the inclusive as a second-person honorific is attested in many languages of the world (for a comprehensive analysis see Cysouw (this volume, b)). It can be considered together with various displaced usages of ‘we’ in non-inclusive languages when it has second-person reference, as in e.g. adult-to-child or doctorto-patient communication. All these usages seem to establish an in-group relation between the speaker and the addressee (like doctor-to-patient or adult-to-child communication) with various consequences, from politeness to rudeness. Although the predicate strictly speaking only applies to the addressee (How do we feel today), ‘we’ (or the inclusive pronoun) thus refers to the group-hood of the speaker and the addressee or their common involvement in the situation (Now we have to take the pill). An inclusive which is used in this way can formally refer to the addressee alone. With the politeness shift this should be impossible. The {Speaker = Addressee} → {Addressee > Speaker} process, which results in the use of the inclusive as the second-person plural pronoun, is not supposed to change the number category of the pronoun, so that the reference of a polite second-person pronoun originating from the inclusive must remain plural. Unfortunately, specifically in the case of Konjo this does not help at all, because Konjo has number-indifferent pronouns and in grammars of those languages that distinguish pronominal number it is often not specified whether the inclusive used as a honorific second person can have singular reference. Notably, Friberg’s own explanation of the system seems to opt for the hierarchy shift decision: “The use of first person reflects the fact that the speaker excludes
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the hearer, while the use of second-person honorific reflects his inclusion” (Friberg 1996: 138). This explanation, though not altogether clear, is strongly reminiscent of the traditional Algonquianist approach to Ojibwa person marking.
A glimpse of other hierarchies The data presented above illustrate more-or-less convincing cases of ‘inclusive = second person’ homophony. As Cysouw (this volume, a) notes, various other homophonies occur. At least some of them can be explained by means of yet other locutive hierarchies. I will only briefly mention these cases here. For a survey of data, see Cysouw’s comprehensive sample in this volume. In the Athabaskan languages Navaho (Young & Morgan 1985: 8) and Slave (Rice 1989: 253), there is no inclusive and second-person plural is identical to first-person plural. This means that the choice of a plural pronoun is not sensitive to any differences between groups, provided that at least one of the locutors is included. The hierarchy which controls the choice of the focal referent of the plural pronoun does not operate on the distinction speaker vs. addressee vs. non-locutor, but simply on locutor vs. non-locutor. Naturally, the hierarchy controlling the choice of the focus is formulated as {Locutor > Non-Locutor} (and the respective plural personal pronoun can be called locutive). Similarly, one can explain the ‘we’ in inclusive languages (traditional exclusive) = ‘you.pl’ pattern. This is frequent, according to Cysouw, in the Austronesian languages of and around Timor. Again, there is no difference between locutors. The choice of the focus of a plural pronoun shows no sensitivity to the speaker vs. addressee opposition. What they are sensitive to is whether both or only one of the locutors is included. Thus, the hierarchy is {Both Locutors > Single Locutor > None of the Locutors}.
8. Previous studies of locutive hierarchies This section briefly discusses previous studies addressing problems of locutive hierarchies and their interaction with personal reference. That the relative ordering of locutors can differ from the one which is so often implicitly admitted to be universal has been argued by e.g. Kibrik and Filimonova. The paper by Kibrik (1997) is an analysis of several person-marking systems, including the extremely sophisticated verbal person-marking system of Alutor, a ChukotkoKamchatkan language. Without going into details, Kibrik’s idea is that implementing ‘non-canonical’ locutive hierarchies allows a significant reduction in the degree of complexity of the description. In her several publications (Filimonova 1997; Filimonova 1999), Filimonova considers various ways in which the addressee’s salience is manifested, including e.g. inverse constructions; later in Filimonova (2002) it is further argued that, at least in the case of Aymara, this probably reflects key
Understanding inclusives
extra-linguistic components of the speakers’ worldview; also see below. The treatment closest to the subject of the present chapter is her analysis of derivation of the inclusive pronoun from the second-person stem (Yokuts, Algonquian). She focuses on cases presenting irregular or diachronic correlations rather than the morphologically regular manifestations of this hierarchy, presented in this chapter. The paper by Hollenbach (1970) is dedicated to the analysis of the notion of the inclusive.29 Hollenbach’s main claim concerns the alleged connection between the inclusive and the third person and is of no relevance to the present discussion. What is important, however, is that she considers the usage of personal pronouns to be controlled by a personal hierarchy. The personal hierarchy is presented in a form of a configuration of overlapping Venn diagrams and is essentially identical to a hierarchical ordering of the person assignment rules. Importantly, different configurations are suggested for inclusive and non-inclusive languages. A pioneering paper by Arnold Zwicky (Zwicky 1977) suggested what is probably the earliest interpretation of the Algonquian pronominal system within the general framework of personal reference. Analyzing person marker assignment, he admits that the non-canonical hierarchy of locutors (Zwicky’s referential units) {Addressee > Speaker} would solve the problem. However, Zwicky proceeds to insist on the universalily of the {Speaker > Addressee} hierarchy. He suggests that the problem should rather be solved by implementing a non-canonical hierarchy of (somewhat roughly) grammatical persons, {II > I}, which overrides the universal hierarchy of locutors at what he calls the ‘morphosyntactic’ level. I do not introduce the whole discussion of Zwicky’s paper into the main body of the chapter; putting the criticism instead into a note.30 Zwicky’s main focus is on Algonquian prefixes, and he does not consider ordinary inclusive systems. In a paper by Filimonova (Filimonova 2002), a totally different aspect of hierarchies dealing with person marking is considered. The aim of this paper is to show that locutive hierarchies31 are not only present in linguistic structures, but are also observable in cultural concepts and thus are not an abstract product of linguistic analysis.32 (Similar implications are also considered in Plank 1985.) Starting from an examination of morphosyntactic phenomena in Aymara, she then proceeds to an extra-linguistic model of Aymara interpersonal communication. Linguistically, Filimonova deals with manifestations of locutive hierarchies that are totally different from the one considered in the present chapter or by Zwicky. She discusses relative overtness of the first and second-person marking in 1A → 2P and 2A → 1P transitive constructions, relative diachronic stability of the material of the first‑ and second-person markers, and relative frequency of textual occurrence of first‑ and second-person pronouns (Aymara being a pro-drop language). Although drawing linguistic implications from the cultural background is always risky, the extralinguistic operation of the {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy in Aymara, if supported by data from other cultures, is important counter-evidence against Zwicky’s assumption that the hierarchy of referential elements (or locutors) {Speaker > Addressee} is universally true.
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A model to which my analysis is particularly close, even identical up to a certain point, is that suggested in Plank (1985). Both Zwicky and Plank explain person assignment by means of hierarchical rules. Both (unlike Hollenbach) consider the Algonquian pronominal system as crucial evidence (Plank also mentions several other languages, including Otomi, but focuses on Algonquian data). However, Hollenbach considered these hierarchical rules to be applied directly to persons, not speech act participants. Zwicky, after considering both options, also prefers to order persons. On the contrary, Plank insists that the hierarchical ordering applies to speech act participants (Sprechakt-Rollen), not linguistic persons (Personen), and thus deals with locutive hierarchies (Referenz-Hierarchien based on speech act categorization) rather than hierarchies of grammatical persons (based on morphosyntaktische Personen-Kategorisierungen). Unlike Zwicky, he applies hierarchical rules to explain rules controlling the use of the inclusive pronoun, positing the {Speaker = Addressee} fragment of the hierarchy. He also mentions several cases in which an {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy is manifested. Plank considers personal reference as only one of the multiple playgrounds of locutive hierarchies, investigating personal pronouns among various other manifestations of locutive hierarchies. I believe, however, that the hierarchy that controls person assignment used in his paper does not allow for an account of the category of person similar to that for other grammatical categories. The view of pronominal number and person defined in terms of representative plurality (Sections 3 through 6) in combination with the positing of locutive hierarchies triggering the choice of the focal referent (thus controlling applicability of only one of the personal reference elements) covers this gap. Important counter-arguments against the analysis in Section 7 are presented in Cysouw (this volume, a). Actually, the latter refutes all studies of the reasons underlying the formal identity of inclusives and second-person plural pronouns. Cysouw’s arguments follow several lines. According to him, hybrid inclusives are not good evidence for an ‘inclusive = second person’ homophony because such inclusives result from a combination of second-person and first-person reference. Thus, inclusive reference results from summing up references of the first‑ and secondperson markers (as in you and us), none of the elements is inclusive by itself, and the second person does not include the speaker in its reference. I agree that there is no inclusive material involved. However, explaining inclusive reference by summingup of the first and second-person reference is problematic for some languages. For more details, see Section 7. There, I explain why another of Cysouw’s objections, that some of the elements discussed are number affixes with limited distribution rather than person–number affixes, also seems questionable. The other argument is that in fact all other kinds of homophonies (Cysouw’s syncretisms) also happen. The inclusive may be homophonous with the third person, and the first person (Cysouw’s and traditional exclusive) may be homophonous with the second person or the third person. If all these cases do occur, in addition to ‘inclusive = second person’ homophony, there is no special need, he argues, to pro-
Understanding inclusives
vide a systemic explanation for the latter, because all the rest is left unexplained anyway. This is an especially strong argument because even if one counts all the cases of ‘inclusive = second person’ homophony which Cysouw rejects (hybrid inclusives), the number of the known cases remains very low. The answer to this latter argument is that the present chapter does not have the rare cases of ‘inclusive = second person’ homophony as its starting point. In an attempt to build up a consistent model of pronominal plurals, I came to the necessity of positing different locutive hierarchies for non-inclusive and inclusive languages: {Speaker > Addressee} and {Speaker = Addressee}, respectively. This model is completely independent of the homophony phenomena. However, there is the third possible hierarchy {Addressee > Speaker}, and it provides a functional explanation for the homophony cases. Of course, one may doubt whether these few cases need a functional explanation at all, since they constitute only one of the types of personal syncretisms (homophonies) occurring in the languages of the world, but if we do start looking for an explanation, {Addressee > Speaker} is the most plausible one. Although the number of these cases does not, strictly speaking, seem to be negligible (five languages of the main WALS sample of 200 languages, this sample being, within reasonable limits, representative), it is really quite low: cf. the 2:1 ratio of non-inclusive to inclusive languages in the same sample. Does this necessarily mean that they are linguistically irrelevant? On the contrary, the very fact that their number is so low is very instructive. Different cognitive factors contribute to the salience of the speaker and addressee and their relative ranking. The fact that the noninclusive languages are more frequent than the inclusive languages, and that the latter in turn are by far more frequent than languages with apparent homophony of the inclusive and the second person, can be interpreted as an indication that the cognitive factors foregrounding the speaker are stronger and outweigh the factors foregrounding the addressee. Languages are thus typically (though not universally) egocentric (see Figure 3). {Speaker > Addressee}
>
{Speaker = Addressee}
>>
{Addressee > Speaker}
Figure 3. Cross-linguistic frequency of locutive hierarchies
9. A note on the tradition Coming back to the traditional vision of the inclusive, we may ask the following question: given that there is no apparent typological evidence that the inclusive is a first-person pronoun, what made us linguists think that the inclusive is a first-person pronoun in the first place?The traditional view of the inclusive as a subcategory of the first person can be understood as a two-step model of the speaker’s choice of personal pronoun. Allegedly, the speaker first checks whether the group includes
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Yes Inclusive Yes First person
Is the addressee included?
Is the speaker included?
No Exclusive No Non-first person Figure 4. Inclusives, traditional view
the speaker (first person if yes), and only after that checks whether it also includes the addressee (inclusive if yes). See Figure 4. In other words, the traditional approach calls the inclusive a first-person pronoun because it implicitly considers the inclusion of the speaker to be its primary feature, and the speaker to be the primary member of the group. The reason for this becomes obvious within the approach suggested above. Indo-European languages are non-inclusive, and thus rank the speaker higher than the addressee. Because Indo-European languages are the point of departure of traditional linguistic studies, the hierarchy {Speaker > Addressee} is adopted as a universal principle of human cognition and projected onto inclusive languages, which makes the inclusive a subcategory of the first-person category. Meanwhile, as I have shown above, it is precisely the replacement of the {Speaker > Addressee} hierarchy with the {Speaker = Addressee} hierarchy that conveniently explains the principles of personal reference in inclusive languages. Except for the projection of the non-inclusive model of personal reference, the scheme in Figure 4 is totally arbitrary. Compare the claim in Plank (1985) that the traditional model is not less effective when put upside down: see Figure 5. Here, inclusive becomes a subcategory of the second person, and we have first person, inclusive second person, and exclusive second person. Both schemes are equally effective — and equally arbitrary. Yes Inclusive Yes Second person
Is the speaker included?
Is the addressee included?
No Exclusive No Non-second person Figure 5. Inclusives, through the looking glass
Understanding inclusives
To sum up, the traditional approach to inclusives is based on an Indo-European, or, more broadly, non-inclusive linguistic intuition. Although the past decades of the typological research already have taught us a lot about the amazing typological diversity of languages, one should still be ready to discover that some basic, implicit component of linguistic theory may in the end turn out not to be universal.33 The egocentricity of human language is a widespread but not universal feature of pronominal marking (see Figure 3 above).
10. Summary In this chapter, I have tried to provide a general model of pronominal plurals and personal reference and to fit into this model what is known about inclusives. I presented different arguments in favor of classing inclusives as a separate person rather than a subcategory of the first person. I considered the peculiar phenomenon of inclusives that are apparently homophonous with the second person. In Section 2, I showed that there is not enough typological evidence to say that inclusives tend to be morphologically related to first-person exclusives. Most inclusives use independent stems. Only in unique cases are they regularly related to the first-person pronoun. In Section 3, I showed that pronominal plurality is different from the basic plurals significantly enough to posit a special category, representative plural, of which pronominal plurals are an instance. In Section 4, I suggested a definition of the person of a plural pronoun that was based on the understanding of pronominal plurality introduced in Section 3. According to this definition, the inclusive is clearly a separate person. In Section 5, I considered some complications suggesting that a consistent interpretation of pronominal plurals as discussed in Sections 3 and 4 needs to rely on hierarchies of speech act participants (locutive hierarchies), introduced in Section 6. Inclusive and non-inclusive languages use different locutive hierarchies: {Speaker = Addressee} and {Speaker > Addressee}, respectively. Section 7 considers rare examples of the third possible hierarchy, {Addressee > Speaker}, in several languages, apparently manifested as homophony between the alleged inclusive and the second-person plural. I suggested that these languages in fact lack the inclusive altogether. Section 8 reviews other scholars’ approaches to locutive hierarchies and ‘inclusive = second person’ homophonies, as well as their use of the {Addressee > Speaker} hierarchy. In Section 9, I explained the European stereotype of person marking underlying the traditional view of the inclusive as a first-person subcategory as a projection of the pattern of non-inclusive languages. In brief, the points made in the present chapter may be summarized as follows:
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• Inclusive is universally a separate, fourth person. • In languages with apparent homophony of the inclusive and second-person pronominal marker, there is actually no inclusive, the item in question being a second-person pronoun. The ‘inclusive usage’ of this pronoun to designate groups including both the speaker and the addressee is similar to the ‘inclusive usage of we’ in non-inclusive languages. • The difference between ordinary non-inclusive and inclusive languages and languages with apparent homophony of inclusive and second person may be interpreted as a difference in the locutive hierarchies controlling the choice of the plural pronoun. • The traditional approach is based on the assumption of the universal egocentricity of human language. A cross-linguistic analysis of pronominal systems shows that, although the egocentric pattern is indeed more widespread, it is by no means universal. The addressee is often ranked equal to the speaker, and in a few cases even outranks the latter.
Notes 1. I would like to thank all those who read this chapter at its different stage of preparation. Considering how long it took to take its present shape, if it were a baby and not a chapter it would now be almost able to speak for itself. And if it is finally able to speak, this is to a great extent owing to the constructive impatience of Elena Filimonova, indefatigable editor of this volume, to numerous stylistic improvements made by Barry Alpher, to many a friendly smack by Michael Cysouw, to kind attention from Edith Moravcsik, Frans Plank, and Andrei Kibrik, and to many other people who less directly contributed to the conception and development of the chapter. As to the defects that still remain, quite naturally, the chapter takes after its author. 2. The term additive plurality (Russian additivnaja množestvennost′) was first suggested in Barulin (1980). 3. Or, in this case, each element of the plural form is also the referent of the stem. 4. The declension of the Russian personal pronouns is not consistently nominal. Nominative, dative, and instrumental use masculine nominal plural endings, (adnominal) genitive functions are fulfilled by adjectival possessive forms, and other cases (in the plural actually one syncretic case) are specifically pronominal. Cf. Nominative m‑y ‘we’ ~ slon‑y ‘elephants’; Dative n‑am ~ slon‑am; Instrumental n‑ami ~ slon‑ami; Accusative-Prepositional n‑as but Genitive-Accusative slon‑ov, Prepositional slon‑ax. Same endings are used in the secondperson plural. 5. One could e.g. argue that this is a result of the presumption of the unique referent, as was done for nominal associative plurals in Daniel (2000); Daniel & Moravcsik (2005). 6. Apart from its pragmatic peripherality, there is one more point which is not mentioned in discussions of the ‘choral’ we. It is actually unclear how one could prove that in the case of speaking in a choir each speaker actually conceptualizes himself as a multiple speaker. It is equally plausible that every speaker uses the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ to designate a group including himself, with the only difference that many people do it in unison; cf.
Understanding inclusives J espersen (1924). In other words, we should decide whether we are dealing with one single speech act or with several speech acts made in unison. It is not obvious whether there could be any linguistic evidence in favor of one or the other point of view. 7. On the other hand, these two meanings of ‘you.pl’, apparently equally probable and frequent, may not be admitted to be ‘equally important’. Indeed, if these two readings of, say, Russian vy or French vous were unrelated and equal, they would be expressed by two different forms in at least a noticeable number of the languages of the world. However, crosslinguistic evidence shows that there is no language which uses different pronouns for ‘addressee + other people’ and ‘addressee + addressee +. . .+ addressee’. Two notable exceptions which were previously known to typologists are convincingly contested in Simon (this volume), who, however, claims that Bavarian German probably is a true exception. Despite the extraordinary data from Bavarian, it is thus most likely that one of the two readings is the core one. Similarly, no language is reported to use different inclusive pronouns depending on whether the group to be designated includes a single addressee and non-locutor(s) or multiple addressees. Thus, the difference between a group that includes only addressees and a group that includes both addressee(s) and non-locutor(s) is (almost) universally disregarded in pronominal marking. The conclusion would be that, grammatically, second-person plural is always conceptualized as ‘a group of people which includes the addressee(s)’, without specifying the actual number of the addressees. Its structure is thus identical to that of the first-person plural. 8. Of course, the notions of speaker and addressee should probably be decomposed and thought of in more exact terms. The speaker can use ‘we’ referring to himself and several people who are not present and aware of what he says, or he may speak on behalf of a group of people which has authorized him to do so, or he may be a representative speaker of a group of people standing by his side, or he may even be speaking in unison with some other people. The situation with the notion of the addressee is not different. I can look at and talk to several people simultaneously, or I can talk to them in turn, the whole speech act being addressed to all of them, or I can talk to one person addressing my speech act to him and to a group of absent people whom I associate with the direct addressee of my speech act. Such analysis may lead to considering the oppositions addressee vs. non-locutor and speaker vs. non-locutor as scalar rather than binary. Consequently, the uses of ‘we’ and ‘you. pl’ would be considered as more/less homogeneous (heterogeneous). However, the scaleness of these oppositions is not relevant to the present discussion, because it is not reflected in the linguistic structure, at least at the level of pronominal morphology. I will assume that both first‑ and second-person plural pronouns have referentially heterogeneous plurals (in the case of the second-person plural, at least as one of two options). 9. Russian linguistics is particularly abundant in terms for associative plurals, including vydelitel′naja množestvennost′ (emphasizing plurals), ograničennaja množest vennost′ (limited plurals), soprovoditel′naja množestvennost′ (plurals of accompaniment), and, especially, representativnaja množestvennost′ (representative plurals); see Daniel (2000); also cf. elliptical plurals and plurals a potiori in Indo-European linguistics and plurals of approximation in Jespersen (1924). 10. Dyadic kinship terms sometimes tend to be used in predicative position and thus to denote kinship relations rather than groups of people. 11. This is a direct translation of the Russian orientalist term reprezentativnaja množestvennost’, used in a series of Russian descriptive grammars, including e.g. Nivkh
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Michael Daniel and Kabardian (Panfilov 1962; Kumakhov 1971), and theoretical studies (Panfilov 1977). In these grammars, the term is used for what I call associative plurals. It is convenient to apply it in a wider sense to all kinds of heterogeneous plurals (similatives, etc.), preserving the term associative plural for the specific meaning ‘X and his associates’. Indeed, in most cases the named element of the group designated by a heterogeneous plural form in a way represents the whole group. It is a socially dominant member of the group in the case of associative plurals, the prototypical referent in the case of similative plurals, and the senior rather than the junior member of the kin pair (group) in the case of dyadic kinship terms. In a group designated by a plural personal pronoun, the element designated by the singular counterpart may also be interpreted as salient. For instance, for a group designated by the pronoun ‘we’ the referent of its singular correlate, i.e. the speaker, may be understood as pragmatically dominating over the other members of this group, the addressee and/or nonlocutors (see Section 6). 12. A taxonomy of the meanings of ‘we’ (as well as ‘you.pl’) is worth a special study. Apart from associative reading ‘the speaker and his associates’, the list would include locutive usage ‘the speaker and the addressee’ in non-inclusive languages (There are too many people here, we’ll talk about that later), anaphoric usage ‘the speaker and another person just mentioned’ (I met Nino in the square and we went to a cafe), class usage ‘the speaker and an open class of people whose member he is’ (We Russians are not what we thought we were), autoethnonymic usage ‘the speaker and the ethnic group he belongs to’ (We had been living on these hills since the 14th century), etc. 13. This table may in fact be considered as a typological extension of a chart suggested in Corbett (2000: 86) to describe the distribution of plural meanings across English nominals. Some classes of nominals are excluded from the table as irrelevant to the present discussion, such as mass nouns, which may have their own specific plural readings (Corbett’s recategorization effects). 14. Note that adopting the view that the representative reading is primary also for ‘you. pl’ — see discussion in n. 7 — would eliminate the lamentable discontinuity of the dark gray area in the first line of the table (additive plurals). 15. I skip the problem of the third person plurals. Their position in the model is somewhat problematic. Logically, there are several possibilities: (a) the third-person pronoun has a non-locutor as its focus; (b) the third-person pronoun designates a group which does not include either of the two locutors, without saying anything about its focus; (c) languages vary in that in some of them (a) is true and in others (b) is true. 16. I will use the term non-locutor in the sense of neither the speaker nor the addressee, as was done in Curnow (1997); Kibrik (1997). 17. That in its additive plural reading ‘you.pl’ = ‘addressee +. . .+ addressee’ is also a secondperson pronoun does not need special comments. 18. Cf. Hollenbach (1970: 31): “An extended inclusive (=‘you.sg, I and other(s)’ — M. D.) usually has first and second persons in focus, and third person is out of focus.” 19. The difference is that minimal is a paradigmatic pronominal category, while focus is the category of pronominal reference. Focus is present in plural pronouns of all languages. The minimal category, on the other hand, is present only in those pronominal systems that align ‘you.sg and I’ with singular pronouns. 20. This analysis is less obvious in languages in which ‘you.sg and I’ is aligned with dual
Understanding inclusives Table 15. Pronominal systems of Weri (from Greenberg 1989: 5), Niue (from Polinskaya 1995: 48) and Even (from Nedyalkov 1996: 200–1)
1st Inclusive 2nd 3rd
Weri (minimal ~ augmented)
Niue
Minimal Unit augmented Augmented
Sg
Du
Pl
Sg Pl
au
taua maua mua laua
tautolu mautolu mutolu lautolu
bi: bu: mut hi: hu:
ne tepir në pë
ten‑ip tëar‑ip ar‑ip pëar‑ip
ten tëar ar pët, pëar
koe ia
Even
pronouns and even somewhat problematic in languages in which there is only one inclusive pronoun for both ‘you.sg and I’ and ‘you.sg and I and other people’ (see Table 15). The problem of the focus of the inclusive in such languages and its connection to the category of pronominal number was addressed in Daniel (2001). Anyway, in all inclusive languages the subset {speaker, addressee} is the obligatory component of all occurrences of the inclusive (except displaced usages) and is, at least in this sense, its focus. 21. Note that this approach, too, leads to the conclusion that the inclusive is not a first-person pronoun. Indeed, in this approach the category of person becomes ‘including X but not the other locutor’. The first person is anything which ‘includes the speaker but not the other locutor (addressee)’, which is obviously wrong with inclusives. 22. From Section 6 on, the present chapter continues the discussion started in Zwicky (1977); Plank (1985). When I suggested the model of pronominal reference based on locutive hierarchies (Daniel 2000) I was not aware of the fact that basically the same approach of ordering locutors was considered by Zwicky and especially Plank much earlier. I will address differences in Section 9 below. 23. Zwicky (1977) implicitly suggests the same. Indeed, while the inclusive in his formalism is rendered by [+I,+II], the exclusive is simply [+I], not [+I,-II] as in many other approaches. 24. See the end of Section 7 below for a discussion of a structurally different manifestation of the {Speaker = Addressee} pattern in Athabaskan. 25. The common gender is present only in non-singular forms and designates a group including people of different biological sex. 26. Haacke (1977) argues against the traditional view that the forms represented in the table are full pronouns. He suggests that these are syntactic constructions rather than word forms, including a nominal, or lexical, formative (traditional stem) and a nominal designant (traditional suffix). However, as he agrees that in this context the formatives have personal reference, this complication does not seem to have direct impact on what will be said below. 27. A case that is interesting in this respect is that of Maybrat, which Cysouw discusses with reference to Dol (1999) and classes together with the hybrid inclusives discussed above. Dol observes that, although the language does not have a separate inclusive category, inclusive reference may be achieved by combining free and bound pronoun, i.e. by a combination of a second-person plural pronoun with a first-person plural verbal agreement marker. Compare the following examples from Dol (1999: 70–1):
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Michael Daniel (i) a. amu p‑kah ora we 1pl‑burn garden ‘We (excl) burn a garden’
b. c.
anu n‑nor p‑awiya you.pl 2‑think thing‑interrog ‘What do you think?’ anu p‑kias ania you.pl 1pl‑tell each.other ‘You (and we), we tell each other’
Unfortunately, it is unclear whether the first example (a) is indeed obligatorily exclusive. For Cysouw, this construction is similar to hybrid inclusives in that the inclusive reference is summed up from the references of different person-marking devices. Therefore, the reference of the second-person pronoun does not include the speaker. What is crucial, however, is whether the last Maybrat example can refer to only two people (addressee plus speaker). If it can, the reference of the plural pronoun anu includes the speaker, thus manifesting the {Addressee > Speaker} locutive hierarchy. 28. “In the first-person plural there is also the distinction of exclusive and inclusive, excluding or including the listener or listeners. First-person plural inclusive and second-person plural have the same pronoun and only context determines which referent is intended” (Borgman 1990: 149). 29. Among others, Hollenbach gives several examples relevant to the discussion in the previous section. These include the Algonquian language Potawotomi with reference to Hockett (1948) (the structure of the inclusive is the same as in other Algonquian languages), Chol (Mayan) with reference to Warkentin & Whittaker (1970), which is different from Algonquian in that the inclusive uses a first-person prefix with a second-person suffix, and Kiowa, a Tanoan language in Oklahoma which uses the same affix for both the inclusive and the second person in one of the person series (reference to Merrifield 1959). Note that she provides all these examples only to show that, morphologically, the inclusive is not necessarily a first-person pronoun but sometimes is related to the second person (which is allegedly manifested by these examples). She then proceeds to her main topic: the cases in which the inclusive is a compound of the first and second person or related to the third person. 30. Zwicky posits two linguistic levels. One is the semantic, or reference, level and deals with referential elements including 1 (the speaker), 2 (the addressee) and 3 (non-locutor). The other is the morphosyntactic, including I person, II person, and III person. He then suggests the use of the following rules: Scheme 1. Zwicky’s assignment principles. First version. (Zwicky 1977: 717) Use the first person (I) pronoun we for any reference set with the referential element 1; Otherwise, use the second person (II) pronoun you for any reference set with the referential element 2; Otherwise, use the third person (III) pronoun they. To get rid of the rules’ ordering, Zwicky suggests these correspondence principles provided with a hierarchy of reference:
Understanding inclusives Scheme 2. Zwicky’s assignment principles. Second version (correspondence principles + hierarchy of reference). (Zwicky 1977: 718) Principle 1. I is associated with 1. Principle 2. II is associated with 2. Principle 3. III is associated with 3. Hierarchy of reference: 1>2>3 The hierarchy is supposed to make up for the absence of rule ordering, just as I suggested in Section 6. However, it is left implicit exactly how the hierarchy of reference operates. Apparently, what the hierarchy says is that the rule which deals with referential item 1 is applied first, then the rule that deals with referential item 2; the rule dealing with referential item 3 comes last. This means that the speaker first checks the presence of himself, then of the addressee. In this case, it is indeed irrelevant in what order we apply the correspondence principles. The applicability is defined by the hierarchy of reference. This brings us back to the model suggested above in Section 6 and fills the gap. Otherwise, Zwicky’s approach up to this point seems identical to that suggested in the present chapter. After this the discrepancies emerge. Preliminarily, he ascribes a universal character to this hierarchy. Zwicky claims that the hierarchy 1>2>3 operates in both inclusive and non-inclusive languages. That seems quite problematic. Whether Zwicky considers the inclusive to be a separate person (as I think he does) or a subcategory of the first person, there should be a separate correspondence principle for the inclusive. Nowhere in the paper is a full list of correspondence principles for inclusive languages put forward. The putative correspondence rule for I+II morphosyntactic (inclusive) person assignment in Zwicky’s formalism would probably be: I+II is associated with 1+2 and should apply before other rules in Scheme 2 above. I see no way how the hierarchy of reference 1>2>3 can be responsible for the precedence of this rule over the other rules in the sense it is for the mutual precedence of the three rules in non-inclusive languages. Zwicky then proceeds to an analysis of Algonquian pronominal marking. Considering various aspects of person marking, he states: “<. . .> we see that the three prefixes cannot be associated with the three grammatical persons in the ordinary way, since the *ke‑ forms cover inclusive first person as well as second person” (Zwicky 1977: 721). The problem is as follows: which component of the model suggested by Zwicky is responsible for this? As ordering of persons is mentioned by many Algonquianists, he starts by investigating whether they mean morphosyntactic person (I, II, III) or referential, or semantic person (1, 2, 3). As it turns out, different authors mean different things, and most of them do not try to distinguish between the two sets of persons. Furthermore, he writes “At any rate, it is clear that the Algonquian pronominal prefixes involve a hierarchy of persons, in some sense of person. If this is a hierarchy of referential (or semantic) person, then we are in trouble, since our putatively universal hierarchy is 1>2>3, but here the hierarchy is 2>1>3” (Zwicky 1977: 722). To preserve the universality of the hierarchy of referential persons (i.e. speech act participants), Zwicky claims that the Algonquian hierarchy deals not with the referential hierarchy, but somehow with correspondence principles described above. He suggests a very peculiar, somewhat algebraic solution. The morphosyntactic persons are re-analyzed componentially: inclusive is [+I, +II], exclusive is [+I], II (second person) is [+II], III (third person) is [+III]. An additional hierarchy of componential features is constructed: +II>+I>+III. As Zwicky says, this hierarchy puts together “second-person forms with first-person inclusive forms, as against first-person exclusive forms” (Zwicky 1977: 723). This it indisputably does. Also, it is obviously a hierarchy of morphosyntactic (i.e. grammatical) persons, rather than referential elements (i.e. speech act participants), just as Zwicky intended.
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Michael Daniel What is unclear to me is how this hierarchy, when added to the correspondence principles and the allegedly universal hierarchy of referential elements (Scheme 2) above, provides for a correct assignment of person categories to referential sets. It seems that Zwicky admits the existence of the inclusive in Algonquian. At least, this problem is not explicitly discussed in the paper, and the morphosyntactic person I+II is posited for these languages. Moreover, if he did not consider k‑ to be homophonous between the inclusive and the second person, he would not need to use componential analysis of morphosyntactic persons, as there would not be either the exclusive or the inclusive, but simply ‘we’ and ‘you.pl’. Then there would be four correspondence principles instead of the three mentioned below, in accord with the number of morphosyntactic persons. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, nowhere in this paper are these four correspondence principles operating in inclusive languages made explicit. This has prompted me to put forward a version of them on my own. I provide two versions, depending on whether one believes that Algonquian has the inclusive or not: How does the hierarchy of morphosyntactic personal features work? We agree that the hierarchy of reference works the following way: of two rules containing two referential items, the rule which contains the more highly positioned item is applied first. It seems that the hierarchy of morphosyntactic personal features should work similarly: of two rules containing two morphosyntactic persons, the rule which contains the morphosyntactic person containing the more highly positioned feature is applied first. Indeed, this hierarchy yields a correct person assignment for Algonquian, but only in case the hierarchy of reference is not applied. The hierarchy of reference and the hierarchy of morphosyntactic personal features are contradictory. According to the former, principle 1 is applied before principle 2, while according to the latter, principle 1 is applied after principle 2. The system of person assignment simply does not work with two hierarchies. It seems that the only way to apply both hierarchies is not to determine the applicability of the rules, but to order them. Then, indeed, the referential hierarchy first orders the correspondence principles as 1, 2, 3 and then the morphosyntactic hierarchy re-orders them as 2, 1, 3; see Table 16. Several counter-arguments arise. First, Zwicky has introduced the hierarchy precisely in order to avoid ordering rules and to replace them with applicability conditions. The solution which he then suggests again has recourse to ordering. Second, from the point of view of a functional (and any other dynamic) linguistic model, it is much more natural to apply restrictions to what conditions the assignment (i.e. referential units) rather than to what is assigned. Third, the model seems over-sophisticated. Dispensing with the assumption of the universality of the {Speaker > Addressee} hierarchy does the same trick much more easily.
Table 16. Hierarchy of morphosyntactic personal features (active in Algonquian): [+II] > [+I] > [+III] Zwicky believing in Algonquian inclusive Principle 0. I+II is associated with 1+2 Principle 1. I is associated with 1 Principle 2. II is associated with 2 Principle 3. III is associated with 3 Hierarchy of reference: 1>2>3
Would-be Zwicky not believing in Algonquian inclusive Principle 1. I is associated with 1 Principle 2. II is associated with 2 Principle 3. III is associated with 3
Understanding inclusives 31. In her paper, Filimonova calls them person hierarchies. However, when addressing cognitive and cultural aspects of these hierarchies, she actually deals with locutive rather than personal hierarchies, in terms of my argument against Zwicky’s position (see the previous note). In different parts of the paper, she alternatively considers the problem as one of ranking of persons or of speech act participants. 32. She tests her hypothesis that “the person hierarchy is not an ‘artificial’ concept developed by linguists to describe different structural constraints but rather a cognitive parameter inherent to the worldview of the corresponding language society” (Filimonova 2002: 199). I must admit that in the present chapter locutive hierarchies are much more of a descriptive tool than an element of a cultural model. 33. Cf. an interesting point concerning the traditional numbering of persons made, again, in Plank (1985) and recently in Filimonova (2000, 2002). What is the raison d’être of the existing terms first person and second person? One could suggest that in classical tradition these terms come from an a priori ordering of the locutors according to the egocentric model. The speaker is ego and thus more important, and the first person; the addressee is second in importance and is thus the second person. However, as Filimonova pointed out, within the Aymara ‘pragmatic grammar’ the addressee is the preferred locutor, with special speech avoidance strategies to avoid directly mentioning him. One could say, she argued, that if the classical linguistic tradition had started from within the Aymara linguistic culture, ‘you’ would be the first person and ‘I’ would be the second person. If one tries to make the terms second and first person more functional and rooted in the linguistic structure, as Plank did in Plank (1985), it would make sense to apply the term first person to the pronoun whose focus has the higher status in the locutive hierarchy at work in the language in question. The term second person would then be applicable to the pronoun whose focus is the second member of the hierarchy. In European languages, the speaker is the preferred focus and the hierarchy is {Speaker > Addressee}. This is consistent with the terms first and second person in their actual use in quite a natural way. In languages like Sanuma, where the hierarchy is the opposite, it would make sense to reverse the usage. One would call ‘you.sg’ and ‘you.pl’ first person and ‘I’ and ‘we’ second person. In inclusive languages, the terms are not applicable in any meaningful way because the locutors are equal and neither is a preferable focus. The suggested usage, although much more consistent and linguistically meaningful, has little chance of survival. Most likely, whether or not the reader agrees with the idea of crosslinguistic variation of the ordering of the locutors, the traditional numbering of the persons is here to stay. The very term inclusive (= ‘inclusive of the addressee’) reflects the history of the term rather than what I believe to be its correct interpretation. Luckily, one may reinterpret inclusive as ‘inclusive of both locutors’, as opposed to the first and second person which include only one, i.e. to understand inclusive in its ‘including more than usual; comprehensive’ meaning.
References Abbott, M. 1991. Macushi. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazon ian languages, Volume 3, 23–160. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Barulin, A. 1980. Kategorija čisla v mestoimenijax. In V. M. Andrjuščenko (ed.), Issledovanija v oblasti grammatiki i tipologii jazykov (Studies in grammar and linguistic typology), 145–64. Moskva: MGU.
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Michael Daniel Benveniste, E. 1966. Structure des relations de personne dans le verbe. In E. Benveniste, Problémes de linguistique générale, 225–36. Paris: Gallimard. Bloomfield, L. 1956. Eastern Ojibwa: Grammatical sketch, texts, and word list. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Borgman, D. M. 1990. Sanuma. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazonian languages, Volume 2, 15–248. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Burling, R. 1961. A Garo grammar. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute [Deccan College Monograph Series 25]. Conklin, H. C. 1962. Lexicographical treatment of folk taxonomies. In F. W. Householder & S. Saporta (eds), Problems in lexicography, 119–42. Bloomington IN: Indiana University. Corbett, G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curnow, T. J. 1997. A grammar of Awa Pit (Cuaiquer): An indigenous language of Southwestern Colombia. Ph. D. dissertation, Australian National University. Cysouw M. 2001. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Nijmegen. Cysouw, M. This volume, a. Syncretisms involving clusivity. Cysouw, M. This volume, b. A typology of honorific uses of clusivity. Dahlstrom, A. 1988. Independent pronouns in Fox. In W. Shipley (ed.), In honor of Mary Haas. From the Haas festival conference on Native American linguistics, 165–94. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Daniel, M. 2000. Tipologija associativnoj množestvennosti (Typology of associative plurals). Doctoral dissertation, Russian State University for Humanities. Daniel, M. 2001. Two ways of pronominal number categorization. A paper read at ALT IV, Santa-Barbara. Daniel, M. 2005. Plurality in independent personal pronouns. In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil & B. Comrie (eds), 146–9. Daniel, M. & Moravcsik, E. 2005. Associative plurals. In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil & B. Comrie (eds), 150–3. Dol, P. 1999. A grammar of Maybrat: A language of the Bird’s Head, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Leiden. Drabbe, P. 1955. Spraakkunst van het Marind, zuidkust Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea. Wien: Wien-Mödling [Reprinted in 1966 by Johnson Reprint Corp., New York.] Dyachkov, M. 1987. Kreol’skije jazyki (The Creole languages). Moskva: Nauka. Evans, N. Forthcoming. Dyad constructions. In K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier. Filimonova, E. 1997. K voprosu ob ierarxičeskom uporjadočivanii lic. Vydelennost’ vtorogo lica. Gipoteza jazykovoj korreljacii (Towards the problem of hierarchical ordering of persons. The second person salience. A hypothesis of language correlation). Voprosy jazykoznanija 4: 85–91. Filimonova, E. 1999. Universal’nye anomalii ličnyx mestoimenij (Universal anomalies of personal pronouns). Ph. D. dissertation, Moscow State University. Filimonova, E. 2000. Nature, culture and compromise: Person hierarchy as a cognitive parameter. A paper read at the International Conference on ‘Cognitive Typology’, University of Antwerp (UIA), April 12–14. Filimonova, E. 2002. Person hierarchy and its implications: The case of Aymara. In M. Crevels, S. van de Kerke, S. Meira & H. van der Voort (eds), Current studies on South American languages, 199–213. Leiden: CNWS [Indigenous Languages of Latin America (ILLA) 3].
Understanding inclusives Filimonova, E. This volume. Clusivity crosslinguistically: Common trends and possible patterns. Forchheimer, P. 1953. The category of person in language. Berlin: de Gruyter. Friberg, B. 1996. Konjo’s peripatetic person markers. In H. Steinhauer (ed.), Papers in Austronesian linguistics 3, 137–71. Canberra: The Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics A 84]. Glass, A. & Hackett, D. 1970. Pitjantjatjara grammar: A tagmemic view of the Ngaanyatjara (Warburton Ranges) dialect. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Greenberg, J. 1988. The first person inclusive dual as an ambiguous category. Studies in Language 12: 1–18. Haacke, W. H.G. 1977. The so-called ‘personal pronoun’ in Nama. In A. Traill (ed.), Khoisan linguistic studies 3, 43–62. Johannesburg: African Studies Institute. Hagman, R. S. 1977. Nama Hottentot grammar. Bloomington IN: Indiana University, Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Hardman-de-Bautista, M., Vásquez, J. & Yapita Moya, J. de Dios. 1974. Outline of Aymara phonological and grammatical structure. Gainesville FL: University of Florida. Haspelmath, M. 1993. A grammar of Lezgian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Haspelmath, M. Forthcoming. Coordination. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language typology and linguistic description (2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M. Gil, D. & Comrie, B. (eds). 2005. World atlas of language structures (WALS). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hekking, E. & Andrés de Jesús, S. 1984. Gramática Otomí. Querétaro: Centro de Estudios Lingüísticos y Literarios, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro. Hockett, C. F. 1948. Potawatomi II: Derivation, personal suffixes, and nouns. International Journal of American Linguistics 14: 1–10. Hockett, C. F. 1966. What Algonquian is really like. International Journal of American Linguistics 32: 59–73. Hollenbach, B. E. 1970. Inclusive plural: A further look. Linguistics 60: 27–32. Jespersen, O. 1924. The philosophy of grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin. Jones, W. & Jones, P. 1991. Barasano syntax. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and The University of Texas at Arlington. Kibrik, A. 1997. Ierarxii, roli, nuli, markirovannost’ i ‘anomal’naja’ upakovka grammatičeskoj semantiki (Hierarchies, roles, zeroes, markedness and ‘anomalous packing’ of grammatical meaning). Voprosy jazykoznanija 4: 27–57. Kumakhov, M. 1971. Slovoizmenenie adygskikh jazykov (Inflection in Circassian languages). Moskva: Nauka. Leavitt, R. M. 1996. Passamaquoddy-Maliseet. München: Lincom Europa. Li, C. N. & Thompson, S. A. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Lichtenberk, F. 2000. Inclusory pronominals. Oceanic Linguistics 39: 1–32. Matisoff, J. A. 1973. The grammar of Lahu. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Matthews, S. & Yip, V. 1994. Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge. McGregor, W. 1989. Greenberg on the first person inclusive dual: Evidence from some Australian languages. Studies in Language 13: 437–58. Merlan, F. & Heath, J. 1982. Dyadic kinship terms. In J. Heath, F. Merlan & A. Rumsey (eds), The languages of kinship in aboriginal Australia, 107–24. Sydney: Oceania Linguistic Monographs.
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Michael Daniel Merrifield, W. R. 1959. The Kiowa verb prefix. International Journal of American Linguistics 25: 168–76. Mithun, M. 2000. The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moravcsik, E. 2004. A semantic analysis of associative plurals. Studies in Language 27: 469– 503. Nedjalkov, I. 1996. Evenki. London: Routledge. Panfilov, V. 1962. Grammatika nivkhskogo jazyka, Čast’ 1 (A grammar of Nivkh, Part 1). Moskva-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR. Panfilov, V. 1977. Filosofskie problemy jazkoznanija (The philosophic problems of linguistics). Moskva: Nauka. Plank, F. 1985. Die Ordnung der Personen. Folia Linguistica 19: 111–76. Polinskaya, M. 1995. Jazyk niue (Niue). Moskva: Vostočnaya literatura. Rice, K. 1989. A grammar of Slave. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rupp, J. E. 1989. Lealao Chinantec syntax: Studies in Chinantec languages 2. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Schwartz, L. 1985. Plural pronouns, coordination and inclusion. In N. Stenson (ed.), Papers from the 10th regional conference on language and linguistics, 152–84. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota. Schwartz, L. 1988. Conditions for verb-coded coordination. In M. Hammond, E. A. Moravcsik & J. Wirth (eds), Studies in syntactic typology, 53–73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Seiler, W. 1985. Imonda, a Papuan language. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 93]. Simon, H. J. This volume. Only you? Philological investigations into the alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural. Tolsma, G. J. 1999. A grammar of Kulung. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Leiden. van Driem, G. 1987. A grammar of Limbu. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. van Driem, G. 1993. A grammar of Dumi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wagner, G. 1933–8. Yuchi. In F. Boas (ed.), Handbook of American Indian Languages, Part 3, 293–384. New York: Columbia University Press. Warkentin, V. & Whittaker, A. 1970. Tumbala Chol clause structure. Linguistics 60: 77–110. Wolfart, H. C. 1973. Plains Cree: A grammatical study. Philadelphia PA: American Philosophical Society [Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 63, Part 5]. Young, R. W. & Morgan, W. 1985. The Navajo language: A grammar and colloquial dictionary. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Zwicky, A. M. 1977. Hierarchies of person. In W. A. Beach, S. E. Fox & S. Philosoph (eds), Papers from the 13th regional meeting, 714–33. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Chapter 2
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide Balthasar Bickel
Johanna Nichols
University of Leipzig
University of California, Berkeley
Using a balanced sample of 293 languages, we propose a new classification of types of inclusive–exclusive oppositions based on how the inclusive–exclusive opposition is worked into person–number categories, and trace their geography and likely history. Inclusive–exclusive oppositions are significantly frequent in the large Circum-Pacific linguistic area, as is the least common type, the minimal/augmented type. Within this large area, inclusive–exclusive oppositions are significantly more frequent toward the south. This worldwide geographical distribution can be explained by early population movements around the Pacific and by likely transitions from type to type of inclusive–exclusive systems. This chapter builds on our previous work on typology, linguistic geography, and ancient population movements. Keywords: number, minimal/augmented, linguistic geography, enclave, type shift, population movement, Circum-Pacific language area
1. Introduction The geography of inclusive–exclusive oppositions in first-person pronouns is distinctive, with unusually clear inter-areal continuities. For all their intimate connection to interpersonal pragmatics, inclusive–exclusive oppositions are not comparably frequent everywhere: they are common in the Americas, near-universal in Australia, common in eastern Asia, rare in the rest of Eurasia, fairly rare in Africa. This geography, however, is based on the gross presence vs. absence of any inclusive–exclusive opposition in the grammar at large, when the proper comparanda are particular types of inclusive–exclusive oppositions and particular grammatical paradigms. Here we look at the first of these two comparanda and propose a new classification of morphological and semantic types of inclusive–exclusive oppositions. We then trace the geography of those types and explain the modern geography by positing likely transitions from type to type, as well as two unusual developments, each of which happened to occur in a center of spread so that their modern ranges and frequencies considerably deviate from what is expected by chance. The survey reported here uses a genealogically based sample of 293 languages which also aims at wide geographical coverage, drawn from the Autotyp database (Bickel & Nichols 2002 ff.).
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2. Three kinds of inclusive–exclusive oppositions For purposes of inter-areal comparison it is most useful to have a typology consisting of few and fairly discrete types, so that, in principle, all types have a statistical chance of occurring with at least fair frequency in all areas. If the types are numerous, area-specific high frequencies of different types will be unlikely to occur and low frequencies of some types will be universal and hence not useful for comparison. We propose a three-way typology of inclusive–exclusive systems, classifying them by the way in which the inclusive–exclusive opposition is worked into person–number categories. Our classification differs from that of Cysouw (2003) in using fewer types (a sampling necessity) and in dealing with person and number in what may appear to be a very traditional fashion. (We agree with Cysouw that “plural” in pronouns is really a group category rather than a true plural. That said, we use the term plural for ease of wording.) We name two of the three types for exemplar languages using them: thus we have a Chechen type, a Belhare type (named for our own current field languages), and (using an established term) the minimal/augmented type. The commonest and probably best known type of inclusive–exclusive system is the Chechen type, in which the first-person plural (or dual and plural), and no other number or person category, is subdivided into exclusive vs. inclusive forms:
(1) Chechen (Nakh-Dagestanian, Caucasus) Singular Plural 1 so excl. txo incl. vai 2 hwo shu 3 i/iza ysh
(2) So (Kuliak, East Africa; Serzisko 1992) Singular Plural 1 aya excl. inia incl. isia pitia 2 piya 3 ica itia
Most systems with a dual number belong to one of the two other types described below, but an example of the less common Chechen type with a dual comes from Garawa:
(3) Garawa (Garawan; northern Australia; Furby 1972: 2) Singular Dual Plural 1 ngayu excl. ngali nurru incl. nunggala ngambala 2 ninjdji nimbala narri 3 njulu bula yalu
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
In all of these systems, neither the form nor the meaning of the inclusive and exclusive category are shared by any other person or number category; they are isolated subcategories of the nonsingular number category. The other two types of inclusive– exclusive oppositions treat exclusive and/or inclusive not as unique or isolated subcategories of number but as members of person categories, as shown in the sharing of roots or stems across a segment of the person–number pronominal paradigm. Somewhat less frequent cross-linguistically than Chechen-type systems are those which treat the inclusive–exclusive distinction on a par with the basic second vs. third distinction rather than as a subcategory of nonsingular first persons. In such a system, the exclusive has a singular value, just as other persons do. Singular inclusive forms cannot exist, because the inclusive minimally denotes a dyad consisting of speaker and addressee. The diagnostic feature of this type is that first-person singular is construed (and morphologically marked) as the singular of an exclusive marker, and there is a gap in the paradigm at the intersection of singular and inclusive. Below are examples from Belhare and Kipeá Kiriri showing that the exclusive pronouns have a common root element in all or both number categories, while the inclusive is different (and is often not very well characterized as a formal person category). We call this type the Belhare type.
(4) Belhare intransitive verb agreement (Kiranti, Sino-Tibetan; Nepal) Singular Dual Plural Excl -ŋa -chi-ŋa -i-ŋa Incl -chi -i 2 -ga -chi-ga -i-ga 3 Ø- N-. . .-chi N-
In Belhare the element -ŋa identifies the exclusive stem in all three numbers. (The inclusive is zero-marked.)
(5) Kipeá Kiriri (Brazil; Mamiani 1877: 7–8) Independent Prefixal Singular Plural Singular Excl hietçã hietçã-de hi- Incl ketçã(a) 2 ewatçã ewatçã-a e- 3 i-/s-
Plural hi-. . .-de ku-. . .(-a) e-. . .-a i-. . .-a/s-. . .-a
In Kipeá Kiriri the independent pronoun hietçã and the prefix hi- mark the exclusive in both singular and plural.1 Considerably less common than either Chechen or Belhare systems, but still well attested, are languages which distinguish minimal vs. augmented number: the minimal inclusive is referentially dual, while the minimal exclusive, second-person, and third-person forms are referentially singular. In Northern Australian languages, a third term, unit augmented, is sometimes distinguished. This translates as trial for the inclusive and dual for the other persons.2 The diagnostic feature of
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minimal/augmented systems is an additional dual or trial number found only with first-person inclusive forms. Unlike in Belhare systems, there is no paradigm gap in minimal/augmented systems. Both inclusive and exclusive have the same number oppositions as the second and third person. This type of system treats not only the exclusive but also the inclusive as a pure person category that intersects with whatever number category or categories the language has.
(6) Hocak (a.k.a Winnebago; Siouan) subject agreement (root xé ~ xa ‘bury’; Lipkind 1945) Minimal (-Ø) Augmented (-wi) Excl ha-xé ‘I bury him’ ha-xa-wí ‘we (they and I) bury him’ Incl hĩ-xé ‘thou and I bury him’ hĩ-xa-wí ‘we (you and I) bury him’ 2 ra-xé ‘thou buriest him’ ra-xa-wi ‘you bury him’ 3 xé ‘he buries him’ xa-wí ‘they bury him’
(7) Rembarrnga pronouns (N. Australia; Dixon 1980: 352 after McKay 1978) Minimal Unit augmented (-pparraʔ) Augmented (-ə) Excl ŋənə yarr-pparraʔ yarr-ə Incl yəkkə ŋakorr-parraʔ ŋakorr-ə 2 kə nakorr-parraʔ nakorr-ə 3 masc nawə parr-pparraʔ parr-ə 3 fem ŋatə parr-pparraʔ parr-ə
This type might be called the Maranao/Sierra Popoluca type, using Cysouw’s exemplar labels based on the following systems (reorganized into traditional number categories, but otherwise from Cysouw 2003):
(8) Maranao (Cysouw 2003: 139, citing McKaughan 1959) Minimal Augmented Excl ako kami Incl ta tano 2 ka kano 3 sekanian siran
(9) Sierra Popoluca (Cysouw 2003: 149) Excl ʔaIncl ta2 mi3 Ø-
Note that every language with a minimal/augmented system also has a Belharetype system (since both extend the inclusive–exclusive opposition to a system of at least two numbers), but the converse is not true. In our coding as reflected in the counts below, we have coded a language as having a Belhare system only if it did not also have a minimal/augmented system, and as having a Chechen system only if it
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
did not also have a Belhare system. That is, we sought and coded types in this order: (10) minimal/augmented > Belhare > Chechen starting with the most specific type and progressing to the less specific types only if there was no more specific type. Our survey sought inclusive–exclusive oppositions wherever they might be found: in independent pronouns, verb agreement affixes, and possessive affixes. In most languages the pronominal system is the same in all form categories, but a few languages distinguish inclusive–exclusive in one paradigm but not in another and even fewer have one subtype of inclusive–exclusive system in one part of the grammar and another subtype in another. For instance, Belhare has a Chechen system in its independent pronoun and possessive prefix series. In these rare cases we have counted an inclusive–exclusive system as present even if it is only present in part of the grammar, and we have coded subtypes as we coded types, above. Thus, if a language has minimal/augmented marking anywhere, we code it as a minimal/augmented language.3
3. Linguistic geography: hypotheses Inclusive–exclusive systems are found in about 40 percent of the world’s languages (based on our 293-language sample) and occur with fair frequency in most continents. Table 1 shows the frequencies of the different types, by continent (or other continent-like area) and worldwide. Table 1. Frequencies of inclusive–exclusive oppositions and the three subtypes, by continent.
Africa Europe–Mesopotamia N Asia S and SE Asia Australia New Guinea–Oceania West Coast N America Eastern N America Central America S America Total
N
Any type
Chechen
Belhare
Min/aug
41 26 15 28 30 54 34 15 15 35
8 (20%) 3 (12%) 4 (27%) 14 (50%) 24 (80%) 22 (41%) 10 (29%) 4 (27%) 7 (47%) 20 (57%)
4 (10%) 3 (12%) 3 (20%) 9 (32%) 14 (47%) 16 (30%) 3 (9%) 1 (7%) 3 (20%) 8 (23%)
3 (7%) 0 0 2 (7%) 2 (7%) 3 (6%) 6 (18%) 1 (7%) 3 (20%) 9 (26%)
1 (2%) 0 1 (7%) 3 (11%) 8 (27%) 3 (6%) 1 (3%) 2 (13%) 1 (7%) 3 (9%)
293
116 (40%)
64 (22%)
29 (10%)
23 (8%)
Note: Percentages are rounded and within areas. For the individual assignment of languages to types, continents and areas, see the electronic appendix, but note generally that Europe-Mesopotamia in‑ cludes the Caucasus and the Near East; Southeast Asia includes the islands up to about the Wallace Line; Central America also includes all of Mexico.
53
Chechen type Minimal–augmented type Belhare Type
Minimal/augmented Type
Map 1: Geographical Distribution of inclusive/exclusive distinctions
No incl–excl. distinction Belhare type
no incl/excl distinction Chechen Type Map 1. Geographical distribution of inclusive–exclusive distinctions
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
The map suggests (a) a concentration of inclusive–exclusive opposition in the broader Pacific region, with skewed balances of subtypes within this region, and (b) a greatly depressed frequency of all types in most of Eurasia. Both patterns point toward large areas that are known from other typological variables and that reflect early population movements. We therefore extensively tested hypotheses deriving from such areas. In the following we give a brief review of the linguistic population history underlying these areal patterns (Nichols 1992; Nichols 1997a; Nichols 1997b; Nichols 2000; Nichols 2002a; Nichols 2003a, b; Nichols & Peterson 1996; Nichols & Peterson 2005).
3.1. The Circum-Pacific area: Ancient Sunda and the Pacific Rim There are two (and perhaps three) broadly areal populations, each apparently resulting from an ancient migration and colonization episode that spread local areal features widely around the Pacific as a series of movements brought people from eastern Asia into the Pacific islands from Southeast Asia and into the Americas from Northeast Asia. The earliest of these language populations, which we call the Ancient Sunda population,4 evidently formed in ancient Southeast Asia just before, or in the early stages of, the initial expansion to the near Pacific islands, New Guinea, and Australia. Linguistic features of this population are ergativity and simple consonant systems with one manner of stop articulation (see Nichols 1997b). By now, some 50,000 years after the initial expansion of the Ancient Sunda population, the set of linguistic features characterizing it is most common in the far periphery of the expansion zone: Australia, sometimes highland and southern but not northern New Guinea, eastern North America, and South America. Later, as glaciation was ending, the Pacific Rim population spread to Melanesia and coastal New Guinea (but not to Australia) and to the western Americas, chiefly the Pacific coast. It has spread far inland from landfall or entry points, but its linguistic markers have not yet reached the far periphery in great numbers. Pacific Rim linguistic features include numeral classifiers, elaborate possessive classification (Nichols & Bickel 2005), and, chiefly in the Americas, personal pronouns with n in the first person and m in the second (Nichols & Peterson 1996; Nichols & Peterson 2005). The boundary between the Ancient Sunda and Pacific Rim populations is not sharp, and Pacific Rim features such as head marking, lack of overt noun pluralization, and inflectional noun incorporation extend into northern Australia and interior North America. Perhaps these features were carried by the very earliest phase of the Pacific Rim spread, or perhaps they are simply more prone to diffusion than the others and have spread somewhat beyond the Pacific Rim boundaries. These ancient population movements are responsible for the formation of modern transcontinental linguistic areas, so we will speak of the Pacific Rim and Ancient Sunda language areas. For purposes of linguistic-geographical surveying and hypothesis-testing we have set up sample areas on strictly geographical grounds, as follows:
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(H1) The Pacific Rim area includes the Pacific coastal strip, up to the major coast range, of the Americas, eastern Asia, and New Guinea (and to some extent also northern Australia), as well as the northern Melanesian islands and the outer Pacific islands. (H2) The Ancient Sunda area is southern Australia, highland and southern New Guinea, eastern North America, and interior and southern South America. (H3) A general term for the entire vast region harboring the Ancient Sunda and Pacific Rim areas is the Circum-Pacific area, which comprises all of the Americas, Australia, all of New Guinea, and all of the Pacific islands, as well Southeast Asia and northern coastal Asia. The progression of population movements within the Circum-Pacific area leads one to expect areal differentiation reflecting population change and language change over time. Specifically, one might hypothesize the following three differentiations: (H4) Within the Circum-Pacific area, western and the eastern parts (respectively eastern Asia plus the Pacific, and the Americas). These two large may have developed independent profiles once the great population movements slowed down. (H5) In the Americas, the South and the North, reflecting earlier (Ancient Sunda) vs. later (Pacific Rim) migration waves. The earliest one is likely to have spread to the far southern periphery; the later one is most in evidence closer to the entry point (today’s Alaska). (H6) In the Americas, eastern vs. western regions, again reflecting earlier (Ancient Sunda) vs. later (Pacific Rim) migration waves. Again, the earlier wave would have spread entirely across both North and South America to the Atlantic coast; the later one would be most in evidence in the west, nearer to the Alaskan entry point.
3.2. Eurasia Eurasia is a large area, but most of northern Eurasia — specifically, Europe, inner Asia, and Siberia more generally — show a good deal of continent-wide areality (Jakobson 1971 [1931]; Austerlitz 1970; Bickel & Nichols 2005a, b, c). The main and proximate cause of this areality is the great language spreads in the vicinity of the steppe (Indo-European, Uralic, Tungusic, Turkic, Mongolian), which have obliterated much of the linguistic diversity that must have been present in pre-Neolithic times. In addition, much of northern Eurasia is high-latitude, continental interior land with marked seasonality, factors that depress both structural and languagefamily diversity (Nichols 1992: 13–24). Some of the typological variables that exhibit northern Eurasian areality have systematic exceptions in the Himalayan and Caucasian enclaves — for example, obligatory possession, bipartite stems, multiple verb agreement, and high degrees of verbal synthesis (Bickel & Nichols 2003, 2005c; Nichols & Bickel 2005) — and
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
most of these enclave features show significant overlap with the Circum-Pacific distributions. They are apparent relics of westward extensions of Ancient Sunda populations that occurred before the general typological profile of northern Eurasia was flattened by the steppe spreads. This leads us to expect the following specific Eurasian patterns: (H7) A distinctive typological profile of northern Eurasia (Europe and North Asia) as against the rest of the world. (H8) A differentiation between the Eurasian enclave and the rest of Eurasia (except the Pacific coast, which belongs to the Circum-Pacific area). (H9) Similar typological profiles in the Eurasian enclaves and in the CircumPacific area.
4. Results In the following we test these hypotheses, as well as ancillary hypotheses suggested by the visual impression of the map. We found no evidence for Hypotheses H1 and H2 (Ancient Sunda vs. Pacific Rim differentiation), no evidence for Hypothesis H6 (east–west differentiation within the Americas), and no evidence for Hypotheses H8–H9 (Eurasian enclaves). For all other hypotheses we found significant evidence either in the gross presence of inclusive–exclusive oppositions, or in the distribution of specific types of the oppositions. We discuss these two sources of evidence in turn.
4.1. Global linguistic geography: inclusive–exclusive vs. none We first analyze the worldwide distribution of inclusive–exclusive systems as a whole, without regard to their particular subtypes. Table 2 summarizes the significant findings. While there is no evidence for distinct Pacific Rim and Ancient Sunda Table 2. Significant areal asymmetries of inclusive vs. exclusive distinctions, regardless of subtype
Circum-Pacific (H3) Rest of the World North America (H5) South and Central America Europe and N Asia (H7) Rest of the World
Incl.–excl. distinction absent
Incl.–excl. distinction present
113 (53%) 64 (79%)
99 (47%) 17 (21%)
p < .001
35 (71%) 23 (46%)
14 (29%) 27 (54%)
p = .014
34 (83%) 143 (57%)
7 (17%) 109 (43%)
p = .002
Note: Percentages are rounded and within areas.
Areal difference test (Fisher’s Exact, 2‑tailed)
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populations, the Circum-Pacific cover area (Hypothesis H3) evidences highly significant areality. The gross presence of inclusive–exclusive oppositions also confirms Hypotheses H5 (latitudinal differentiation of the Americas) and Hypothesis H7 (distinct areality of Eurasia). The visual impression of the map suggests a particularly high concentration of inclusive–exclusive oppositions in Australia, mirroring the latidunal cline predicted and found in the Americas (cf. Hypothesis H5). The difference between Australia and the rest of the world is statistically significant (Fisher’s Exact, p < .001): in our sample, Australia has 80 percent languages (24 out of 30) with the opposition, as opposed to a world average of only 35 percent (92 out of 263). Like Australia, South and Central America have an increased frequency of inclusive–exclusive oppositions not only in comparison to the north, but also in comparison to the world average: South and Central America have 54 percent (27 out of 50) languages with the opposition, yielding a significant difference to the world average (Fisher’s Exact, p = .026) The visual impression of the map would also lend support to Hypotheses H8 and H9 suggesting an enclave distribution of inclusive–exclusive oppositions in Eurasia: inclusive–exclusive oppositions are present in 27 percent (3 out of 11) of the sample languages in the Caucasus and in 10 percent (2 out of 20) of the sample languages in the combined area of Europe, Mesopotamia and Inner Asia; but like the visual impression, the percentages are deceptive. Fisher’s Exact test performed on the raw numbers results in p = .32, which means the frequency differences are close to what one expects from the frequency differences in the total distribution. (Counting the Himalayas together with the Caucasus as part of the enclaves and, consequently, South Asia as part of the area surrounding the enclaves also fails to reach significance: p = .53.)5 The most parsimonious conclusion from this is that the visual clusters of inclusive–exclusive systems in the Caucasus and Himalayas are the accidental consequence of the relatively higher numbers of sample languages in these areas of high genealogical diversity. But we will discuss another possible interpretation below in Section 5.2.
4.2. Areal linguistic geography: different kinds of inclusive–exclusive oppositions Table 1 above suggests that Chechen systems and Belhare systems both occur with good frequency in nearly all areas. Only in Europe are Belhare systems lacking; but inclusive–exclusive systems of any kind are extremely rare there. Chechen systems are more frequent than Belhare systems in most areas; only in the Americas do Belhare systems regularly outnumber or tie Chechen systems. (They are tied in Africa, but the frequencies of both are very low there.) This is predicted by Hypothesis H4, and the findings are summarized in Table 3: the western half of the CircumPacific area (comprising Australia, New Guinea, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Coastal Asia and termed West Pacific in Table 3) is significantly different from
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide Table 3. West Pacific vs. Americas (Hypothesis H4) Chechen
Belhare
Areal difference test (Fisher’s Exact, 2‑tailed)
Americas West Pacific
15 (44%) 38 (88%)
19 (56%) 5 (12%)
p < .001
Americas Rest of the World
15 (44%) 49 (83%)
19 (56%) 10 (17%)
p < .001
West Pacific Rest of the World
38 (88%) 26 (52%)
5 (12%) 24 (48%)
p < .001
Note: Percentages are rounded and within areas
the eastern half (the Americas). Consistent with this, we find a concentration of Belhare systems in the Americas that is significantly higher than the world average, and, conversely, the western Circum-Pacific shows a significantly increased frequency of Chechen systems. Minimal/augmented systems have a Circum-Pacific distribution (confirming Hypothesis H3), with a salient frequency peak in Australia, chiefly northern Australia. Outside of the Circum-Pacific area they are vanishingly rare, apparently nonexistent except for Africa, where our sample has one token in Margi (Hoffmann 1963: 73–5)6 (Table 4).
4.3. Summary of findings The overall picture emerging from these analyses is the following: (i) a large-scale Circum-Pacific distribution characterized both by increased frequencies of gross inclusive–exclusive distinctions and by the more specific development of the minimal/augmented subtype; (ii) within the Circum-Pacific area, a latitudinal cline with more cases of inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the southern than in the northern parts, reaching its peak in Australia (80%) and South/Central America (54%); Table 4. Pairwise comparison of minimal/augmented system frequencies Min/aug absent
Min/aug present
Areal difference test (Fisher’s Exact, 2-tailed)
Circum-Pacific Rest of the World
170 (90%) 67 (99%)
18 (10%) 1 (1%)
p = .03
Australia Rest of the World
17 (70%) 221 (95%)
7 (30%) 12 (5%)
p = .001
Note: Percentages are rounded and within areas.
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(iii) w ithin the Circum-Pacific area, a division into a western and an eastern half, the western half characterized by Chechen systems and the eastern half characterized by Belhare systems; and (iv) a significantly low frequency in northern Eurasia (17%). We did not find evidence in our sample for a difference between eastern and western/coastal regions in North America (cf. Hypothesis H6), nor for clear differentiation of a distinct Pacific Rim area (as opposed to the wider Ancient Sunda area or as opposed to the rest of the world), nor for a Eurasian enclave distribution (Hypotheses H8 and H9).
5. Discussion There are two global historical factors that explain the distribution we found to be significant. We take these up in turn: Section 5.1 discusses factors accounting for the Circum-Pacific high frequency of inclusive–exclusive pronouns, the latitudinal cline within it, and the distribution of subtypes within this area; Section 5.2 discusses factors explaining the northern Eurasian low frequency.
5.1. The Circum-Pacific distribution We take the high frequency of gross inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the CircumPacific area as evidence that high frequency of inclusive–exclusive oppositions characterized the Ancient Sunda population. The very high frequency in Australia must reflect the heavily Ancient Sunda heritage of Australia, pushed to near-absolute by the general continent-wide areality of Australia. South America, far from the Alaskan point of entry to the Americas, must also have a heavily Ancient Sunda heritage, and this is consistent with its higher frequency of inclusive–exclusive oppositions. Thus in both Australia and South America inclusive–exclusive oppositions are most frequent in those populations that were least affected by the later Pacific Rim immigrations. The subdivision of the Circum-Pacific area into a western half with a preference for Chechen systems and an eastern half with a preference for Belhare systems is likely to reflect more recent developments that started once the Ancient Sunda migrations lost importance and populations became more independent. After this time, there must have been an increased trend in the Americas to develop Belhare systems, which we assume occurred by specialization of first-person singular markers as exclusive markers. There was also a distinct and very strong trend in the West Pacific to develop Chechen systems, presumably by analogical leveling of general first-person markers or by phonological obliteration of the morpheme unity of firstperson singular and exclusive markers in Belhare systems. The different directions of development were simply due to random drift.
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
All three scenarios are likely, and can be readily illustrated by reconstructed developments in various families. We illustrate by Tibeto-Burman data. LaPolla’s survey (this volume) suggests that many Tibeto-Burman exclusive markers are specialized first-person singular markers (e.g. PTB *ŋa ‘1sg’ > ŋa ‘exclusive’ in many daughter languages including Belhare, Akha, Sixing, etc.), i.e. specialized from ‘exclusive of any person except the speaker’ to ‘exclusive of the addressee’. Developments of Chechen systems from Belhare systems are exemplified by phonological splitting of ŋa ‘exclusive’ and ŋa ‘first-person singular’ that destroys the morphemic unity between the two, either partially as in Guiqiong (Qiangic) ŋø 35 ‘1sg’ vs. ŋɔ 33‑zi 55 ‘1pl.excl’ vs. ŋø 35-ɲi 33pi 35 ‘1dl.excl’, or completely as in Zaiwa (N. Burmish) ŋo51 ‘1sg’ vs. ŋa55-moʔ ‘1pl.excl.’ vs. ŋa55-nik 55 ‘1dl.excl’ (LaPolla, this volume). Another process that produces the same type of system is analogical leveling with the result that PTB *ŋa covers all first-person forms and loses any notion of exclusion: compare, for example, Balti (Bodish) ŋa ‘1sg’ vs. ŋa-tʃa ‘1pl.excl.’ vs. ŋa-taŋ ‘1pl.incl.’ Thus, from a general point of view, transitions toward Belhare and Chechen systems are both equally likely, and it is reasonable to assume that both have occurred in the Circum-Pacific area (and elsewhere). But in this area at least, transitions toward Belhare systems have never been as common as transitions toward Chechen systems: even where they are best represented, namely, in the Americas, Belhare systems reach only 56 percent, whereas Chechen systems reach 88 percent in their highest concentration, that is, the West Pacific. Minimal/augmented systems, on the other hand, are most likely to have developed as analogical extensions of Belhare systems across numbers (removing the paradigm gap characteristic of Belhare systems). Where minimal/augmented systems are found, they must mostly have been innovations. Our geographical findings suggest that this innovation has happened very rarely and only once to a degree that the innovation acquired areal viability. This was in the Circum-Pacific region, and the wide geographical distribution makes it most likely that the innovation took place in the early stages of the Ancient Sunda expansion. Minimal/augmented systems remain at all common only where supported by local areality, as appears to have occurred only in northern Australia (cf. Table 4, which shows that the local areality of Australia is significant at the α = .001 level).7 Inclusive–exclusive oppositions in general are much less common in New Guinea, where the Ancient Sunda heritage has generally been swamped by the younger Pacific Rim heritage, and it is reasonable to assume that areal pressure has pushed them to near-zero. However, they have subsequently been reintroduced into New Guinea, in the last few thousand years, in languages of the northern coast as a consequence of Austronesian contact. The Austronesian language family emanated ultimately from the vicinity of Taiwan, and like many Southeast Asian languages Proto-Austronesian happened to have an inclusive–exclusive opposition. (For the early settlement and colonization and recolonization of Melanesia and New Guinea see Bellwood 1979; Blust 1985; Ross 1988; Spriggs 1992; Pawley & Ross 1993; White 1996; Spriggs 1997; Kirch 2000.) If this scenario is correct, we would expect the
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northern coast of New Guinea to show more cases of inclusive–exclusive oppositions than the highlands and the south, which indeed is the case (71% vs. 10%, Fisher’s Exact p < .001; cf. Map 2). This distribution, with an Ancient Sunda feature better attested on the New Guinea coast than in the interior, is reversed in all other instances of Ancient Sunda features that we are aware of: head-marking type, numeral classifiers, possessive classification, lack of number marking in nouns, low frequency of ergative alignment, and more complex consonant systems are all more common in northern coastal New Guinea than in the highlands and the highland frequency resembles that of Australia (Nichols 1997b).
5.2. The Northern Eurasian area and deviations from it The greatly depressed inclusive–exclusive frequencies in northern Eurasia reflect the great language spreads in the vicinity of the steppe, which have led to areality in other typological variables as well (cf. above, Section 3.2). As a result of these spreads, the entire continent is dominated by the chance low frequency of inclusive– exclusive oppositions that has happened to characterize the few northerly Eurasian families that have undergone large-scale spreading. Our sample does not reveal statistically significant evidence for the Himalayas and the Caucasus forming enclaves in Eurasia (cf. Hypothesis H8 and H9 in Section 3.2). There are three interpretations of this non-significance: (i) O ne interpretation is that the westward extension that brought Ancient Sunda features across southern Eurasia was somewhat earlier than the areal consolidation of inclusive–exclusive distinctions in Ancient Sunda, while features such as high degree of synthesis, found in Ancient Sunda and the Eurasian enclaves, arose earlier and were carried westward. Even if relatively late in the Ancient Sunda population, the inclusive–exclusive opposition reached high frequency early enough to be included in the spread around the Pacific all the way to South America. This interpretation would suggest that there were at least two distinct large waves of westward population movements, each with its own typological profile. So far, there is no ancillary evidence in support of this. (ii) An alternative interpretation suggests that inclusive–exclusive distinctions originally did have the same westward extensions as the other Ancient Sunda features and originally did manifest the same enclave effects and near-zero presence in interior northern Eurasia, but that the evidence for this has been leveled out due to secondary and more recent losses in the enclaves and gains in interior northern Eurasia. (iii) Of course, it is always possible that there is nothing of interest in the frequencies of inclusive–exclusive in the Caucasus and Himalayas. There is some suggestive evidence supporting the second scenario. Two language families of interior northern Eurasia that do exhibit inclusive–exclusive opposi-
No incl–excl. distinction Belhare type Chechen type Minimal–augmented type
Map 2. New Guinea and Northern Australia no incl/excl distinction Chechen Type
Belhare Type
Minimal/augmented Type
Map 2: New Guinea and Northern Australia
Map generated by http://atlas.geo.cornell.edu/ima.html
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tions are Tungusic and Mongolian, both of which originated in the eastern reaches of their present ranges and in the Pacific Rim or Circum-Pacific area (for their prehistories see Janhunen 1996). Thus it appears that a secondary, relatively recent diffusion of a Circum-Pacific feature into the interior has leveled the Eurasian frequencies somewhat. In the Caucasus, there is suggestive evidence that now-extinct prehistoric languages in geographically distant parts of the mountains had inclusive–exclusive oppositions. Svan, a southwestern highland language representing one branch of the Kartvelian family, has an inclusive–exclusive opposition in verb subject agreement, but as no other Kartvelian language has this it cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Kartvelian (Harris 1991: 35–6, 43).8 Many Nakh-Daghestanian languages have an inclusive–exclusive opposition, but for Proto-Nakh-Daghestanian only a first-person plural pronoun can be reconstructed, which yields the exclusive in Nakh but the inclusive in Daghestanian (Nichols 2003b). Therefore no inclusive–exclusive opposition can be reconstructed for Proto-Nakh-Daghestanian, and it seems that Proto-Nakh and Proto-Daghestanian innovated the opposition separately. Independent innovation of inclusive–exclusive oppositions seems not to be common, so it is at least plausible that the opposition was diffused separately from different neighbors into pre-Svan in the southwest, Proto-Nakh in the southeast, and proto-Daghestanian in the east. Then there may have been three separate language groups with inclusive–exclusive oppositions in the ancient southern Caucasus, and if 100 percent of the extinct language groups whose existence can be inferred from possible contact phenomena had the opposition it is likely that more did. Thus the ancient Caucasus may have been a local hotbed of inclusive–exclusive oppositions.9 The other major enclave in Eurasia, the Himalayas, shows a similar picture: the only sample languages in this enclave having an inclusive–exclusive oppostion are Tibeto-Burman, but the opposition does not reconstruct to Proto-Tibeto-Burman. Rather, as LaPolla (this volume) shows, there are multiple, formally heterogenous independent innovations in various branches. It is likely that these innovations were supported by areal pressure from Circum-Pacific languages to the southeast (specifically Austroasiatic, where four out five of our sample languages have the opposition, and where it is likely to reconstruct to at least the two major branches: see below) and, in the western Himalayas, from languages to the south (specifically, Dravidian, where the opposition is well-reconstructed for the protolanguage even though several daughter languages have lost it: Steever 1998). Suggestive evidence for this comes from the particular subtype of the inclusive–exclusive opposition: for all its formal diversity, there is a distinct trend in Tibeto-Burman for an increased frequency of Belhare systems. This is a trend in which Tibeto-Burman significantly deviates from the average distribution in Old World languages (though still not as strongly as American languages; see Table 3 above): LaPolla’s survey in this volume suggests that among the Tibeto-Burman languages that have an inclusive–exclusive distinction, about 40 percent (25 out of 62) have a Belhare system. In other Old World languages in our sample, only about 20 percent (10 out of 52) of the languages
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
with an inclusive–exclusive distinction have a Belhare system. A Belhare system is precisely what is reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian (Steever 1998), and Dravidian influence — or influence through any kind of shared prehistoric areality — might therefore help explain the Tibeto-Burman deviation from the Old World standard. (11) Proto-Dravidian pronouns (Steever 1998) Singular Plural Excl yā yām Incl nā-m (or ñā-m) 2 nī nī-m 3 tā tā-m Proto-Austroasiatic pronouns have not been reconstructed yet, but an inclusive– exclusive opposition is reconstructed for the Mon-Khmer branch which comprises half of the family tree and most of the daughter languages (Diffloth 1994: 319), and is likely to be reconstructable in the Munda branch (Anderson 2001 and p.c.). It is likely that Austroasiatic shows a balance of non-Chechen vs. Chechen systems similar to that of Tibeto-Burman. In our database, about half of the languages have Belhare systems. Thus, there is a distinct possibility that like the Caucasus, the ancient Himalayas were part of a hotbed of inclusive–exclusive oppositions. The ultimate root of the Himalayan hotbed is either distinct local sources in Southwestern Eurasia or the ancient, ultimately Circum-Pacific, source of the enclave effects discussed above.
6. Long-term diachrony In the previous sections, we explained the current non-accidental distributions by appeal to ancient sources of population movements. This presupposes that the frequency distributions of inclusive–exclusive oppositions are historically robust enough to survive over a time span of at least 20,000 years, the minimum age presumed for the Ancient Sunda population (Nichols 2000, 2002a). In the following we provide evidence that this historical stability assumption is plausible, and that specifically, this stability results from a combined effect of areal diffusion and inheritance. Inclusive–exclusive oppositions are prone to areal diffusion, and what diffuses is often the opposition itself, not the specific pronominal forms that code it in the donor language (Jacobsen 1980). Beyond that, inclusive–exclusive systems (or their absence, as the case may be) are also quite stable in language families (Nichols 1995). Nichols 2002b calculated retention rates for an inclusive–exclusive opposition in those families that have it, for 25 old families with a median age of about 4500 years (Table 5).10 Though inclusive–exclusive oppositions are genealogically quite stable, their stability evidently depends on areal factors, for the survival rate is greatest in areas
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Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols Table 5. Retention rates for inclusive–exclusive in 26 language families (based on a sample consisting of 2 to 11 languages per family, one per major branch). Area
Families
Retention
Eurasia and Africa Australia, New Guinea, Oceania Americas Total
7 8 11 26
31% 79% 64% 60%
Note: The source for this is materials for Nichols (1995). Retention is indicated by the mean percent of daughter languages per family that have inclusive–exclusive oppositions.
where the opposition is most frequent. And in any event the high frequency of inclusive–exclusive oppositions in areas of Ancient Sunda heritage cannot be due entirely to inheritance, as it would take an inheritance rate of over 95 percent of the daughter languages per 5000 years to preserve inclusive–exclusive oppositions in their attested frequencies in the languages of the Americas and the Pacific for a period of time as great as the age of the Ancient Sunda population (Nichols 2002b), and this degree of fidelity in transmission is not found in any well-sampled old family in our database, either for inclusive–exclusive or for any other typological feature. Ninety-five percent fidelity in inheritance at the stock level means that, some 5000–6000 years after a protolanguage with an inclusive–exclusive opposition disperses, 95 percent of its daughter languages retain the opposition, and likewise for every other stock. Alternatively, for 95 percent of the stocks there is 100 percent retention in the daughter languages. If half of the stocks have a 95 percent retention rate and half do not, the overall figure will be much less than 95 percent. We surveyed the stocks in our database to see whether this 95 percent retention rate for inclusive–exclusive is approached in the world’s languages. Our database is not very well designed for this survey: we have representatives of most stocks but not of enough of their major branches to estimate retention across the entire stock very accurately. Nonetheless we made a first stab. We surveyed all stocks for which we have representatives of two or more major branches (there were 52 of them), and we chose one language per major branch or, where we had the data, one language per subbranch. The null hypothesis is that inclusive–exclusive oppositions are nearly always inherited, and the survey seeks to falsify that by showing that some stocks have less than 95 percent transmission fidelity or that under 95 percent of the stocks have 100 percent transmission fidelity. Therefore, in order to favor the null hypothesis, whenever we had a choice of languages for a surveyed branch we chose a language that does have an inclusive–exclusive opposition, if there was such a language in that branch. (Further favoring the null hypothesis is the fact that our database includes a good deal of data designed to show what kinds of inclusive–exclusive oppositions exist, taken from the literature on inclusive–exclusive oppositions and therefore comprising only languages that do have the opposition.) With this sam-
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
pling technique, some language families are charted as having 100 percent consistency in inclusive–exclusive oppositions (though in reality they have some daughter languages without the opposition, which are not in our sample). Ten of our families, and six that we judged to be old — about 5,000 years or more, or of roughly Indo-European-like antiquity (though of course most such reckonings are not very precise) — achieved 100 percent fidelity by this count. They are shown in Table 6. These ten represent about 20 percent of our 52 families, much less than the needed 95 percent. The old ones are of primary interest here; they number six, or about 12 percent of the families (and 25 percent of the 24 old or probably old families), again much less than 95 percent. The old families in Table 6 all come from Southeast Asia, Oceania/New Guinea, and the southern Americas, and they represent 22 percent of the families in those areas, again far from 95 percent. It must be concluded, therefore, that inheritance of inclusive–exclusive oppositions is not remotely close to 95 percent. Therefore it is nowhere near consistent enough to make it possible for modern frequencies of the opposition to reflect direct inheritance of the situation 50,000 years ago or earlier. Five of these six old families have from two to four languages representing them in our survey, but one of them — Austronesian — has many (up to eight representatives, depending on how branches are subclassified, and 15 languages in all) and therefore provides an example of a large language family that actually does achieve a high retention rate for the inclusive–exclusive opposition (see also Lichtenberk, this volume). The linguistic prehistory of Austronesian is unique in that many of the languages have developed in relative isolation and most have had no contact except with close sister languages. This suggests that the strongest factor favoring retention of an inclusive–exclusive opposition is lack of contact (or contact only with close sisters). The higher retention rate in areas with higher overall frequencies of inclusive–exclusive (Table 5) shows that contact with unrelated or distantly related Table 6. Language families in our database with 100% retention of inclusive–exclusive oppositions across lower branches, and their areas and approximate ages. Family
Area
Age
Mongolian Tangkic Border Caddoan Austroasiatic Austronesian West Papuan Mixe-Zoque Cariban Macro-Ge
Asia Australia New Guinea N. America SE Asia Oceania New Guinea Mexico S. America S. America
young young ? young to medium old old old? old? old old
Note: The table is sorted by estimated age. Young = Romance-like, old = Indo-European-like.
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languages that have the opposition favors retention of the opposition, but the case of Austronesian indicates that non-contact favors retention even more strongly. We therefore hypothesize that the factors favoring preservation (as opposed to loss) of an inclusive–exclusive opposition are, in order, (i) isolation, or contact only with close sisters; ( ii) areal support (from unrelated or distantly related languages). The Austronesian language family is a wonderful natural laboratory, but unfortunately for statistical purposes it is unique. The only other clear case of a welldescribed language isolated for millennia is Tiwi, a language isolate of Bathurst and Melville Islands off the northern Australian coast. Tiwi preserves the inclusive– exclusive opposition expected in a language of the Ancient Sunda population, and this is at least consistent with our hypothesis about isolation, but since Tiwi is a genetic isolate and the time of its last contact with the mainland is unknown its case is hardly probative. The three known languages of the Andaman Islands (Great Andamanese, Jarawa, and Onge) are unrelated to any others and may well have been out of contact with the mainland for millennia, and two of them have inclusive–exclusive oppositions (there is no information yet on Jarawa) (Manoharan 1997; Abbi 2003). The Tasmanians, the longest-isolated population known, probably spoke six or more different languages (Crowley & Dixon 1981), but the scant materials available for Tasmanian contain no first-person plural pronouns. The only other known cases of long isolation are the language of the Veddas of Sri Lanka (undescribed) and the unknown language of Sentinel Island (uncontacted), one of the Andaman Islands. These cases are all problematic because they involve genetic isolates or languages of unknown affiliation for which we cannot know whether the inclusive– exclusive oppositions are innovations or retentions.
7. Conclusions We have shown that the worldwide current geographical distribution of inclusive– exclusive distinctions can be explained by early population movements around the Pacific, movements which started out from the Ancient Sunda region (today’s Southeast Asia) and have left the most salient traces in Australia and South America. The same Ancient Sunda prehistory also accounts for the distribution of minimal/ augmented systems (with a minimal vs. augmented number distinction), though this subtype gained historical robustness and areal viability only in Australia. Belhare and Chechen systems are two other subtypes of inclusive–exclusive distinctions, and they can apparently develop into each other with equal ease. In the Circum-Pacific area, however, the West strongly favored developments of Chechen systems, while the East shows a more balanced distribution of these subtypes. These developments are probably due to drift.
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide
Acknowledgments For help with data collection, we thank David Petersen and Alena Witzlack-Maka revich, and for useful comments on an earlier draft, we are grateful to Michael Cysouw.
Notes 1. According to Mamiani (1877: 58), there are no independent third-person pronouns in the language; the verbal prefixes suffice. 2. This terminology was first proposed by McKay (1978). The analysis, using different terms, goes back to Forchheimer (1953: 93) and Thomas (1955); see Cysouw (2003: 87ff.) for the history. 3. The database is available as an electronic appendix at http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp. 4. The Sunda Islands and Sunda Strait are in the western Malay Archipelago. This is the appoximate area from which the Ancient Sunda population originated, not the regions where it is now found. 5. All of this should be interpreted as an important caveat against the reliability of visual representations or frequency reports without proper statistical analysis. Notice that the map also gives the visual impression that inclusive–exclusive systems form a narrow band across central Africa, but this too is non-significant statistically (Fisher’s Exact test comparing this area with the rest of Africa results in p > .99). 6. Cysouw (2003: 140), in a much larger set of languages than our sample, finds more examples in Africa. 7. Inclusive–exclusive systems of all kinds, and especially Belhare and minimal/augmented systems, in different ways all move away from a strict opposition of singular vs. plural in pronominal systems. In the future we plan to survey correlations between number categories and inclusive–exclusive types in the world’s languages. It is striking that the Circum-Pacific area has many languages with no overt number distinctions in nominals and many languages with inclusive–exclusive systems, especially of the more unusual types. 8. There is a formally similar allomorphy of first-person plural object agreement forms in Old Georgian. Dondua (1938), Klimov and Alekseev (1980: 133), and sources in Georgian which they refer to regard the allomorphy and the resemblance to Svan as sound evidence for reconstructing an inclusive–exclusive opposition for Pre-Old Georgian. In Old Georgian, as Dondua shows, one object prefix has both inclusive and exclusive functions with good frequency while the other has chiefly exclusive functions. Gulyga (1979) argues that the function was not inclusive–exclusive but a different opposition, one contrasting a purely deictic first person to one based on fixed membership in some class or category (the meaning of French nous autres). Given the non-compositional nature of Kartvelian morphology (for Georgian see Gurevich 2003), in which, among other things, allomorphy of one affix signals the presence of another category, we suspect that the original distinction in the Svan and Old Georgian object affixes was conditioned by the person of the subject. In any event we agree with Harris and Gulyga that an inclusive–exclusive opposition cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Kartvelian. The Svan development is then an innovation, possibly contact-based. 9. Kartvelian and Nakh-Daghestanian are very old families: Kartvelian is probably of
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References Abbi, A. 2003. Vanishing voices of the Andaman Islands. Ms., Jawaharlal Nehru University. New Delhi. Anderson, G. 2001. Recent advances in Proto-Munda and Proto-Austroasiatic reconstruction. Paper presented at the 3rd Harvard Round Table on the Prehistory of Central and South Asia, Cambridge, MA. Austerlitz, R. 1970. Agglutination in northern Eurasia in perspective. In R. Jakobson & S. Kawamoto (eds), Studies in general and oriental linguistics presented to Shiro Hattori, 1–5. Tokyo: TEC. Bellwood, P. S. 1979. Man’s conquest of the Pacific: The prehistory of Southeast Asia and Oceania. New York: Oxford University Press. Bickel, B. & Nichols, J. 2002ff. The Autotyp research program. http://www.uni-leipzig.de/ ~autotyp/. Bickel, B. & Nichols, J. 2003. Typological enclaves. Paper presented at Association for Linguistic Typology V, September 15–18, Cagliari. (http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp/ download) Bickel, B. & Nichols, J. 2005a. Fusion of selected inflectional formatives. In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil & B. Comrie (eds), 86–89. Bickel, B. & Nichols, J. 2005b. Exponence of selected inflectional formatives. In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil & B. Comrie (eds), 90–93. Bickel, B. & Nichols, J. 2005c. Inflectional synthesis of the verb. In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil & B. Comrie (eds), 94–97. Blust, R. A. 1985. The Austronesian homeland: A linguistic perspective. Asian Perspectives 26: 45–67. Crowley, T. & Dixon, R. M.W. 1981. Tasmanian. In R. M.W. Dixon & B. J. Blake, Handbook of Australian languages, Volume 2, 395–427. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Cysouw, M. 2003. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diffloth, G. 1994. The lexical evidence for Austric, so far. Oceanic Linguistics 33: 309–21. Dixon, R. M.W. 1980. The languages of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dondua, K. 1938. Kategorija inkljuziva-èkskljuziva v svanskom i ee sledy v drevnegruzinskom. In I.I. Meščaninov (ed.), Pamjati akademika N. J. Marra, 134–51. Leningrad: Akademija nauk. Forchheimer, P. 1953. The category of person in language. Berlin: de Gruyter. Furby, C. E. 1972. The pronominal system of Garawa. Oceanic Linguistics 11: 1–31. Gulyga, O. A. 1979. Inkljuziv i èkskljuziv v dagestanskix jazykax. Unpublished candidate’s dissertation, Institut jazykoznanija AN SSSR, Moscow.
Inclusive–exclusive as person vs. number categories worldwide Gurevich, O. 2003. The status of the morpheme in Georgian verbal morphology. In P. M. Nowak, C. Yoquelet & D. Mortensen (eds), Proceedings of the 29th conference of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 161–72. Berkeley CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Harris, A.C. 1991. Overview on the history of the Kartvelian languages. In A.C. Harris (ed.), The indigenous languages of the Caucasus, 1: The Kartvelian languages, 7–83. Delmar NY: Caravan Books. Haspelmath, M,. Dryer, M., Gil, D. & Comrie, B. (eds). 2005. The world atlas of language structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoffmann, C. 1963. A grammar of the Margi language. London: Oxford University Press. Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1980. Inclusive–exclusive: A diffused pronominal category in native western North America. In J. Kreiman & A.E. Ojeda (eds), Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora. Chicago Linguistic Society, April 18–19, 1980, 326–406. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Jakobson, R. 1971 [1931]. K xarakteristike evrazijskogo jazykovogo sojuza. In R. Jakobson, Selected writings, Volume 1, 144–201. The Hague: Mouton. Janhunen, J. 1996. Manchuria: An ethnic history. Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen Seura [SUST 222]. Kirch, P.V. 2000. On the road of the winds: An archaeological history of the Pacific islands before European contact. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Klimov, G. A. & Alekseev, M. E. 1980. Tipologija kavkazskix jazykov. Moscow: Nauka. Lipkind, W. 1945. Winnebago grammar. New York: King’s Crown. Mamiani della Rovere, L.V. 1877. Arte de grammatica da lingua brazilica da naçao kiriri. Rio de Janeiro: Brown & Evaristo. Manoharan, S. 1997. Pronominal prefixes and formative affixes in Andamanese language. In A. Abbi (ed.), Languages of tribal and indigenous peoples of India: The ethnic space, 457– 73. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. McKaughan, H.P. 1959. Semantic components of pronoun systems: Maranao. Word 15: 101–2. McKay, G. R. 1978. Pronominal person and number categories in Rembarrnga and Djeebbana. Oceanic Linguistics 17: 27–37. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nichols, J. 1995. Diachronically stable structural features. In H. Andersen (ed.), Historical linguistics 1993: Papers from the 11th international conference on historical linguistics, 337–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nichols, J. & Peterson, D. A. 1996. The Amerind personal pronouns. Language 72: 336–71. Nichols, J. 1997a. Modeling ancient population structures and movement in linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 359–84. Nichols, J. 1997b. Sprung from two common sources: Sahul as a linguistic area. In P. McCon vell & N. Evans (eds), Archaeology and linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in global perspective, 135–68. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Nichols, J. 2000. Estimating dates of early American colonization events. In C. Renfrew, A. McMahon & L. Trask (eds), Time depth in historical linguistics, Volume 2, 643–6. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Nichols, J. 2002a. The first American languages. Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences 27: 273–9. Nichols, J. 2002b. Monogenesis or polygenesis? Typological perspective on language origins. LSA Annual Meeting plenary lecture, San Francisco.
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Balthasar Bickel and Johanna Nichols Nichols, J. 2003a. Diversity and stability in language. In B. Joseph & R. Janda (eds), Handbook of historical linguistics, 283–310. London: Blackwell. Nichols, J. 2003b. The Nakh-Daghestanian consonant correspondences. In D. Holisky & K. Tuite (eds), Current trends in Caucasian, East European, and Inner Asian linguistics: Papers in honor of Howard I. Aronson, 207–51. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nichols, J. & Bickel, B. 2005. Possessive classification (alienable/inalienable possession). In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil and B. Comrie (eds), 242–5. Nichols, J. & Peterson, D. A. 2005. Personal pronoun systems with /m/ and /n/. In M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil and B. Comrie (eds), 544–9. Pawley, A. K. & Ross, M. D. 1993. Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history. Annual Review of Anthropology 22: 425–59. Ross, M. D. 1988. Proto Oceanic and the Austronesian languages of western Melanesia. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 98]. Serzisko, F. 1992. Sprechhandlungen und Pausen: Diskursorientierte Sprachbeschreibung am Beispiel des Ik. Tübingen: Niemeyer [Linguistische Arbeiten 282]. Spriggs, M. J. T. 1992. Archaeological and linguistic prehistory in the North Solomons. In T. Dutton, M. D. Ross & D. Tryon (eds), The language game: Papers in memory of Donald C. Laycock, 417–26. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 110]. Spriggs, M. J. T. 1997. The Island Melanesians. Oxford: Blackwell. Steever, S. B. 1998. Introduction to the Dravidian languages. In S. B. Steever (ed.), The Dravidian languages, 1–39. London: Routledge. Thomas, D. D. 1955. Three analyses of the Ilocano pronoun system. Word 11: 204–8. White, J. P. 1996. Paleolithic colonization in Sahul land. In T. Akazawa & E. J. E. Szathmáry (eds), Prehistoric mongoloid dispersals, 303–8. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chapter 3
Syncretisms involving clusivity Michael Cysouw Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
The inclusive and exclusive are commonly considered to be kinds of first-person plural. In this chapter, I will investigate whether they deserve this name by looking at syncretisms between clusivity and other person markers. Such syncretisms are rare, but a thorough investigation has resulted in a large enough sample to allow for some conclusions. It turns out that the exclusive is often syncretic with the first-person singular, and can thus indeed be considered a kind of first-person plural. In contrast, the inclusive cannot. The often claimed link between inclusive and second person turns out to be spurious. This claim probably only arose because of selected attention for those syncretisms arguing for such a connection, but disregarding all other syncretisms that argue against it. In this survey, all possible syncretisms are considered, resulting in the observation that the inclusive/second-person syncretism does not occur more often than others. Keywords: syncretism, second person, third person, minimal/augmented, clusivity
1. Introduction The commonly used name for the inclusive is ‘inclusive first-person plural’ and for the exclusive ‘exclusive first-person plural’. Such long names are not only cumbersome, but it is also questionable whether they describe the correct approach to the linguistic categories in question. It is not at all clear whether inclusives and exclusives are a kind of first person. Semantically, an inclusive refers to both first and second person, so it could just as well be analysed as a kind of second person. An exclusive refers to both first and third person and could thus just as well be considered a third person. It is regularly claimed in the literature, in particular with reference to Algonquian languages, that some languages consider the inclusive to be a kind of second person (e.g. Zwicky 1977: 720–3; Plank 1985: 141–3; Hewson 1991: 862–5; Noyer 1992: 155–7). Such languages are then contrasted to the widespread structure showing a pronoun we, in which inclusive reference is part of first person (because the meaning of English we can be interpreted as being both inclusive and exclusive). In this argumentation, there are two possibilities for human language: either a speaker-centered perspective (as in English) or an addressee-centered perspective (as in Algonquian). In this chapter, I will present a typological argument showing that this opposition is misled. It is well known that the English-type we
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pronoun is extremely common among the world’s languages. In constrast, I will show that the Algonquian-type inclusive/second-person combination is extremely rare. If this rarity is considered of central importance for our theory of language, then other rarities should also be taken into account. For example, it turns out that inclusive–third-person combinations are just as common as the Algonquian type inclusive/second-person combination. In this chapter, I will present a large collection of examples in which the inclusive or the exclusive is exactly like another person marker in the same paradigm. Such cases are important to establish a theory of language. If a particular language uses the same morpheme for various apparently unrelated functions or meanings, it is possible that the various meanings have accidentally merged. Or they have a common origin, but the synchronic usages are too different to warrant a unified analysis. In any case, the proper null‑hypothesis should be that formally homophonous morphemes in a language have a unified meaning — until reasons are found that prove this hypothesis wrong. This order of examination is crucial for the empirical basis of linguistic analysis. Two meanings might look different from our current understanding of linguistic structure, yet this understanding could be wrong — or shortsighted. Apparently accidentally homophonous morphemes in any language can be used to empirically test our understanding of linguistic structure. If two meanings turn out to be homophonous in language after language, then this is an argument to reconsider the original analysis. From the present collection, it turns out that the exclusive is regularly homophonous with the first-person singular. In contrast, the inclusive is hardly found to be homophonous with the first-person singular. So there appears to be some correspondance between the first person and the exclusive, but not between the first person and the inclusive. Further, there are examples in which the inclusive is homophonous with the second person and examples in which the exclusive is homophonous with the third person — both options that appear to make sense semantically. However, these semantically transparent syncretisms are just as frequently attested as the contrasting opaque syncretisms, viz. inclusive with third person and exclusive with second person. There is thus no reason to assume a special connection between any of these categories. Specifically, the inclusive does not have a special relationship to the second person. This chapter is organised as follows. In Section 2, I will discuss some methodological considerations. The Sections 3 to 6 are the basis of the present chapter. In each of these sections, a long list of cases with a particular syncretism involving clusivity is presented and discussed. Section 3 discusses syncretisms between clusivity and first person. Section 4 discusses syncretisms between clusivity and second person. Section 5 discusses syncretisms between clusivity and third person. All theoretically possible syncretisms are attested, though only the one between exclusive and first person seems to be frequent enough to be typologically worth of further considerations. Finally, Section 6 discusses some special syncretisms between inclusive and exclusive. The characteristics of all these cases are summarised
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and analysed in Section 7. I will argue there that there is typologically no reason to give the syncretism between the inclusive and the second person a special status. This particular syncretism might make sense semantically/cognitively as it puts the addressee at the centre of the person marking, yet this syncretism is just as rarely found as other syncretisms, which are semantically/cognitively intransparant. In Section 8, I will discuss some attempts from the literature to make sense of the various syncretisms. I will criticise the appeal to purportedly widespread (or even universal) linguistic characteristics to explain a highly exotic and probably just incidental syncretism. Explanations should be on the same level of generalisation as the phenomenon that they try to explain. Common phenomena need more sweeping generalisations, while incidental phenomena should be approached with a situation-specific explanation.
2. Methodological musings This chapter consists of a collection of languages in which the morpheme that is used for inclusive or exclusive reference is also used for other kinds of person reference. The similarity between the marking of these different referential values should not be merely approximately, but the match has to be exact within the phonological structure of the language in question. The problem with approximate similarity is that it is notoriously difficult to handle. Should the number of phonemes that are different be counted, or maybe the number of phonemes that are identical, or both? Should the phonetic likeliness of the differing morphemes be valued? Even if one would find a suitable quantification of approximate likeliness, then it is still questionable whether this means anything. If two morphemes in a language differ in only one phoneme (e.g. English me, we, he and she), then they are of course closely alike, but the difference is still salient for the speakers of a language. To avoid this methodological muddle, I have decided to restrict my investigation to cases of exact likeliness (like the English you-singular and you-plural). The main body of this chapter will be a rather dry survey of languages that distinguish between an inclusive and an exclusive morpheme, yet either of those morphemes is exactly homophonous with another marker in the same person paradigm. Morphologically separatistic number markers are not considered as part of the person paradigm. I include examples of syncretism from all available kinds of person marking, whether they are independent pronouns, inflectional or clitic person marking, or pronominal possession. I did not include examples in which the overlap of marking is found in an inflectional paradigm for only one verb class (or noun class). The homophony should minimally be present in all instantiations of a particular paradigm — though it can (and often will) not be found throughout all paradigms of person in the whole language. Combination of categories in a paradigm can be called a structural ambiguity, a syncretism, or simply a homophony. I will use the term syncretism, which is
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intended as a neutral empirical cover‑term for all observed cases (cf. Luraghi 2000). Also, I do not distinguish languages in which this syncretism is a meaningful ambiguity, which reflects the conceptualisation of reality of a particular speech community, from those cases in which the syncretism is only an incidental result of phonological merger. Even when a syncretism is an incidental merger, then it is still part of the synchronic structure of a language, which is used by some human community of speakers. The simple, yet arduous task that I have set myself is to collect all cases that have such a syncretism and then to analyse these cases synchronically and diachronically. Two questions will be asked for every language that will be described in this chapter. First, is there any obligatory way in which the syncretism is disambiguated? It turns out that in many cases there is no obligatory instrument in the language structure that disambiguates the possible meanings of the syncretism. Only in those cases in which there is obligatory marking to disambiguate the syncretism, this strategy will be explicitly noted in this chapter. If there is no obligatory disambiguation, this will in most cases simply not be mentioned. The second question that will be asked for every language is whether the syncretism can readily be argued to be the result of a (recent) historical merger. If, for example, a phonological merger caused two erstwhile different morphemes to become identical, the resulting syncretism can be argued to be an incidental effect. A problem is that there are no historical data available for most languages that will be discussed in this chapter. To investigate the history of the syncretisms attested, I will draw either on close relatives (as in comparative reconstruction) or, incidentally, on language‑internal (ir)regularities (as in internal reconstruction). The present collection of cases is a result of rather ad hoc sampling. The problem with a consistent sampling strategy (cf. Rijkhoff & Bakker 1998) is that the kind of syncretisms that I am interested in is uncommon among the world’s languages. In a standard typological sample, these syncretisms would not even appear, or only as exceptions. This touches on a central problem with strict sampling procedures in typology. A sample can show which linguistic types are common among the world’s languages, but it cannot be used to analyse a type that is possible, yet uncommon. It is good practice to amend each large‑scale typology with a detailed investigation of uncommon types. A fine example of this method is the article on gender/number marking by Plank & Schellinger (1997). This article starts with the well‑known Greenbergian universals, which state that gender distinctions in the plural imply gender distinctions in the singular. However, the authors then show that, on closer inspection, a large set of ‘counter-examples’ exists. By collecting these ‘exceptional’ examples a deeper understanding of the possible variability of human language can be reached. Likewise, for this chapter I started from a large‑scale typological investigation of person marking (Cysouw 2003) in which syncretisms between clusivity and other person categories turned out to exist, yet to be uncommon. To further investigate the possible variability of human language, I amended the examples from that study with cases described in other publications and asked colleagues for any examples
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they happened to know of. Then I closely investigated the families and linguistic areas in which these syncretisms were attested. Clusivity is known to be an areal phenomenon (Jacobsen 1980; Nichols 1992; Cysouw 2005), so investigating areas known to show clusivity is prone to turn up more examples. By cyclically questioning specialists and investigating specific linguistic areas and/or families, I was able to expand the collection to the present size. However, it should not be forgotten that, notwithstanding the rather large collection of cases that will be presented shortly, the occurrence of a syncretism between clusivity and other person categories is typologically uncommon.
3. Clusivity and first person 3.1. Introduction Traditionally, inclusive and exclusive marking are seen as specifications of the firstperson plural. In this section, I will test this traditional approach empirically by searching for syncretisms between the inclusive and the first-person singular (Section 3.2) and between exclusive and first-person singular (Section 3.3). If inclusive and exclusive are indeed a kind of first person, then I expect to find languages that show a formal similarity between those categories. The most extreme form of similarity is complete identity, as surveyed in this chapter. Such complete identity does not occur frequently, but it is possible to find some examples among the wide variety of structures among the world’s languages. The result of this survey is that examples of inclusive/first-person syncretisms are much rarer than examples of an exclusive/first-person syncretism. This shows that the exclusive is indeed a kind of first person, but the inclusive is not (cf. Daniel, this volume).
3.2. Inclusive = first person As far as I have been able to find, there is only one language that has a regular syncretism between an inclusive and the first-person singular. In the so‑called ‘Past II stative’ paradigm in Binandere, a Goilalan language from New Guinea, the suffixes for both first-person singular and inclusive are ‑ana. In contrast, the exclusive suffix is ‑ara. All other tense/aspect paradigms show exactly the same syncretism (Capell 1969: 16–31). This syncretism is probably a relatively recent addition to the paradigm, as two close relatives, Orokaiva and Korafe, have exactly the same form of the suffixes, yet without an inclusive–exclusive opposition. The ‘indicative Mid Past B’ from Orokaiva has a first-person singular -ana and a first-person plural -ara (Healey et al. 1969: 62). The present indicative from Korafe has a first-person singular ena and a first-person plural -era (Farr & Farr 1975: 747–9). The structure of Binandere is quite possibly the result of an extension of an original first-person singular reference of -ana. However, the fact that Binandere is worldwide the only presently
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known example of a complete identity between inclusive and first-person singular indicates that the inclusive cannot systematically be regarded as a kind of first person. In contrast, the long list of examples of exclusive/first-person syncretisms, to be presented next, shows that the exclusive is a kind of first person.
3.3. Exclusive = first person The syncretism between exclusive and first-person singular is particularly prominent among the world’s languages. There are a few clear areal clusters of this syncretism. It is found in a few restricted areas among native American languages and among the Papuan languages of New Guinea. Except for these two macro-areas, there are various incidental examples. All examples of an exclusive/first-person syncretism in North America are attested in prefixal person paradigms. In all these cases, the exclusive is disambiguated from the first-person singular by a number affix. This pattern is found throughout the Central and Eastern branches of Algonquian, e.g. in Eastern Ojibwa (Bloomfield 1956: 44), Southwestern Ojibwe (Schwartz & Dunnigan 1986: 305), Menomini (Bloomfield 1962: 36–40), Cree (Wolfart 1996: 399–400) and Passamaquoddy‑Maliseet (Leavitt 1996: 9–10). The exclusive/first person is marked by a prefix n(i)- in contrast to a prefix k(i)- for the inclusive (this inclusive is in turn identical to the second person, cf. Section 4.2). Another example of an exclusive/firstperson syncretism is found in Winnebago, a Siouan language. In Winnebago, the ‘agentive’ inclusive is marked by a prefix hi- while the first person and exclusive are both marked by a prefix ha‑. This syncretism can be disambiguated by the use of a number suffix -wi’.1 This syncretism appears to be a singularity among the Siouan languages. Most other Siouan languages use the same prefix for both inclusive and exclusive in contrast to a different prefix for the first-person singular (e.g. in Mandan, Mixco 1997: 8; see also Section 6.3 below). However, the same syncretism as in Winnebago is also found in the Caddoan languages, which might be distantly related to the Siouan languages (Chafe 1976). In Caddo, the inclusive is marked by a prefix yi- and the exclusive/first person is marked by a prefix ci-. Again, the exclusive and first-person singular are disambiguated by number affixes (Chafe 1976: 65– 70; 1990: 66–7). The same syncretism is also found in the Caddoan languages Wichita (Rood 1996: 600) and Pawnee (Parks 1976: 164–75). In Mesoamerica, a few examples of an exclusive/first-person syncretism are attested in independent pronouns. In the Mixtecan languages, there is an ongoing development in which the exclusive independent pronoun (and the second-person plural pronoun) is reinterpreted as an honorific pronoun, used for humble self-reference. This change can be inferred from the variation among the Mixtecan languages. In some languages, there is a clear exclusive pronoun, apparently without honorific usage (e.g. Jamiltepec Mixtec, Johnson 1988: 114–16; Ayutla Mixtec, Hills 1990: 209–10). In some languages, this pronoun can be used for exclusive reference and for humble self-reference (e.g. Coatzospan Mixtec, Small 1990: 413–
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14; Silacayoapan Mixtec, Shields 1988: 406–7). Finally, there are a few languages, in which the formerly exclusive pronoun is solely used for humble self-reference and not for exclusive reference anymore (e.g. Chalcatongo Mixtec, Macaulay 1996: 138– 43; Ocotepec Mixtec, Alexander 1988: 263–4; Yosondúa Mixtec, Farris 1992: 134– 5; Diuxi-Tilantongo Mixtec, Kuiper & Oram 1991: 341). The inclusive pronoun is not affected by this change. In this last set of languages, the formerly first-person singular pronoun is now used both for the exclusive and for the first-person singular. This exclusive/first-person syncretism in the independent pronouns can be disambiguated by other linguistic means, but that does not appear to be obligatory. For example, Macaulay (1996: 81) remarks on Chalcatongo Mixtec that: “plurals . . . may be marked by addition of the prefix ká- to the verb stem when the subject is plural, and/or by various syntactic means.” An exclusive/first-person syncretism is also found in Chocho, a Popolocan language (Veerman-Leichsenring 2000: 325– 7).2 Other Popolocan languages do not show this syncretism. The Popolocan languages are only distantly related to Mixtecan (both are part of Oto-Manguean), but the Chocho language is spoken in the direct vicinity of the above mentioned Mixtecan languages with an exclusive/first-person syncretism (in the western part of the Mexican state of Oaxaca). The syncretism in Chocho is thus probably a result of language contact. Also in Mesoamerica, inflectional exclusive/first-person syncretisms are found in Sierra Popoluca, a Mixe‑Zoque language (Foster & Foster 1948: 17–19; Elson 1960: 207) and in Huave, a Huavean language (Stairs & Hollenbach 1969: 48–53; see also Section 5.2). In both languages, number suffixes disambiguate the exclusive from the first-person singular. In South America, the exclusive/first-person syncretism is attested as an areal feature in central Peru. It is found in all Campa languages, a subgroup of the Arawakan family, both in the independent pronouns and in the verb inflection (e.g. Asheninca, Reed & Payne 1986: 324–7; Nomatsiguenga, Wise 1971: 647; Caquinte, Swift 1988: 61–2). The same syncretism, both in pronouns and inflection, is also attested in Jaqaru (Hardman 1966: 79) and the closely related language Aymara (Hardman 2001: 105–19). Surrounded by Aymara-speaking population, the closely related language Uru and Chipaya have the same syncretism in their pronominal prefixes (Crevels & Muysken, this volume). A further example of this structure is the inflection from Tarma Quechua (Adelaar 1977: 89–93, 127–8). In Huallaga Quechua, a close relative of Tarma Quechua within subgroup I of the Quechuan languages, the exclusive is disambiguated from the first-person singular by the obligatory addition of the nominal plural marking -kuna. The areal distribution of these languages is striking. All are spoken in close vicinity of each other in central Peru, extending eastwards into Bolivia. The pronominal systems of these languages are strongly alike: they are all ‘4-person’ systems, consisting of first, second, third person (without singular/plural distinction) and a separate inclusive. Within each of their genetic families, these languages are unique in having such a structure. Their similarity is thus clearly the result of areal influence. Also in South America, but outside this area in Peru, an exclusive/first-person syncretism is also found in the independent
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pronouns and verbal inflection of Canela-Kraho, a Gé language from Brazil (Popjes & Popjes 1986: 175) and in the inflection of Maká, a Mataco‑Guaicuruan language from Paraguay (Gerzenstein 1994: 83–97). In New Guinea, the exclusive/first-person syncretism is attested regularly among independent pronouns. In Nimboran (Anceaux 1965: 167) and in the Border languages Imonda (Seiler 1985: 44) and Amanab (Minch 1991: 31–2) the first-person singular pronoun is also used with exclusive reference, but there is a different pronoun for inclusive reference. In Nimboran, the verb inflection has the same syncretism, although there are number affixes that disambiguate the exclusive from the first-person singular (Anceaux 1965: 83–91).3 These languages are all spoken in an area around the border between Irian-Jaya and Papua New Guinea on the northern side of the Island. More examples of the exclusive/first-person syncretism are attested among the Tanna languages, a subgroup of Austronesian spoken in Vanuatu. The five Tanna languages, Kwamera, Lenakel, North Tanna, Southwest Tanna and Whitesands, all have the same prefix for first person and exclusive. Both meanings are regularly differentiated by number affixes (Lynch 1967; 1978: 45; Lindstrom & Lynch 1994: 10). Other languages closely related to Tanna do not have this syncretism (e.g. Ura, Crowley 1998: 21; see also Section 5.2). An exclusive/first-person syncretism is also found in Tiwi, a language spoken on a little island near Australia. The subject prefix in transitive constructions is ngi(mpi)- for first-person singular and for exclusive reference (Osborne 1974: 38; Lee 1987: 173). In Warrwa, a Nyulnyulan language from mainland Australia, the actor prefix nga/ka- is used both for first person and exclusive, in contrast to a prefix ya- for inclusive (McGregor 1994: 41). This syncretism is a recent merger because in Bardi, a close relative of Warrwa, the forms for first-person singular ŋa- and exclusive aŋ- are still differentiated (Metcalfe 1975: 123). In Nyulnyul, another close relative of Warrwa, the inclusive and exclusive marking has merged, using the formerly inclusive prefix ya- (McGregor 1996: 40–1; see also Section 6.3 below). Finally, three geographically scattered cases with an exclusive/first-person syncretism are the subject prefixes from Svan, a South Caucasian language (Tuite 1997: 23, disambiguated by number suffixes), the subject prefixes from Ngiti, a Nilo-Saharan language (Kutsch Lojenga 1994: 190–3, 220) and the independent pronouns from Chrau, a Mon-Khmer language. The first-person pronoun in Chrau “may be used as plural without modification . . . but plurality is often indicated by preposing kha or khay” (Thomas 1971: 138). In all these scattered cases, close relatives do not show an inclusive/first-person syncretism.
3.4. Summary There is a clear asymmetry between the two possible syncretisms reviewed in this section. Judging from the many exclusive/first-person syncretisms attested, the exclusive can indeed be seen as a special kind of first person. In contrast, the solitary
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example of an inclusive/first-person syncretism indicates that the inclusive is not a kind of first person. However, the inclusive might be a kind of second person. This option will be taken up in the next section.
4. Clusivity and second person 4.1. Introduction In this section, examples of syncretisms between clusivity and second person are presented. First, in Section 4.2, the possibility of a syncretism between inclusive and second person is discussed. There are indeed such syncretisms, yet the number of examples is not overwhelming. In Section 4.3, some apparent cases of an inclusive/second-person syncretism are dismissed, because the inclusive forms are combinations of first- and second-person marking. Finally, in Section 4.4, a survey is presented of syncretism between exclusive and second person. From a semantic point of view, the existence of such syncretisms is strange because exclusive and second person do not have any referential overlap. Still, such syncretisms exist and are about as frequent as inclusive/second-person syncretisms.
4.2. Inclusive = second person The notoriously recurring example in the literature of a syncretism between inclusive and second person is the Algonquian family (e.g. Zwicky 1977: 720–3; Plank 1985: 141–3; Hewson 1991: 862–5; Noyer 1992: 155–7). The crucial phenomenon in Algonquian is the occurrence of a person prefix ki‑ for both inclusive and second person. This is found throughout the Central and Eastern branches of Algonquian, e.g. in Eastern Ojibwa (Bloomfield 1956: 44), Southwestern Ojibwe (Schwartz & Dunnigan 1986: 305), Menomini (Bloomfield 1962: 36–40), Cree (Wolfart 1996: 399–400) and Passamaquoddy‑Maliseet (Leavitt 1996: 9–10). The pronominal prefixes can be reconstructed for Proto-Algonquian (Bloomfield 1946: 97–9; Goddard 1990: 108) and probably the inclusive usage of ki‑ as well (Richard Rhodes, p.c.). In contrast, the syncretism is not attested in Blackfoot, where ki‑ is only used for second person and not for inclusive reference (Frantz 1991: 22). It is important to realise that this syncretism in Algonquian is always disambiguated by various number suffixes, also distinguishing some person categories (see the end of section 4.3 for a discussion of the implications of the existence of these suffixes). Besides the Algonquian languages, it turns out to be rather difficult to find good examples of a syncretism between inclusive and second person. The following examples are all incidental cases within their linguistic family. A particularly fine case is the independent pronoun paradigm from Sanuma, a Yanomam language from Venezuela/Brazil. In Sanuma, the pronoun (ka)makö is used for both inclusive as well as second-person plural reference. The contrasting pronoun samakö is used
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for exclusive reference (Borgman 1990: 149). There is no verbal inflection, nor any other linguistic device that disambiguates this syncretism. Also in South America, though independent from Sanuma, an inclusive/second-person syncretisms is also attested in the independent pronouns and the verbal prefixes of Itonama, an isolate from Bolivia (Camp & Liccardi 1965: 332, 375; Crevels & Muysken, this volume). A further example of this syncretism is found in Lavukaleve, an East Papuan language from the Solomon Islands. The pronominal prefix me‑ is used both for inclusive and second-person plural (Terrill 2003: 242–4). This syncretism is probably the result of a recent merger. The closely related language Savosavo differentiates between an inclusive mai and a second-person plural me (Todd 1975: 813). Fourth, the secondperson plural agent pronominal prefix -bà from Kiowa, a Tanoan language from North America, is also used to mark inclusive (Watkins 1984: 113). The closely related language Southern Tiwa does not mark clusivity (Allen & Frantz 1978: 11). Fifth, the Kiranti (Tibeto‑Burman) language Kulung has a dual suffix ‑ci, just as all other Kiranti languages. However, in Kulung, the inclusive and the second-person dual are not marked by any other morphological device, leaving an inclusive/second-person syncretism (Tolsma 1997: 107). Sixth, the Papuan language Inanwatan, spoken on the Bird’s Head (Irian Jaya), has an inclusive/second-person plural syncretism in the independent pronouns for object íwe, emphatic subject dewawaro and oblique íga(dara), though there is no syncretism for subject pronouns nor for the possessive pronouns (de Vries 2004: 27–9). The same syncretism is also found in the person prefixes on verbs (de Vries 2004: 36). The inclusive–exclusive distinction is very likely introduced individually into various languages in the Bird’s Head by Austronesian contact. In the case of Inanwatan, the exclusive subject pronoun níiti appears to be the original first-person pronoun, and the inclusive dáiti is made on the basis of the second-person singular áiti by adding the possessive plural prefix da-. However, this only happened for the subject pronouns. In all other paradigms, the new inclusive category became simply coded alike to the second person plural.4 Finally, the direct object prefixes from the non‑Pama‑Nyungan language Tiwi in Australia use a prefix mani‑ both for inclusive and second-person plural (Osborne 1974: 39; Lee 1987: 180) There are two more languages with a syncretism between inclusive and second person. In both these languages, the syncretism is attested in a phonologically reduced variant of the personal pronouns. The syncretism is not attested in the full forms, so the syncretism in the reduced forms can readily be interpreted as example of an ongoing merger. The first case is Diola‑Fogny, an Atlantic (Niger‑Congo) language from Senegal. In this language, verbs have prefixal bound pronouns. The short versions of these prefixes show a prefix u‑ for both inclusive and second-person singular.5 However, the inclusive meaning is obligatorily disambiguated from the second-person singular by a suffix ‑a(e) (Sapir 1965: 90–1, see also Section 5.3). The second case of an inclusive/second-person syncretism in reduced pronouns is attested in Acehnese, a Chamic language spoken in Northern Sumatra (Indonesia). The full forms of the independent pronoun clearly distinguish an inclusive
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(geu)tanyoe from a second-person (informal) gata. However, the corresponding clitics are identical, either ta‑ as a prefix or -teu(h) as a suffix (Durie 1985: 117).
4.3. Dismissing other apparent inclusive/second-person syncretisms There are a few languages for which an inclusive/second-person syncretism is claimed in the literature, but I will argue that these syncretisms are only superficial phenomena for two different reasons. First, there are a few languages that have a number marker, which happens to be found only in the inclusive and in the secondperson plural. This might look like an inclusive/second-person syncretism, but the syncretism is not found in the person marking, but in the number marking. This is, for example, the case in Quechua. Mannheim (1982: 147) claims an inclusive/second-person syncretism for Quechua. There is indeed an identical suffix ‑cis both in the inclusive and in the second person in some of the Quechuan languages (cf. Pottier 1963; van de Kerke 1996: 120–5). However, this is neither a syncretism of the complete person markers (the inclusive suffix is ‑ncis and the second-person plural suffix is ‑nkicis), nor is it found in all Quechuan languages. Originally, the suffix ‑cis has been combined with the second-person singular ‑n‑ki to form the second-person plural ‑n‑ki‑cis. The suffix ‑cis can probably be related historically to a particle indicating abundance (Cerrón Palomina 1987: 271). Another example of a number marker that is attested only in the inclusive and the second person is the suffix ‑Vmu from Muna, a Western Malayo‑Polynesian language from Sulawesi (van den Berg 1989: 51, 53, 81). This is not counted as a syncretism here because the real person markers are prefixes, the suffix ‑Vmu being probably best analysed as a number suffix, which only happens to be used in the inclusive and the second person. The person prefixes of Muna will appear later on in Section 5.2, because these prefixes have a syncretism between inclusive and third person. The second reason why some claims for an inclusive/second-person syncretism from the literature are not included here is that the apparent syncretism is, on closer inspection, only part of the story. The problem is that inclusive marking in some language is a combination of first- and second-person marking. A clear example of such a combination is the inclusive pronoun yumi — made from the English pronouns you and me — as attested in Tok Pisin and some other English based Creoles in the Pacific (Mühlhäusler 1986: 161). This is of course no syncretism between inclusive and second person. It could just as well be called a syncretism between inclusive and first person. In fact, the inclusive meaning is established neatly componentially by combining first- and second-person morphology into one word. There are numerous variants on this theme. A more detailed discussion of this phenomenon is presented under the heading ‘A note on hybrid inclusives’ in section 7 of Daniel (this volume). He argues that there are different kinds of componentiality involved, an analysis which I subscribe. However, a finer-grained differentiation does not lessen the point that these inclusives use a combination of first- and second-person markers (however complicated the semanic details), and can thus just
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as well be considered a kind of first person as a kind of second person. They cannot be used to argue for a special link between inclusive and second person. A nice illustration of a componential construction is the inclusive marking from Maybrat, a West Papuan language from Irian Jaya. To express the inclusive, the second-person plural independent pronoun anu is used, so it might look like there is an inclusive/second-person syncretism. Actually, the inclusive “is expressed by using the free pronoun anu followed by a verb that takes a first-person plural person prefix p‑” (Dol 1999: 70), as illustrated in (1). The inclusive is marked by a combination of second and first-person marking, so there is no special connection between inclusive and second person.
(1) Maybrat (Dol 1999: 71) anu p‑kias ania 2pl.pron 1pl‑tell recip ‘You (and) we, we tell each other.’
This problem is of importance for the case of Khoekhoe (=Nama/Damara), a Khoe language from Namibia.6 In this language, it appears as if the so‑called ‘pronominal root’ saa shows a syncretism between inclusive and second person. I will argue that this is not the case (in contrast to an earlier claim in Cysouw 2001: 151). The central problem is that saa only has the inclusive interpretation in combination with a first-person clitic attached to it. In this combination, the inclusive meaning can be constructed componentially from the constituting parts ‘you’ + ‘we’, just as the Tok Pisin inclusive yumi consists of the parts ‘you’ + ‘I’. The meaning of saa is only ‘you’ and the apparent syncretism with the inclusive is a result of the combination with a first-person clitic. I will present two arguments for this analysis of Khoekhoe, a synchronic and a diachronic one. For the synchronic argument, it is important to understand the structure of Khoekhoe person marking. The main device for person marking in Khoekhoe is the pronominal clitic (called ‘person–gender–number marker’ (PGN) by Hagman 1977, but ‘nominal designant’ (Nd) by Haacke 1977). These clitics do not mark clusivity. Besides these clitics there are also pronominal roots. The pronominal roots (among them saa) only occur sparingly, and if they occur, they are almost always followed by a pronominal clitic. The only constructions in which the roots are not followed by a clitic is when marking pronominal possession, and then the only possible reference of saa is second-person singular (Hagman 1977: 36; Haacke 1977: 47–8). The only way to get inclusive reference is by a combination of second-person saa with a first-person non‑singular clitic (Hagman 1977: 43–4). For the diachronic argument it is important to realise that Khoisan is not a genetic unit. At the present stage of knowledge, it consists at least of three families and a few isolates (Güldemann & Vossen 2000). As explained above, Khoekhoe is part of the Khoe family (formerly ‘Central Khoisan’). The pronominal clitics can be confidentially reconstructed for proto‑Khoe (Vossen 1997: 377). The reconstruction of the pronominal roots is less straightforward (Vossen 1997: 368). However,
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it is clear that clusivity is not part of the reconstructed pronominal roots in proto‑Khoe — it is an innovation of Khoekhoe. Güldemann (2002: 51–3) argues that clusivity in Khoekhoe is borrowed from a language of the !Ui‑Taa family (‘Southern Khoisan’). Following this proposal, the only pronominal roots to be reconstructed for proto‑Khoe are *tii for first person and *saa for second person (Güldemann argues here against Vossen 1997: 368). Khoekhoe has borrowed the exclusive root *sii from !Ui-Taa, using its own second-person root *saa together with the pronominal clitics to form the missing inclusive (as described above). It turns out that real inclusive/second-person syncretism is only attested in the Algonquian family and in a few incidental cases. However, the Algonquian case is not beyond doubt. In the Algonquian languages, the inclusive/second-person syncretism in the prefixes is obligatorily disambiguated by suffixes for all non-singular categories. These suffixes might be considered plural suffixes, as they only occur in the non-singular. However, they have different forms for first (-min), second (-m) and third person (-wak) plural. Taking the history of the Khoekhoe person marking as an guide, one might speculate that clusivity was not part of proto‑Algic (just as it is not found in the other major northern American families Salish, Athabascan, and Eskimo‑Aleut). Its history could have been as follows. First there were person suffixes without marking clusivity and later the person prefixes, also without clusivity, were innovated. The new inclusive category was made by combining the second-person prefix with the first-person suffix. The reason for this innovation might have been contact (e.g. with the Iroquoian languages, which all have a clear inclusive–exclusive opposition). In this interpretation, the Algonquian inclusive is a semantically transparent combination of first- and second-person markers, and I would not consider it a case of inclusive/second-person syncretism. However, the comparative details of Algonquian person marking have to be investigated more closely to backup this speculation. Untill a clear decision to the contrary, I will interpret the Algonquian prefixes as a case of an inclusive/second-person syncretism. To summarise, inclusive/second-person syncretisms exist among the world’s languages but the number of examples is not overwhelming. The question now remains how frequent other theoretically possible syncretisms involving clusivity are. As I will show below, the other possibilities are at least as common as the inclusive/ second-person syncretism.
4.4. Exclusive = second person Syncretism between exclusive and second person are particularly prominent among Austronesian languages on and around the island Timor. In various languages of the Timor subgroup of Central Malayo‑Polynesian, the subject prefix m‑ is used for exclusive as well as for second-person singular and plural. This is found in Lamalera (Keraf 1978: 74–6), Dawanese (Steinhauer 1993: 133), Kisar (Blood 1992: 3), Sika (Lewis & Grimes 1995: 605) and Roti (Fox & Grimes 1995: 615). This
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syncretism is probably an accidental merger of the proto Central Malayo‑Polynesian prefixes ma‑ for exclusive, mi‑ for second-person plural and mu‑ for secondperson singular (Blust 1993: 258–9). These prefixes are, for example, still differentiated in Kola (Takata 1992: 54). A syncretism between exclusive and second-person plural is also found in various Western Oceanic (also Austronesian) languages. It is found in the subject prefix a‑ from Yabem (Ross 1995: 707), the subject prefix m‑ from Sobei (Sterner 1987: 37), the object suffix ‑mi and the possessive clitic amia from Mekeo (Jones 1998: 150–1, 208–10, 230) and the inalienable possessive suffix ‑min from Central Buang (Hooley 1995: 734). Interestingly, there is also one Western Oceanic language in which the syncretism between exclusive and second person is found in independent pronouns, namely in Nehan (Todd 1978: 1183–6). The pronoun for exclusive and for second-person plural is ingam. This might seem a rather different construction as in the Austronesian languages mentioned so far. However, the first- and secondperson pronouns of Nehan appear to be constructed on the basis of a root ing‑. The syncretism thus consists only of the suffix ‑am. This is probably the same merger as the other Austronesian syncretisms that have been discussed. In the Remote Oceanic language Buma, the subject prefixes show an exclusive/third-person syncretism both in the dual (-ba) and in the plural (-pi/pe). The same syncretism is also attested in the Micronesian languages Ulithian and Trukese. In Ulithian, the subject pronoun xa can be used for reference to the exclusive as well as to the second-person plural (Sohn & Bender 1973: 42, 101–5). In Trukese, the comparable syncreted subject pronoun is jëwy (Dyen 1965: 12). Following the tradition of Micronesian descriptions, these markers are called ‘(short) subject pronouns’, but they seem to be obligatorily present before each verb, so they are probably better not interpreted as independent pronouns, but as proclitics, or maybe even as prefixes. Outside of the Austronesian stock, there are three examples of a syncretism between exclusive and second person. The first of these is found in the southern dialect of Udihe (called Bikin), a Tungusic language from Russia, in which the suffix ‑u marks for both person categories (Nikolaeva & Tolskaya 2001: 212). In an older survey of the Tungusic languages, Benzing (1955) does not find this syncretism in any Tungusic language. He differentiates for Udihe between a suffix ‑u for exclusive and a suffix ‑hu for second-person plural (Benzing 1955: 1078). However, according to Nikolaeva & Tolskaya (2001: 51), there is no phonemic /h/ in southern Udihe. In northern Udihe, the original /h/ is conserved as a pharyngealisation of the following vowel, so in this variant there is still a difference between a plain ‑u for the exclusive and a pharyngealised ‑u for second-person plural. In southern Udihe, the pharyngealised vowels have become long vowels, but vowel length is being lost, especially word‑finally, leading to the syncretism of the exclusive and the secondperson plural (I. Nikolaeva, p.c.) The final cases of an exclusive/second-person syncretism are found among the non‑Pama‑Nyungan language from northern Australia. The first is attested in
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Burarra. The intransitive prefixes nyirri‑ (for dual) and nyiburr‑ (for plural) mark both for exclusive and second person (Glasgow 1984). In the closely related language Ndjébbana (McKay 2000: 240), the exclusive and second person are distinguished, but the difference consists only of an initial lamino‑palatal nasal for the exclusive (njirri‑ for unit augmented and njarra‑ for augmented) versus an initial apical‑alveolar nasal for the second person (nirri‑ for unit augmented and narra‑ for augmented). These two sounds appear to have merged in Burarra, leading to the present syncretism between exclusive and second person. The other example is Tiwi, which presently has no known close relative. The intransitive prefixes from Tiwi are identical for exclusive and second-person plural: ngimpi‑ for non‑past and nginti‑ for past (Osborne 1974: 38; Lee 1987: 173).
4.5. Summary As shown in Section 4.2, it is not very common, outside the Algonquian languages, for inclusives and second person to be identical. Among the fifteen cases presented, the best cases are Sanuma, Itonama, and Inanwatan, in which the syncretism is attested in the independent pronouns. There are a few examples, discussed in Section 4.3, which, on closer inspection, do not turn out to be examples of real syncretism between inclusive and second person. A central argument to disqualify apparent syncretism is the fact that the inclusive is a combination of first- and second-person markers. The sixteen cases presented in Section 4.4 show that it not at all unheard of that there is a syncretism between exclusive and second person. Among these cases, there is even one language (Nehan) that shows this syncretism in its independent pronouns. All examples appear to be cases of relatively recent merger, because closely related languages do not have the same syncretism. Only in the Timor family, various (but far from all) closely related languages show the same syncreted person-marking structure. However, even if all examples are historical coincidences, this still leaves open the question why the semantically rather disparate categories ‘exclusive’ and ‘second person’ are not disambiguated. Apparently, there is no absolute need to do so. Comparing the two collections, there appears to be no reason to consider the inclusive/second-person syncretism to be more ‘regular’ than the exclusive/secondperson syncretism. For both syncretisms, almost all examples are inflectional, but incidental examples (Sanuma/Itonama, Inanwatan, and Nehan, respectively) show that it is also possible for independent pronouns to have either syncretism. Further, both syncretisms are generally found in isolated cases (meaning that close relatives do not have the same syncretism), except for one genetic group for either syncretisms in which the syncretism is widespread (Algonquian and Timor, respectively).
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5. Clusivity and third person 5.1. Introduction As shown in the previous section, it is possible for the inclusive and for the exclusive to be identical to the second person. The logical next question is whether it is also possible for the inclusive or exclusive to be identical to the third person. As will be shown in this section, it is indeed possible to have either an inclusive/third-person syncretism (Section 5.2) or an exclusive/third-person syncretism (Section 5.3). Further, the number of cases and the general structural characteristics will turn out to be much alike in both syncretisms. The empirical evidence for these two syncretisms will even turn out to be comparable to the syncretisms with second person as surveyed in the previous section. All four theoretical possibilities are roughly equally common and show a comparable world-wide distribution.
5.2. Inclusive = third person A syncretism between inclusive and third person is consistently found in the subject prefixes of the Tanna languages from Vanuatu. Genetically, these languages belong to the Central‑Eastern Oceanic branch of the Austronesian stock. The five Tanna languages — Kwamera, Lenakel, North Tanna, Southwest Tanna and Whitesands — all have a syncretism between the inclusive and the third person non‑singular, using a prefix k‑ for both referential categories (Lynch 1967: 46–8; Lindstrom & Lynch 1994: 10–12; Lynch 1978: 45). The Tanna languages are a subgroup of the Southern Vanuatu family and for Proto‑Southern Vanuatu, Lynch (1986: 274) reconstructs an opposition between an inclusive prefix k(V)‑ and a third-person plural prefix γ-.This opposition is still attested in Ura, another language from the Southern Vanuatu family, where the inclusive prefix is (g)ur‑ and the prefix for third-person plural (γ)ir‑ (Crowley 1998: 21). The syncretism in the Tanna languages is thus a relatively recent merger. However, this syncretism in the person inflection does not cause the independent pronouns to be used for disambiguation. For example, Lynch notes about Lenakel that there is a “homophony between k‑ ‘first inclusive’, and k‑ ‘third non‑singular’; which of these is actually present is almost always determined by the context” (Lynch 1978: 45). The same merger is also attested in Atchin, a language from the North and Central Vanuatu family, showing that this merger is not a singularity of the Tanna languages. In Atchin, the suffix for inalienable pronominal possession is ‑r for both the inclusive and the third-person plural. The possessive pronouns that are used for alienable possession are derived from these suffixes and consequently show the same syncretism (Capell and Layard 1980: 55–6). Still within Oceanic, this syncretism is found in Nalik, a Western Oceanic language from New Ireland and in Buma, a Remote Oceanic language from the Santa Cruz islands. In Buma, the subject prefixes show an inclusive/third-person syncretism both in the dual (‑la) and in the plural (-li/le). In Nalik, the prefixal subject
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marker di(a)‑ is used for both inclusive and third-person plural (Volker 1998: 47– 51). The speakers of Nalik are well aware of this syncretism, which is proven by the fact that the syncretism is taken over by some speakers into their variant of Tok Pisin, replacing the Tok Pisin inclusive independent pronoun yumi by the Tok Pisin third-person plural pronoun ol (Volker 1998: 48). Another example of this syncretism is found in Muna, a Western Malayo‑Polynesian language from Sulawesi (Indonesia), distantly related to the previous cases within the Austronesian stock. In Muna, the subject prefix do‑ is used for both inclusive and third-person plural (van den Berg 1989: 53). The potential ambiguity does not result in an obligatorily used personal pronoun: “the personal pronouns are optionally used . . . to emphasise the subject of a verbal predicate, in addition to the subject marker” (van den Berg 1989: 82). Roughly within the same area, yet genetically unrelated to the previous cases, this syncretism is also attested in Hatam, a West Papuan language from the Bird’s Head (Irian Jaya). Both the subject prefix i(g)‑ (Reesink 1999: 51) and the prefix i(p)‑ for inalienable possession (Reesink 1999: 48) are used for inclusive as well as for third-person plural. At the other side of the world, a syncretism between inclusive and third person is attested in the pronominal prefixes from Huave, a Huavean language from Mexico. There is massive allophony in these pronominal prefixes, but in all allophones the inclusive is identical to the third person. This indicates that the syncretism is not a random merger, though there is no comparative information to shed light on the history of this structure. The syncretism is obligatorily disambiguated by various suffixes that mark non‑singular (Stairs & Hollenbach 1969: 48–53). A special case is the extinct language Tupínambá, a Tupí language from Brazil. We only know about this language because two missionaries described it in the 16th and 17th century. From these descriptions, Rodrigues (1990) extracts the fact that the subject prefixes ya‑ and o‑ can be used both for inclusive and for third person reference, yet only in transitive clauses. No syncretism is found in intransitive clauses, ya‑ is consistently used for inclusive and o‑ for third person (Rodrigues 1990: 396). In this usage, the prefixes are identical to the reconstructed active prefixes from Proto‑Tupí‑Guaraní (Jensen 1990: 120). However, in transitive sentences in Tupínambá, both these prefixes can be used for inclusive as well as for third person. The precise interpretation of the transitive use of these prefixes remains somewhat mysterious, though Rodrigues argues that it is related to the marking of focus. No contemporary Tupí language has been described to show this syncretism, so the old Tupínambá grammars are the only source of information (see Section 7 for a summary of the analysis by Rodrigues). The independent pronouns from Tupínambá show exactly the same referential structure as the prefixes with the same syncretism between inclusive and third person (Rodrigues 1990: 396, 402). Finally, mention has to be made of the Kiranti (Tibeto‑Burman) language in this context. The dual in the Kiranti languages is marked using a suffix ‑ci (e.g. Athpare, Ebert 1997a: 23–38; Camling, Ebert 1997b: 16–24) or ‑ti (e.g. Dumi, van Driem 1993a: 95–9). The exclusive suffix is generally explicitly marked in contrast to the
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other persons (in Athpare with ‑ciŋa, in Camling with ‑cka and in Dumi with ‑ti). As a result, the inclusive dual suffix is identical to both the second- and third-person dual. The second-person dual is disambiguated by root changes and a prefix (t)a‑ (except for Kulung, see Section 3.2). There remains a complete syncretism between the inclusive dual and the third-person dual in Athpare, Camling and Dumi (see van Driem 1993b; 1997; 1990 for a comparative analysis of the Kiranti person markers).
5.3. Exclusive = third person A syncretism between exclusive and third person is attested in the Cariban language Wai Wai. The pronominal prefix for both exclusive and third person is n(î)‑, as opposed to the prefix for inclusive, which is t(î)‑ (Hawkins 1998: 178–9). The syncretism between exclusive and third person is regularly disambiguated by the use of an exclusive independent pronoun amna. Exactly the same structure is also found in the closely related language Hixkaryana (Derbyshire 1979: 146–9). In a survey of the Cariban family, Derbyshire (1999) notes that a syncretism between exclusive and third person appears to be the rule in the Cariban family: “except for Makushi and Kuikúro, the [exclusive] prefix is identical in form and function with third person, and a free pronoun ana (or cognate) is always present [to mark exclusive reference, M. C.]” (Derbyshire 1999: 32).7 The languages that have an exclusive/third-person syncretism in this survey by Derbyshire are Kariña (=Carib), Tiriyó (=Trio), Carijona, Kashuyana, Wai Wai, Hixkaryana, Waimiri‑Atroari, Arekuna, Akawaio, Wayana, Dekwana, Bakairí and Txikão.8 The exceptions to this Cariban idiosyncrasy, Makushi and Kuikúro, both have innovated specialised marking for the exclusive. These innovations have been independent developments because these languages are neither close relatives within Cariban nor spoken in each other’s neighbourhood and the innovative exclusive morphemes are not cognate. The language Panare also does not have this syncretism because the inclusive–exclusive distinction has been lost in the prefixes (Gildea 1989; Derbyshire 1999: 32–3). The loss of clusivity has resulted in an even more extensive syncretism as the already syncreted exclusive/third person prefix has expanded its meaning to cover also inclusive reference. The same development has taken place in Kapón and Pemón (S. Gildea, p.c.). Besides the Cariban languages, there are a few incidental cases that also show a syncretism between exclusive and third person. It is, for example, found in Shuswap, a Salish language from Canada. None of the other Salish languages has an opposition between inclusive and exclusive, and it is consequently not part of a reconstruction of the pronominal elements of Proto‑Salish (Newman 1980: 156; Davis 2000). In Shuswap, however, the third person suffix ‑əs is also used for the exclusive; the inclusive is marked by ‑ət, the equivalent of the Proto‑Salish first-person plural suffix *‑at. The syncretism between exclusive and third person can optionally be disambiguated by the morphologically independent element kwəxw for the exclusive (Kuipers 1974: 45, 59).9 The origin of this construction is not yet conclusively re-
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solved. Van Eijk (this volume) argues that the existence of clusivity in Shuswap is the result of influence by neighbouring Algonquian languages. Van Eijk proposes that the independent element kwəxw is related to the proto‑Salish second-person subject clitic *kəxw. This clitic has been reanalysed as a first-person marker kwu in Kalispel and Okanogan. In Shuswap, the combination of this person marker with a third person inflected verb results in an exclusive reference.10 Another example of this syncretism in America is attested in Kiowa, a Tanoan language of Southwestern USA. In Kiowa, the exclusive agent prefix è‑ is identical to the inverse third person marking (Watkins 1984: 113). In the closely related language Southern Tiwa, which does not mark clusivity, the first and third person non‑singular are identical (in‑ for dual and i‑ for plural, Allen & Frantz 1978: 11). This correspondence is analysed by Watkins (1984: 127–8) as a sign of the historical relationship between the languages. Two other examples of this syncretism come from New Guinea, yet from opposite corners of this linguistically diverse island. First, it is attested in Binandere, a Goilalan language from southeastern New Guinea. There are many different tense‑aspect variants of the verbal person suffixes in this language, but in all these paradigms, the exclusive is identical to the third-person plural. The large variety of paradigms showing this syncretism in this language indicates that it is not a recent merger but a structural property of the language (Capell 1969: 16–31; see also Section 3.2). Two closely related languages, Orokaiva (Healey et al. 1969: 62) and Korafe (Farr & Farr 1975: 747–9), both have a comparable syncretism between first-person plural and third-person plural but without a separate inclusive. Second, a syncretism between exclusive and third-person singular is attested in Hatam, a West Papuan language from the Bird’s Head, the northwestern end of New Guinea. The inalienable possession prefix for both exclusive and third-person singular reference is ni(p)‑. The verbal subject prefixes are almost identical to these prefixes for inalienable possession, yet the third-person singular on verbs is zero, so that the exclusive–third person syncretism is not found in the subject prefixes (Reesink 1999: 48, 51). Finally, I know of two cases with an exclusive/third-person syncretism in Africa. In Diola‑Fogny, an Atlantic (Niger‑Congo) language from Senegal, verbs have prefixal bound pronouns (cf. Section 4.2 above). The short versions of these prefixes show a prefix a‑ that is used for both exclusive and third-person singular. This recent merger is not disambiguated by any other linguistic material (Sapir 1965: 90–1). In Buduma, a Chadic (Afro-Asiatic) language from Chad/Nigeria, both the exclusive and the third-person plural are marked with the prefix yə- and this syncretism is normally not disambiguated by the linguistic marking (Awagana 2001: 62–3). Such a syncretism is not found in any other Chadic language.
5.4. Summary There are fifteen examples with a syncretism between the inclusive and the third person, as described in Section 5.2. Among these, there is one narrow genetic family in which all members have the same syncretism (the Tanna languages). In some
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of the fifteen languages, the syncretism is obligatorily disambiguated (in particular in Huave), but in most cases this does not seem to be the case. In Nalik, this syncretism appears to be a completely normal and accepted part of the linguistic awareness within the speech community. This can be concluded from the fact that the same syncretism is taken over into their dialect of Tok Pisin. In general, the syncretism between inclusive and third person is just as common and normal as the inclusive/second-person syncretism that has been discussed in Section 4.2. The set of syncretisms between exclusive and third person, as described in Section 5.3, has the same characteristics. There are slightly more examples with this syncretism (nineteen languages) due to its widespread occurrence in the Carib family. In the Cariban languages, the syncretism is regularly disambiguated by use of an independent pronoun for the exclusive. However, the syncretism is not obligatorily disambiguated in the remaining four examples, which are found widely dispersed throughout the world’s languages. To summarise, there seems to be no typological reason to consider either the inclusive/third person or the exclusive–third person syncretism to be more common than the other or more common than the previously discussed syncretisms inclusive/second person and exclusive–second person.
6. Mixes of inclusive and exclusive 6.1. Introduction The final syncretism involving clusivity to be discussed in this chapter are syncretisms between inclusive and exclusive reference. The most obvious kind of such a syncretism is a morphemes like the English pronoun we, which is used for all inclusive and all exclusive reference. Such syncretisms are common and will not further be considered here because there is simply no clusivity marked at all. In this section, cases will be considered in which there is clusivity marked in some sense, but the difference between the various morphemes involved do not follow along the standard division between inclusive and exclusive.11 The best way to approach these curious divisions is by starting from a minimal‑augmented person marking system. In a minimal‑augmented system, there are three different forms for ‘we’. First, there is the ‘minimal inclusive’, which is only used with reference to the speech‑act dyad of speaker and one addressee — also called ‘dual inclusive’. Second, there is the ‘augmented inclusive’, which is used for all other inclusive reference. This ‘plural inclusive’ is used with reference to three or more participants, including at least the speaker and the addressee. The third form for ‘we’ in a minimal‑augmented system is the exclusive. Such a tripartite division is well-attested world-wide (Cysouw 2003: 139–40). On the basis of this division, two special kinds of syncretism can be characterised. On the one hand, there are languages in which the minimal inclusive is combined with the exclusive into the referential value of one morpheme; a different morpheme marks for the augmented inclusive only (Section 6.2). On the other
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hand, there are cases in which the augmented inclusive is combined with exclusive, contrasting to a separately marked minimal inclusive (Section 6.3).
6.2. Minimal inclusive = exclusive The best described case of a syncretism between minimal inclusive and exclusive is attested in Gooniyandi, a non‑Pama‑Nyungan language from northwestern Australia. The minimal‑inclusive/exclusive pronoun is ngidi and the augmented inclusive pronoun is yaadi (McGregor 1989; 1990: 167–73). McGregor uses the terms ‘restricted’ and ‘unrestricted’, respectively, to refer to these crosslinguistically unusual combinations of referential values. Exactly the same distinction if attested in the closely related language Bunuba (Rumsey 2000: 70–2). In Bunuba, the minimal‑inclusive/exclusive combination is expressed by the pronoun ngiyirri. The two different meanings of this pronoun are optionally disambiguated by a dual suffix ‑way or a plural suffix ‑yani. The pronoun for augmented inclusive in Bunuba is yaarri. In both Gooniyandi and Bunuba, the verbal inflection shows the same syncretism (Rumsey 2000: 80–8; McGregor 1990). The Gooniyandi‑type syncretism is rare cross‑linguistically, yet it is not completely unheard of. Another example of this syncretism is found in Yaouré, a Mande language from Ivory Coast. There are two different forms for the first-person plural with a division of meaning that is alike to the one in Gooniyandi: “kàà, which has an inclusive reference (the speaker and a group of listeners) and kʊ¯, which has either a dual reference (you and I) or an exclusive reference (the others and I)” (Hopkins 1986: 192). The pronoun kàà is the odd one out, as its morphophonological behaviour is different from all other pronouns. Probably, this pronoun is a recent addition to the pronominal paradigm. The syncretism as found in Yaouré is a singularity among the Mande languages — no other case is presently known in this family (V. Vydrine, p.c.). However, there are some other Mande languages that have a (non‑syncreted) minimal‑augmented paradigm, viz. Dan (Doneux 1968: 45–7) and Northern Looma (V. Vydrine, p.c.; cf. Greenberg 1988: 2, citing Prost 1967). Also in Africa, though completely unrelated to the Mande languages, this same structure is found in two neighbouring, but unrelated, languages in southern Chad. The occurence of this unusual structure in these two languages makes a good argument for areal influence. Both Tumak (a Chadic language, belonging to the AfroAsiatic stock) and Sar (a Sara-Bagirmi language, belonging to the Nilo-Saharan stock) have two different pronouns to be translated in to English as we. In Tumak, the pronoun nà is glossed as ‘nous (duel ou exclusif)’ and the pronoun dì is glossed as ‘nous (inclusif)’ (Caprile 1975: 31). The first pronoun is used for all dual reference and all exclusive reference, which boils down to the same thing that has been called minimal-inclusive/exclusive syncretism here. The second pronoun is probably only used for inclusives with more than three persons (although the source is not explicit in this point). In Sar, the pronoun jìi is glossed as inclusive and the pronoun jìì as exclusive, though it is added that all dual reference is done with the exclusive pronoun
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(Palayer 1989: 202). The distinction between the two forms is made even more explicit in the discussion of the verbal inflection, where it is said that the prefix j- is used for the dual inclusive and all exclusive reference, and the circumfix j-. . .-i is used for the inclusive plural, there being three or more referents (Palayer 1989: 208). Finally, the same minimal‑inclusive/exclusive syncretism is also found in the independent pronouns from Kunimaipa, a Goilalan language from the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea. In this language, there are two different forms for ‘we’. The pronoun rei is used for the combination minimal inclusive and exclusive. The pronoun rari is used for the augmented inclusive (Pence 1968; Geary 1977: 17– 18). There is an optional suffix ‑pi, a dual/trial marker that can can partly be used for disambiguation. The combination rari‑pi is an inclusive trial. However, this number suffix cannot be used for disambiguation of the different meanings of the pronoun rei as the pronoun rei‑pi can still be both minimal inclusive and exclusive dual (Geary 1977: 17). This bivalent dual/trial usage of the suffix ‑pi indicates that there is a relation to a so‑called unit‑augmented paradigm, with the suffix ‑pi marking unit‑augmented (cf. McKay 1978). This is confirmed by the closely related language Weri, which has a unit‑augmented type paradigm with a suffix ‑ip marking unit‑augmented (Boxwell 1967: 36). The particular syncretism of Kunimaipa is probably the result of a merger of an erstwhile minimal‑augmented paradigm.
6.3. Augmented inclusive = exclusive Greenberg (1988: 9) was the first to explicitly note the possibility of a contrast between minimal inclusive (‘I and you’) on the one hand and a syncretism of augmented inclusive (‘I, you and other’) and exclusive (‘I and others’) on the other hand. He called this structure the ‘Assiniboine‑type’ after the Siouan language in which he observed this phenomenon. In Assiniboine, the syncretism is produced by the special usage of the plural suffix ‑pi. The pronominal prefix u̹ k‑ is used for all first-person plural reference. The plural suffix ‑pi is normally used together with u̹ k‑, except in case of minimal inclusive reference (Levin 1964: 31–2). The independent pronouns of Assiniboine are made from the same affixes and show the same structure (Greenberg 1989: 457). The situation is identical in the closely related Siouan language Lakhota. Both the verbal inflection (Rood & Taylor 1996: 465) as well as the independent pronouns (Van Valin 1977: 74–5; cf. Rood & Taylor 1996: 454) show this particular syncretism. Also the prefixes from Ioway-Oto show the same structure (Whitman 1947: 242). The main point of doubt remains about the obligatoriness and reference of the crucial number suffix ‑pi. For example, Rood & Taylor(1996: 469) notes that the suffix -pi in Lakhota is used with object reference in transitive constructions. If this suffix is not obligatorily coreferential with the person prefixes (and the sources are not very explicit in this respect), then these examples are not prime cases of an augmented inclusive/exclusive syncretism. Even if the Siouan cases would be disqualified, there are still some other examples of this syncretism attested in the world’s languages. The clearest cases are found
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among the non‑Pama‑Nyungan languages in northwestern Australia. I know of ex‑ amples in Tiwi (Tiwian), Burarra (Burarran) and in various Nyulnyulan languages. In Tiwi, the independent pronoun muwa is used for minimal inclusive and the pro‑ noun ngawa is used for the combination augmented inclusive/exclusive (Lee 1987: 101). In the description of Tiwi by Osborne (1974: 54), a pronoun ngagha is ob‑ served for augmented inclusive. The difference between the two descriptions might be accounted for by dialectal differences or it could be the result of recent changes. In young people’s speech (as also described by Lee 1987), the loss of the marking of clusivity has progressed even further. The minimal inclusive muwa has been lost as well, which results in a complete loss of any marking of clusivity in the independent pronouns (Lee 1987: 101–3). In Burarra, the minimal inclusive pronoun is ngar‑ ripa. The referential structure of the combined augmented inclusive/exclusive pro‑ noun is somewhat complicated by the existence of a unit‑augmented series in the paradigm (cf. McKay 1978). The combination unit‑augmented‑inclusive/exclu‑ sive‑dual is marked by the pronoun nga‑tippa and the combination augmented‑in‑ clusive/exclusive‑plural is marked by the pronoun nga‑yburrpa (Glasgow 1964: 110–11; 1984: 15). This syncretism in Burarra is disambiguated by the use of per‑ son prefixes. However, these prefixes have a syncretism between exclusive and sec‑ ond person (see Section 4.4 above). Comparison with the closely related language Ndjébbana (McKay 2000: 171, 203) shows that this syncretism probably arose rela‑ tively recently by a merger of a lamino‑palatal and a dorso‑velar nasal. Other cases of this syncretism in Australia are attested in the Nyulnyulan lan‑ guages. The clearest case is the subject prefixes from Bardi. In Bardi, the minimal inclusive prefix is a‑ and the prefix for the combination augmented‑inclusive/exclu‑ sive is aŋ‑ (Metcalfe 1975: 123). This syncretism can optionally be disambiguated by the use of independent pronouns, which show a complete minimal‑augmented paradigm (Metcalfe 1975: 49–50, 203).12 This particular syncretism is indirectly at‑ tested in the language Nyulnyul, in which the marking is structurally identical to the examples of the Siouan languages as discussed above. In Nyulnyul, the pronom‑ inal prefixes themselves do not show the syncretism — the prefix ya‑ simply marks for all first-person plural reference (McGregor 1996: 40–1). But McGregor notes that the plural marking can be left out for minimal inclusive reference only, leaving an augmented-inclusive/exclusive syncretism: “[ya‑] occasionally occurs without the number marking prefix [‑rr‑] when it refers to the speaker‑hearer dyad: that is, when reference is made to the 1&2 minimal category” (McGregor 1996: 40). How‑ ever, judging from the example shown in (2), it is not obligatory for plural mark‑ ing to be left out with minimal inclusive reference. This syncretism is not attested in the Nyulnyulan language Warrwa. In this language, there is a regular difference be‑ tween an inclusive ya‑ and an exclusive nga/ka‑ prefix (McGregor 1994: 41, see also Section 3.3).
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(2) Nyulnyul (McGregor 1996: 42) ngay a juy ya‑li‑rr‑jid derby‑ung 1sg.pron conj 2sg.pron 1pl‑irr‑pl‑go place‑all “You and I might go to Derby.”
Further, there are two cases of this syncretism in New Guinea. One example is attested in Kunimaipa, a Goilalan language from Southeastern Papua New Guinea. In the imperfect, a suffix ‑paine marks for minimal inclusive and a suffix ‑ka marks for the combination augmented inclusive/exclusive. The same syncretism is also attested in the perfect suffixes, yet here the referential values of the suffixes are even more messed up (Pence 1968: 110; Geary 1977: 26). The other example is found in the independent pronouns of Hatam, a West Papuan language from the Bird’s Head (the westernmost part of New Guinea). There are two pronouns to be translated into English as we in Hatam. In Reesink (1999: 40–1), the pronoun sa(ni) is simply glossed as ‘dual’ without further specification, but in Reesink (2002: 3) it is explicitly noted that this pronoun is only used for dual inclusive. The remaining combination of augmented inclusive and exclusive is marked by the pronoun nye(ni). The final examples of this kind of syncretism come from America. In Guató, a Macro‑Gé language from Brazil, the pronominal inflection is a mix of pre‑ and suffixes. Clusivity is marked by two prefixes, the prefix ga‑ for minimal inclusive and the prefix dʒa‑ for the remaining combination of augmented inclusive and exclusive reference. The independent pronouns consist of the same person markers affigated to a root -ó(kó)‑ and show the same syncretism (Palácio 1986: 366–70). This structure of Guató appears to be a singularity within the Macro‑Gé languages (Rodrigues 1999: 186–7). Finally, in Pech, a Chibchan language from Honduras, the first-person pronoun patàs is glossed as “dual” and the pronoun untàs as “plural” (Holt 1999: 40). However, in the discussion of the verbal inflection, it is made explicit that the gloss “dual” is only a shorthand for “first-person-dual-[inclusive]”,13 which means that the other pronoun probably has a combined augmented inclusive/exclusive reference (Holt 1999: 49).
6.4. Summary There are six languages presently known to me of the peculiar syncretism that combines the reference of minimal inclusive with the reference of exclusive into the marking of one morpheme. The other structure, combining augmented inclusive with exclusive, is likewise uncommon — eleven examples are attested. However, both sets of languages are geographically and genetically diverse, which warrants the conclusion that both syncretisms are real possibilities of human language, albeit rare ones. In contrast to the syncretism between clusivity and second/third person, there are many examples of independent pronouns among the presented mixes of inclusive and exclusive reference. Five out of six languages with the minimal-inclusive/
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exclusive mix have this syncretism in their independent pronouns. The other syncretism is attested in independent pronouns in seven out of eleven languages.
7. Analysis of the syncretisms attested In total, 123 cases of a syncretism involving clusivity have been discussed in this chapter, as summarised in Table 1 (see the appendix for a complete listing). However, many of these languages have been mentioned twice (viz. the Algonquian languages, the Tanna languages, Huave, Binandere, Kiowa, Diola‑Fogny, Burarra, Buma, and Kunimaipa), one language has been mentioned three times (Hatam) and one language has even been mentioned four times (Tiwi). Subtracting these, there are 100 different languages that have (at least) one of the syncretisms discussed. Relative to the 6,703 languages as mentioned in the thirteenth edition of the Ethnologue (Grimes 1996: 955), this amounts to 1.5% of the world’s languages. I expect there to be more cases among the Austronesian languages and among the non‑Austronesian languages of New Guinea. Also in the Tibeto‑Burman family and among the native languages of Mesoamerica I expect more languages with syncretisms to exist than have been summarised here. My informed guess is that the kind of syncretisms that were discussed in this chapter are to be found in about 2 to 3 percent of the world’s languages. This low proportion indicates that the phenomenon reviewed in this chapter is typologically rare among the world’s languages. Still, 2 to 3 percent of the world’s languages represent a high number of cases. This indicates that it is not at all impossible for a human language to have any of these syncretisms reviewed. Even stronger, given that only about 40% of the world’s languages have some kind of clusivity (cf. Bickel & Nichols, this volume; Siewierska & Bakker, this volume), the present 100 cases are 3.7% of all languages with some kind of clusivity. Incorporating a factor two for all yet unknown or undescribed cases, Table 1. Summary of examples discussed No. of families Inclusive = first person Exclusive = first person Inclusive = second person Exclusive = second person Inclusive = third person Exclusive = third person Minimal inclusive = exclusive Augmented inclusive = exclusive Total (Multiple occurrences subtracted)
1 21 10 7 8 7 5 8
No. of languages 1 40 15 16 15 19 6 11
Independent Inflectional pronouns marking 0 15 3 1 1 0 5 7
1 32 13 15 15 19 4 9
67
123
32
109
(47)
(100)
(32)
(91)
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this amounts to about 7% of the languages with some kind of clusivity. Such proportions are at least worth the establishment of a sub-class. There is a clear asymmetry between the inclusive/first person and the exclusive/ first-person syncretism. The inclusive/first-person syncretism only occurs in one incidental case. In contrast, the exclusive/first-person syncretism is relatively widespread. It is attested in fourty languages belonging to twenty-one different linguistic families. This indicates that the exclusive can be seen as a kind of first person, but the inclusive cannot. The exclusive/first-person syncretism is even attested in the independent pronouns of fifteen languages. I assume that speakers of a language are much more consciously aware of their independent pronouns than of their inflectional person marking. Under this assumption, the ubiquity of exclusive/firstperson syncretisms among independent pronouns emphasises the conclusion that the exclusive is a kind of first person (cf. Daniel, this volume). The frequency of occurrence of the next four syncretisms (inclusive–second person, exclusive–second person, inclusive/third person and exclusive–third person) are strikingly similar. Each of these syncretisms is attested in about fifteen to twenty languages belonging to about eight different families. They occur thus clearly less often than the exclusive/first-person syncretism. Still, all four syncretisms occur in various cases, well dispersed throughout the world’s languages. For each syncretism, there is also at least one group of genetically related languages in which the syncretism is widespread, which indicates that all four syncretisms are not necessarily diachronically instable. Finally, almost all examples are found in inflectional paradigms — the examples among independent pronouns are incidental cases. The important conclusion that can be drawn from these occurrences is that the semantically transparent combinations (inclusive–second person and exclusive–third person) are not different from the semantically opaque combinations (inclusive/ third person and exclusive/second person). The last two syncretisms discussed show an unusual combination of referential values. They are both really rare, just a few examples belonging to a few families are attested, yet these few examples are found in all corners of the world. The reasons for both these syncretisms are thus more than incidental. The fact that both syncretisms are rather often attested among independent pronouns stresses the fact that these syncretisms are a real possibility of linguistic structure, albeit rare ones. In the next section I will discuss the various explanations that have been brought forward for the existence of these syncretisms.
8. Explaining the anomalies The question now remains why the uncommon syncretisms exist. As I have shown, various kinds of syncretisms involving clusivity are uncommon, yet they exist in more than one case (so it is not enough to invoke coincidence to explain the existence) in various geographically dispersed part of the world (so one cannot resort to
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contact for an explanation). To explain the existence of the various syncretisms, it is possible to use a diachronic or a synchronic perspective. From a diachronic perspective, an explanation amounts to clarifying how a syncretism arose. Among the syncretisms reviewed in this chapter, by far the most originated by an accidental merger (when diachronic or comparative data is available at all). Only a few examples give some indication of other possible source of a syncretism. For Caddo, Chafe (1990) argues that the inclusive was originally a defocusing marker. As this marker was reanalysed as an inclusive, the formerly first-person marker (used for both singular and plural) was reduced to only the first-person singular and the exclusive usage. The development resulted is an exclusive/first-person syncretism. For the Mixtecan languages, I argued (see Section 3.2) that the formerly exclusive pronoun was reanalysed as a first-person humble marker. The first-person singular extended its meaning to include exclusive reference, leading to an exclusive/first-person syncretism. For Carib, Meira (2002: 257) and S. Gildea (p.c.) propose that the first-person plural pronoun was originally a noun, which had third person agreement on verbs. As this noun grammaticalised to become an exclusive pronoun, it retained the third person agreement. This results in an exclusive/third-person syncretism in the Carib verbal inflection. However, this proposal for the origin of the exclusive/third-person syncretism in Carib is not based on any comparative evidence. It is a speculation about a possible structure in PreProto-Carib to explain the current syncreted structure. Finally, one could speculate that a part of an erstwhile transparent combination loses its person-marking status. For example, there are various examples of a first and a second-person marker forming an inclusive (see Section 4.3). If the first-person marker would lose its person-marking value, an inclusive/second-person syncretism remains. Such a history might be fruitful to explain the origin of the Algonquian inclusive/second-person syncretism. Irrespective of origin, it is also an interesting question what a particular syncretism synchronically means for the speaker of a language. The common occurrence of the exclusive/first-person syncretism can readily be explained semantically. An exclusive can be analysed as an associative plural, in which the first person is the focal referent. The ‘others’, which are included in the reference of the exclusive are non-focal participants in the speech act. It is semantically possible — and empirically widespread — for a language to reduce the marking of the exclusive to its focal referent only, i.e. the first-person singular. In the same vein, it is tempting to propose semantic reasons for the transparent inclusive/second person (cf. Daniel, this volume) and exclusive/third-person syncretisms. However, the empirical status of these syncretisms is much more doubtful compared to the exclusive/first-person syncretism. As set out above, there are clearly less cases and there are almost no examples of independent pronouns showing these syncretism. However, the main reason to object to a semantic analysis of these combinations is that the non-transparent syncretisms (inclusive/third person and exclusive/second person) are just as frequent as the semantically transparent ones.
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Rodrigues (1990) searched for an explanation of the inclusive/third-person syncretism, which he described for Tupínambá. He analysed the correspondence between inclusive and third using the notion ‘no contrast between speaker and hearer’. Both the inclusive as well as the third person treat speaker and addressee alike, by either including both (inclusive) or excluding both (third person). In combination with a notion of focus, Rodrigues claims to be able to explain the syncretism attested in Tupínambá: The verbal person marker o‑ means that third person is in focus and that there is no contrast between the speaker and the hearer; that is to say, it means {(you, I, and he)+f } as well as {he+f }. Analogously, ya‑ means that third person is out of focus and that there is no contrast between the speaker and the hearer; it means {(you and I)+f and he‑f }. (Rodrigues 1990: 402)
Although this reasoning is interesting, it is questionable whether such a general semantic explanation is the right approach. If this explanation makes sense for human language, then why is this syncretism not attested much more commonly among the world’s languages? The same problem occurs with the explanation put forward for the special syncretism of Gooniyandi (see Section 6.2) by McGregor (1996).14 He proposes that the particular difference between yaadi and ngidi can be explained as a special kind of inclusive–exclusive opposition, with the difference that the inclusive (yaadi) has to include more than one addressee and the exclusive (ngidi) only excludes groups of more than one addressee, but still includes reference to one addressee: Thus the system can be regarded as an inclusive/exclusive one. What is different from the traditional or classical inclusive/exclusive system lies in the nature to the thing that is included or excluded: in the traditional system it is the hearer or addressee; in the Bunaban system it is the hearers, an augmented group of addressees. In the traditional inclusive/exclusive system you-singular is the ‘pivot’; in the Buna ban system it is you-non-singular, or you-augmented. (McGregor 1996: 166)
Again my criticism: if it is indeed possible for human language to invoke the crosslinguistically widespread semantic category of ‘you-non-singular’ to define the inclusive–exclusive opposition, then why is this not more regularly attested among the world’s languages? To conclude, explanations should always have the right level of generalisation. Typological research is indispensable for determining the level of explanation, which is needed to explain a particular phenomenon in a particular language. If the phenomenon is rare cross-linguistically, then the explanation should not invoke universal characteristics, but use idiosyncratic reasons from the cultural or linguistic history of the language and its speakers. Only if a phenomenon is common cross-linguistically, general semantic, functional or structural explanations make sense.
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Acknowledgements The basic work on this chapter was conducted while I was at the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschft (ZAS) in Berlin. I am very grateful to Hein Steinhauer, who first directed my attention to the strange syncretism in Kisar. This example urged me to look further, ultimately resulting in the present collection. Misha Daniel read earlier versions of this chapter with great care, as I did with his chapter in this volume. We discussed our differences of opinion extensively, with the result that not many of them remained. Further, I thank (in alphabetical order) George van Driem, Jan van Eijk, Aone van Engelenhoven, Elena Filimonova, Spike Gildea, Tom Güldemann, Sérgio Meira, Edith Moravcsik, Irina Nikolaeva, Richard Rhodes, and Valentin Vydrine for help with the many details of the present chapter. Notwithstanding their important input, the present content remains completely my own responsibility.
Notes 1. It remains unclear from the description by Lipkind (1945) whether the Winnebago inclusive prefix is only used for the minimal inclusive or also for the augmented inclusive (cf. Section 6.3 for other Siouan languages that make this difference). Greenberg (1988: 4–5, citing Susman 1943) claims indeed that the inclusive prefix can be used for both kinds of inclusive. 2. Veerman-Leichsenring (2000) does not use the term “inclusive”. She uses the term “collective” instead, probably because this “inclusive” is not a first-person plural in Chocho, but a separate category of person (p. 322). This is completely in concord with my argumentation. However, I hold on to the term “inclusive” and add that an inclusive is not normally a kind of first-person plural. 3. Note that ‘the forms [with inclusive inflection] are similar to those of the third person masculine dual . . . but differ from them in many cases by always having an accent on the a of the actor morpheme’ (Anceaux 1965: 85–6). 4. From the survey by Voorhoeve (1975: 438–9) of the South Bird’s Head family (part of the purported Trans New‑Guinea stock), it appears as if the language Puragi has an independent pronoun ididi that is used both for inclusive and for second-person plural. However, this appears to be an error. In the original source (Cowan 1953: 22), the second-person plural is the same as in Voorhoeve’s survey (though written idjidji), but the inclusive turns out to be nidjidji. Probably, the missing initial nasal is a printing error in Voorhoeve’s article (cf. de Vries 2004: 140). 5. The occurrence of the short version of the prefixes in Diola-Fogny is analysed as follows: ‘The full form is used . . . when the verb is neither contingent nor negative, and when it does not take a second position prefix or the verbal proclitic connectives man and ban. In all other situations the stripped form is used. . . . The stripped form may substitute for the full form depending on the context. This transformation indicates an imperative, an interrogative or the fact that emphasis is placed on the subject’ (Sapir 1965: 90–1). 6. Khoekhoe is the new name that the speakers themselves chose instead of the former double name Nama/Damara. Rather confusingly, the name Khoekhoe is used for the
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Michael Cysouw language and Khoe for its linguistic family, formerly called Central Khoisan. 7. The syncretism between exclusive and third person is so ubiquitous among the Cariban languages that it is sometimes taken for granted by the specialist in the field. Some descriptions do not, or only covertly, note the syncretism. It is not noted at all, for example, by Gildea (1998), nor in a paper on Tiriyó by Meira (2000a: 202–4), though in another paper (Meira 2000b: 62), he confirms that there is an exclusive/third-person syncretism in Tiriyó. In a paper on the reconstruction of the proto‑Carib independent pronouns, the syncreted inflection is mentioned in a footnote (Meira 2002: 257, n. 3). In the description of the language Carib (=Kariña) by Hoff, the existence of the syncretism is also hidden away in a footnote (Hoff 1968: 164, n. 44). 8. Derbyshire (1999) also includes Apalai in his list of Cariban languages with an exclusive/ third-person syncretism. However, the description by Koehn & Koehn (1986: 108) mentions two different forms, viz. exclusive ynan(y)‑ and third person n(y)‑. 9. The labialisation, as indicated by the superscript w is written as a superscript circle in the original source on Shuswap by Kuipers (1974). 10. If the Shuswap pronoun kwəxw can be analysed as being originally a first-person marking, then the exclusive reference in Shuswap is marked by a semantically transparent combination of first and third person reference. This would then not count as an exclusive/third syncretism, just like transparent inclusives (made from a combination of first- and secondperson markers) were dismissed in Section 4.3. 11. There are a few cases in which clusivity is marked in a restricted part of the person-marking paradigm only. These will not be considered here as examples of syncretism. Clusivity in the plural, but not in the dual is found in the independent pronouns from Gugu‑Yalanji (Pama‑Nyungan, Australia, Oates & Oates 1964: 7), Jiarong (Tibeto‑Burman, China, Bauman 1975: 131–2, 276), Tuaripi (Eleman, Papua New Guinea, Wurm 1975: 515), Guhu‑Samane (Binanderean, Papua New Guinea, Richard 1975: 781) and Korafe (Binanderean, Papua New Guinea, Farr & Farr 1975: 734–5). There are also a few cases in which clusivity is marked in the dual, but not in the plural. This is found in the independent pronouns from Samo (Central and South New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Voorhoeve 1975: 391–2) and in the pronominal prefixes from the extinct language Coos (Coast Oregon, USA, Frachtenberg 1922: 321). 12. Greenberg (1989), after discussing the case of Bardi, also notes the same structure in a language called “Dampier land” (citing Cappell 1956: 87). This appears to be the same language as Bardi. 13. In fact, there is an error in the source here, as it literally says “the first-person-dual-exclusive morpheme . . . indicates ‘you and I (but not they)’ ” (Holt 1999: 49). The second part of the sentence makes it clear that the word ‘exclusive’ should be read ‘inclusive’. 14. This explanation for Gooniyandi is proposed by McGregor to replace his earlier attempts at an explanation (McGregor 1989; 1990).
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Appendix Survey of the examples with a syncretism involving clusivity as discussed in this chapter. Within the various kind of syncretisms, the languages are grouped by genetic family relationship. Different families that belong to the same overarching genetic unit are counted separately when there does not appear to be a shared origin of the syncretism (e.g. various branches of Austronesian are counted separately because the syncretisms are probably independent developments in these branches). Some languages have the same syncretism both in their independent pronouns and in their inflectional marking (e.g. Asheninca Campa). Such languages are only counted once. In contrast, some languages have different kinds of syncretism in their person marking (i.e. they appear in different sections, e.g. Tiwi or Hatam). Such languages are counted more than once. Inclusive = First person (Section 3.2): Found in 1 family (1 language) Independent: ‑ Inflectional: Binandere (Central & Southeastern, Trans New Guinea) Exclusive = First person (Section 3.3): Found in 21 families (40 languages) Independent: Chalcatongo Mixtec, Ocotepec Mixtec, Yosondúa Mixtec, Diuxi-Tilantongo Mixtec (all Mixtecan, Oto‑Manguean); Chocho (Popolocan, Oto‑Manguean); Aymara, Jaqaru (Aymaran); Canela‑Kraho (Gé); Asheninca, Nomatsiguenga, Caquinte (all Campa, Arawakan); Nimboran (Nimboran, Trans‑New Guinea); Imonda, Amanab (both Border, Trans‑New Guinea); Chrau (Mon‑Khmer, Austro-Asiatic). Inflectional: Winnebago (Siouan); Wichita, Caddo, Pawnee (all Caddoan); Menomini, Cree, Fox, Eastern Ojibwe, Southwestern Ojibwe, Passamaquoddy‑Maliseet (all Algonquian); Huave (Huavean); Sierra Popoluca (Mixe‑Zoque); Maká (Mataco‑Guaicuruan); Aymara, Jaqaru (Aymaran); Uru, Chipaya (Uru-Chipayan); Canela‑Kraho (Gé); Tarma Quechua (Quechuan); Asheninca, Nomatsiguenga, Caquinte (all Campa, Arawakan); Nimboran (Nimboran, Trans‑New Guinea); Kwamera, Lenakel, North Tanna, Southwest Tanna, Whitesands (all Tanna, Austronesian); Tiwi (Tiwian); Warrwa (Nyulnyulan); Svan (South Caucasian); Ngiti (Central Sudanic, Nilo‑Saharan). Inclusive = Second person (Section 4.2): Found in 10 families (15 languages) Independent: Sanuma (Isolate), Itonama (Isolate), Inanwatan (South Bird’s Head, TransNew Guinea) Inflectional: Menomini, Cree, Fox, Eastern Ojibwe, Southwestern Ojibwe, Passamaquoddy‑Maliseet (all Algonquian); Kiowa (Tanoan); Lavukaleve (East Papuan); Tiwi (Tiwian); Acehnese (Sundic, Austronesian); Diola‑Fogny (Atlantic, Niger‑Congo); Kulung (Kiranti); Itonama (Isolate). Exclusive = Second person (Section 4.4): Found in 7 families (15 languages) Independent: Nehan (Western Oceanic, Austronesian). Inflectional: Lamalera, Dawanese, Kisar, Sika, Roti (all Timor, Austronesian); Yabem, Sobei, Mekeo, Central Buang (all Western Oceanic, Austronesian); Buma (Remote Oceanic, Austronesian); Ulithian, Trukese (both Micronesian, Austronesian); Southern Udihe (Tungusic); Burarra (Burarran); Tiwi (Tiwian).
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Michael Cysouw Inclusive = Third person (Section 5.2): Found in 8 families (15 languages) Independent: Tupínambá (Tupí). Inflectional: Kwamera, Lenakel, North Tanna, Southwest Tanna, Whitesands (all Tanna, Austronesian); Atchin, Buma (Remote Oceanic, Austronesian), Nalik (Western Oceanic, Austronesian), Muna (Sulawesi, Austronesian); Hatam (West Papuan); Athpare, Camling, Dumi (all Kiranti, Tibeto‑Burman); Huave (Huavean); Tupínambá (Tupí). Exclusive = Third person (Section 5.3): Found in 7 families (19 languages) Independent: ‑ Inflectional: Kariña, Tiriyó, Carijona, Kashuyana, Wai Wai, Hixkaryana, Waimiri‑Atroari, Arekuna, Akawaio, Wayana, Dekwana, Bakairí, Txikão (all Carib); Kiowa (Tanoan); Shuswap (Salish); Binandere (Goilalan); Hatam (West Papuan); Diola‑Fogny (Atlantic, Niger‑Congo); Buduma (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). Minimal inclusive = Exclusive (Section 6.2): Found in 5 families (6 languages) Independent: Bunaba, Gooniyandi (both Bunaban); Yaouré (Mande); Sara (Sara-Bagirmi, Nilo-Sagaran); Kunimaipa (Goilalan, Trans‑New Guinea). Inflectional: Bunaba, Gooniyandi (both Bunaban); Sar (Sara-Bagirmi, Nilo-Saharan); Tumak (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). Augmented inclusive = Exclusive (Section 6.3): Found in 8 families (11 languages) Independent: Assiniboine, Lakhota (both Siouan); Hatam (West Papuan); Burarra (Burarran); Tiwi (Tiwian); Pech (Chibchan); Guató (Macro‑Gé). Inflectional: Assiniboine, Lakhota, Iowa (all Siouan); Bardi, Nyulnyul (both Nyulnyulan); Hatam (West Papuan); Kunimaipa (Central & Southeast, Trans‑New Guinea); Pech (Chibchan); Guató (Macro‑Gé).
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Syncretisms involving clusivity Goddard, I. (ed.). 1996. Handbook of North American indians. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. Greenberg, J. H. 1988. The first-person inclusive dual as an ambiguous category. Studies in Language 12(1): 1–18. Greenberg, J. H. 1989. On a metalanguage for pronominal systems: A reply to McGregor. Studies in Language 13(2): 452–8. Grimes, B. F. (ed.).1996. Ethnologue. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Güldemann, T. 2002. Die Entlehnung pronominaler Elemente des Khoekhoe aus dem !UiTaa. In T. Schumann, M. Reh, R. Kießling & L. Gerhard (eds), Aktuelle Forschungen zu afrikanischen Sprachen, 43–61. Köln: Köppe. Güldemann, T. & Vossen, R. 2000. Khoisan. In B. Heine & D. Nurse (eds), African languages: An introduction 99–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haacke, W. H.G. 1977. The so-called ‘personal pronoun’ in Nama. In A. Traill (ed.), Khoisan linguistic studies, 43–62. Johannesburg: African Studies Institute. Hagman, R. S. 1977. Nama Hottentot grammar. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press [Language Science Monographs 15]. Hardman, M. J. 1966. Jaqaru: Outline of phonological and morphological structure. The Hague: Mouton [Janua Linguarum, Series Practica 22]. Hawkins, R. E. 1998. Wai Wai. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazonian languages, Volume 4, 25–224. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Healey, A., Isoroembo, A. & Chittleborough, M. 1969. Preliminary notes on Orokaiva grammar. Papers in New Guinea linguistics, 33–64. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics A 18]. Hewson, J. 1991. Person hierarchies in Algonqian and Inuktitut. Linguistics 29: 861–75. Hills, R. A. 1990. A syntactic sketch of Ayutla Mixtec. In C. H. Bradley & B. E. Hollenbach (eds), Studies in the syntax of Mixtecan languages, 1–260. Arlington VA.: Summer Institute of Linguistics [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 90]. Hoff, B. J. 1968. The Carib language. The Hague: Nijhoff [Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 55]. Holt, D. 1999. Pech (Paya). München: Lincom [Languages of the World/Materials 366]. Hooley, B. A. 1995. Central Buang. In D. T. Tryon (ed.), 731–40. Hopkins, E. B. 1986. Pronouns and pronoun fusion in Yaouré. In U. Wisemann (ed.), 191– 204. Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1980. Inclusive/Exclusive: A diffused pronominal category in native western North America. In J. Kreiman & A. E. Ojeda (eds), Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora. Chicago Linguistic Society, April 18–19, 1980, 326–406. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Jensen, C. 1990. Cross-referencing changes in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. In D. L. Payne (ed.), 117–60. Johnson, A. F. 1988. A syntactic sketch of Jamiltepec Mixtec. In C. H. Bradley & B. E. Hollenbach (eds), Studies in the syntax of Mixtecan languages, 11–150. Arlington, VA.: Summer Institute of Linguistics [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 83]. Jones, A. A. 1998. Towards a lexicogrammar of Mekeo (an Austronesian language of West Central Papua). Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 138]. Keraf, G. 1978. Morfologi Dialek Lamalera. Ende-Flores: Arnoldus. Koehn, E. & Koehn, S. 1986. Apalai. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), 33–127.
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Michael Cysouw Kuiper, A. & Oram, J. 1991. A syntactic sketch of Diuxi-Tilantongo Mixtec. In C. H. Bradley & B. E. Hollenbach (eds), Studies in the syntax of Mixtecan languages, 179–408. Arlington VA.: Summer Institute of Linguistics [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 105]. Kuipers, A. H. 1974. The Shuswap language: Grammar, texts, dictionary. The Hague: Mouton. Kutsch Lojenga, C. 1994. Ngiti: A Central Sudanic language of Zaire. Hamburg: Köppe [NiloSaharan Linguistic Analyses and Documentation 9]. Leavitt, R. M. 1996. Passamaquoddy-Maliseet. München: Lincom [Languages of the World/ Materials 27]. Lee, J. 1987. Tiwi today: A study of language change in a contact situation. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 96]. Levin, N. B. 1964. The Assiniboine language. The Hague: Mouton. Lewis, E. D. & Grimes, C. E. 1995. Sika. In D. T. Tryon (ed.), 601–9. Lindstrom, L. & Lynch, J. D. 1994. Kwamera. München: Lincom [Languages of the World/Materials 2]. Lipkind, W. 1945. Winnebago grammar. New York: King’s Crown. Luraghi, S. 2000. Synkretismus. In G. Booij, C. Lehmann & J. Mugdan (eds), Morphology: An international handbook on inflection and word-formation, 638–47. Berlin: de Gruyter [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 17]. Lynch, J. D. 1967. A comparative study of the languages and dialects of the island of Tanna, southern New Hebrides. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Sydney. Lynch, J. D. 1978. A grammar of Lenakel. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 55]. Lynch, J. D. 1986. The proto-southern Vanuatu pronominal system. In P. Geraghty, L. Carrington & S. A. Wurm (eds), Focal II: Papers from the fourth international conference on Austronesian linguistics, 259–87. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 94]. Macaulay, M. 1996. A grammar of Chalcatongo Mixtec. Berkeley: University of California Press [University of California Publications in Linguistics 127]. Mannheim, B. 1982. Person, number and inclusivity in two Andean languages. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 17(2): 139–56. McGregor, W. B. 1989. Greenberg on the first-person inclusive dual: evidence from some Australian languages. Studies in Language 13(2): 437–51. McGregor, W. B. 1990. A functional grammar of Gooniyandi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins [Studies in Language Companion Series 22]. McGregor, W. B. 1994. Warrwa. München: Lincom [Languages of the World/Materials 89]. McGregor, W. B. 1996. Nyulnyul. München: Lincom [Languages of the World/Materials 88]. McGregor, W. B. 1996. The pronominal system of Gooniyandi and Bunaba. In W. B. McGregor (ed.), Studies in Kimberley languages in honour of Howard Coate, 159–73. München: Lincom. McKay, G. R. 1978. Pronominal person and number categories in Rembarrnga and Djeebbana. Oceanic Linguistics 17: 27–37. McKay, G. R. 2000. Ndjébbana. In R. M.W. Dixon & B. J. Blake (eds), 154–354. Meira, S. 2000a. The accidental intransitive split in the Cariban family. In S. Gildea (ed.), Reconstructing grammar: Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization, 201–30. Amsterdam: Benjamins [Typological Studies in Language 43]. Meira, S. 2000b. A reconstruction of Proto-Taranoan: Phonology and morphology. München: Lincom [Lincom Studies in Native American Linguistics 30].
Syncretisms involving clusivity Meira, S. 2002. A first comparison of pronominal and demonstrative systems in the Cariban language family. In M. Crevels, S. van de Kerke, S. Meira & H. van der Voort (eds), Current studies on South American languages, 255–75. Leiden: CNWS [Indigenous Languages of Latin America (ILLA) 3]. Metcalfe, C. D. 1975. Bardi verb morphology (Northwestern Australia). Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 30]. Minch, A. S. 1991. Essential elements of Amanab grammar. Ph. D. dissertaion, University of Texas. Mixco, M. 1997. Mandan. München: Lincom [Languages of the World/Materials 159]. Mühlhäusler, P. 1986. Zur Entstehung von Pronominalsystemen. In N. Boretzky, W. Enninger & T. Stolz (eds), Beiträge zum 2. Essener Kolloquium über „Kreolsprachen und Sprachkontakte“, 157–74. Bochum: Brockmeyer [Essener Beiträge zur Sprachwandelforschung 2]. Newman, S. 1980. Functional changes in the Salish pronominal system. International Journal of American Linguistics 46(3): 155–67. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nikolaeva, I. & Tolskaya, M. 2001. A grammar of Udihe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 22]. Noyer, R. R. 1992. Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. Cambridge MA: MIT [MIT Working Papers in Linguistics]. Oates, W. & Oates, L. 1964. Gugu-Yalanji linguistic and anthropological data. Gugu-Yalanji and Wik-Munkan language studies, 1–17. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies [Occasional Papers in Aboriginal Studies 2]. Osborne, C. R. 1974. The Tiwi Language. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Palácio, A. P. 1986. Aspects of the morphology of Guató. In B. F. Elson (ed.), Language in global perspective: Papers in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Summer Institute of Linguistics 1935–8, 363–72. Dallas TX.: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Palayer, P. 1989. La langue Sar (sud du Tchad). Ph. D. dissertation, University of Tours. Parks, D. R. 1976. A grammar of Pawnee. New York: Garland [Garland Studies in American Indian Linguistics]. Payne, D. L. (ed.).1990. Amazonian linguistics. Austin TX.: University of Texas Press. Pence, A. R. 1968. An analysis of Kunimaipa pronouns. Kivung 1(2): 109–15. Plank, F. 1985. Die Ordnung der Personen. Folia Linguistica 19: 111–76. Plank, F. & Schellinger, W. 1997. The uneven distribution of genders over numbers: Greenberg Nos. 37 and 45. Linguistic Typology 1(1): 53–101. Popjes, J. & Popjes, J. 1986. Canela-Krahô. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), 128–99. Pottier, B. 1963. Inclusif et exclusif dans le système personnel du Quichua. Traveaux de l’Institut d’Études Latino-américaines de l’Université de Strasbourg 41(8): 533–6. Reed, J. & Payne, D. L. 1986. Asheninca (Campa) pronominals. In U. Wiesemann (ed.), 323– 31. Reesink, G. P. 1999. A grammar of Hatam: Bird’s Head Peninsula, Irian Jaya. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 146]. Reesink, G. P. 2002. The eastern Bird’s Head languages compared. In G. P. Reesink (ed.), Languages of the Eastern Bird’s Head, 1–44. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics 524]. Richard, E. L. 1975. Sentence structure of Guhu-Samane. In T. E. Dutton (ed.), 771–816.
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Michael Cysouw Rijkhoff, J. & Bakker, D. 1998. Language sampling. Linguistic Typology 2(3): 263–314. Rodrigues, A. D. 1990. You and I = neither you nor I: the personal system of Tupínambá. In D. L. Payne (ed.), 393–406. Rodrigues, A. D. 1999. Macro-Jé. In R. M.W. Dixon A. Y. Aikhenvald (eds), 164–206. Rood, D. S. 1996. Sketch of Wichita, a Caddoan language. In I. Goddard (ed.), 580–608. Rood, D. S. & Taylor, A.R. 1996. Sketch of Lakhota, a Siouan language. In I. Goddard (ed.), 440–82. Ross, M. D. 1995. Yabem. In D. T. Tryon (ed.), 699–718. Rumsey, A. 2000. Bunuba. In R. M.W. Dixon & B. J. Blake (eds), 34–152. Sapir, J. D. 1965. A grammar of Diola Fogny: A language spoken in the Bass-Casamance region of Senegal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [West African Language Monograph Series 3]. Schwartz, L. J. & Dunnigan, T. 1986. Pronouns and pronominal categories in southwestern Ojibwe. In U.Wiesemann (ed.), 285–322. Seiler, W. 1985. Imonda, a Papuan language. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 93]. Shields, J. K. 1988. A syntactic sketch of Silacayoapan Mixtec. In C. H. Bradley & B. E. Hollenbach (eds), Studies in the syntax of Mixtecan languages, 305–449. Arlington VA.: Summer Institute of Linguistics [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 83]. Siewierska, A. & Bakker, D. This volume. Inclusive and exclusive in free and bound person forms. Small, P. C. 1990. A syntactic sketch of Coatzospan Mixtec. In C. H. Bradley & B. E. Hollenbach (eds), Studies in the syntax of Mixtecan languages, 261–479. Arlington VA.: Summer Institute of Linguistics [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 90]. Sohn, H.-M. & Bender, B.W. 1973. A Ulithian grammar. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 27]. Stairs, E. F. & Hollenbach, B. E. 1969. Huave verb morphology. International Journal of American Linguistics 35: 38–53. Steinhauer, H. 1993. Notes on verbs in Dawanese (Timor). In G. P. Reesink (ed.), Topics in descriptive Austronesian linguistics, 130–58. Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuid oost-Azië en Oceanië [Semaian 11]. Sterner, J. K. 1987. Sobei verbmorphology reanalyzed to reflect POC studies. Oceanic Linguistics 26(1–2): 30–54. Swift, K. E. 1988. Morfologia del Caquinte (Arawak Preandino). Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüistica Peruana 25]. Takata, Y. 1992. Word structure and reduplication in Kola. In D. A. Burquest & W. D. Laidig (eds), Descriptive studies in languages of Maluku, 47–68. Jakarta: Universitas Atma Jaya [NUSA 34]. Terrill, A. 2003. A grammar of Lavukaleve. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 30]. Thomas, D. D. 1971. Chrau grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press [Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication 7]. Todd, E. M. 1975. The Solomon language family. In S. A. Wurm (ed.), 805–46. Todd, E. M. 1978. A sketch of Nissan (Nehan) grammar. In S. A. Wurm & L. Carrington (eds), Second international conference on Austronesian linguistics: Proceedings, 1181–238. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 61].
Syncretisms involving clusivity Tolsma, G. J. 1997. The verbal morphology of Kulung. In D. Bradley (ed.), 103–17. Tryon, D. T. 2002. Buma. In J. D. Lynch, M. D. Ross & T. Crowley (eds), The Oceanic languages, 573–86. London: Curzon [Curzon Language Family Series 1]. Tryon, D. T. (ed.). 1995. Comparative Austronesian dictionary. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Trends in Linguistics. Documentation 10]. Tuite, K. 1997. Svan. München: Lincom [Languages of the World/Materials 139]. van Driem, G. 1990. An exploration of proto-Kiranti verbal morphology. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 22: 27–48. van Driem, G. 1993a. A grammar of Dumi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 10]. van Driem, G. 1993b. The proto-Tibeto-Burman verbal agreement system. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 56(2): 292–334. van Driem, G. 1997. A new analysis of the Limbu verb. In D. Bradley (ed.), 157–73. van Eijk, J. P. This volume. On the origin of the inclusive vs. exclusive in Shuswap: A background investigation. van de Kerke, S. 1996. Affix order and interpretation in Bolivian Quechua. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam. van den Berg, R. 1989. A grammar of the Muna language. Dordrecht: Foris [Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks 139]. Van Valin, R. D., Jr. 1977. Aspects of Lakhota syntax. Ph. D. dissertation, Berkeley, University of California. Veerman-Leichsenring, A. 2000. Popolocan independent personal pronouns: Comparison and reconstruction. International Journal of American Linguistics 66(3): 318–59. Volker, C. A. 1998. The Nalik language of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. New York: Lang [Berkeley Models of Grammar 4]. Voorhoeve, C L. 1975. Central and western Trans-New Guinea phylum languages. In S. A. Wurm (ed.), 345–460. Vossen, R. 1997. Die Khoe-Sprachen: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Sprachgeschichte Afrikas. Köln: Köppe [Quellen zur Khoisan-Forschung 12]. Watkins, L. J. 1984. A grammar of Kiowa. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press [Studies in the Anthropology of North American Indians]. Whitman, W. 1947. Descriptive grammar of the Ioway-Oto. International Journal of American Linguistics 13(4): 233–48. Wiesemann, U. (ed.). 1986. Pronominal systems. Tübingen: Narr. Wise, M. R. 1971. Identification of participants in discourse: A study of aspects of form and meaning in Nomatsiguenga. Norman OK.: Summer Institute of Linguistics [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 28]. Wolfart, H. C. 1996. Sketch of Cree, an Algonquian language. In I. Goddard (ed.), Handbook of North American indians, Volume 17: Languages, 390–439. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. Wurm, S. A. 1975. The East Papuan phylum in general. In S. A. Wurm (ed.), 783–804. Wurm, S. A. (ed.). 1975. Papuan languages and the New Guinea linguistic scene. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 38]. Zwicky, Arnold M. 1977. Hierarchies of person. In W. A. Beach, S. E. Fox & S. Philosoph (eds), Papers from the 13th regional meeting, 714–33. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
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Chapter 4
Only you? Philological investigations into the alleged inclusive– exclusive distinction in the second-person plural* Horst J. Simon Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Does the language distinguish [. . .] inclusion v. exclusion of the third person in the first or second person [. . .]? (from the Lingua questionnaire; Comrie & Smith 1977: 37) The typological literature is divided over the question whether there exists a distinction between an inclusive and an exclusive pronoun in the second-person plural. In this chapter, I reexamine all the available data concerning the pertinent languages. Thereby I show that the empirical evidence for the category in question adduced so far is rather weak. However, new data from Bavarian (Germanic) suggest that here the usage pattern of honorific pronouns of address resembles the clusivity contrast, albeit intertwined with the grammatical category respect. Methodologically, the chapter demonstrates that typological research based on large samples should be supplemented by the application of traditional philological techniques in order to avoid pre-mature claims concerning crosslinguistically rare features. Keywords: second-person clusivity, inclusive and exclusive pronouns, honorific address, person features, Bavarian, methodology of typology, grammaticalisation
1. Introduction: The problem The present volume gives ample testimony to the fact that the distinction between inclusive and exclusive forms in the first-person plural (and often in the dual, too) is well researched and well-understood. There is no doubt that clusivity1 in the firstperson non-singular is a wide-spread category among the languages of the world.2 In contrast to that it is far from clear what the situation is like for the second person. Is there anything like clusivity also in second-person pronouns? Is there a distinction involving a second-person plural exclusive that refers to a set of addressees only {addressee . . .}, and — in opposition to this — a second-person plural inclusive that includes also non-speech-act-participants {addressee . . ., other . . .}? In other words: Are there languages that distinguish two pronouns A and B such that A refers exclusively to a multitude of addressees, whereas B refers to a group consisting of addressee(s) plus other(s)?
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One should think that this is a straightforward empirical question to which one can give a simple empirical answer. However, the typological literature is very much divided over this seemingly simple question. All three possible types of answers (‘no’, ‘maybe’, and ‘yes’) can be found, as can be seen from the following selection of excerpts. Answer type I: ‘No!’ Several authors maintain that no language with second-person clusivity exists. It has even been assumed that such a distinction would render a language too complex for human speakers to process, or that it could not be captured by humans’ genetically given grammatical feature system. In all languages: if a form expresses the 2nd meta-person more-than-singular, then it includes in its meaning the 6th meta-person also. (Sokolovskaja 1980: 91; translated) [note: 2nd meta-person: ‘addressee(s)’; 6th metaperson: ‘addressee(s)+other(s)’; cf. p. 85f.] My contention is that any language which provided more than one 2nd plural pronoun, and required the speaker to make substantial enquiries about the whereabouts and number of those referred to in addition to the one person he was actually addressing, would be quite literally unspeakable. (Henderson 1985: 308; emphasis added) [. . .] nor does it seem that languages distinguish between a multiplicity of hearers (2+2+ . . .), and a single hearer plus one or more others (2+3+ . . .). (McGregor 1989: 443) [. . .] and I assume that none exists.’ (McGregor 1989: 450, n. 8; emphasis added) One generally unremarked fact is that second-person plurals never appear to make a distinction between a plurality of addressees and combinations of one or more addressees with non-ego, non-addressees, i.e., third persons. (Greenberg 1993: 14; emphasis added) There is no “exclusive/inclusive” distinction for the 2nd person: [. . .] there is no language with simplex pronouns distinguishing {2} from {2, 3}, that is, an argument picking out only hearers to the exclusion of non-hearers, {2} only. (Noyer 1997: 109) [. . .] 2nd inclusive/exclusive distinction is not in fact attested, a result which conforms to the predictions of our geometry: we can encode no such contrast. (Harley & Ritter 2002a: 37, n.7)
Answer type II: ‘Well, maybe. . .’ Methodologically conscious researchers admit that they might just happen not to know of a relevant language, but that, naturally, such a language could exist — in principle, somewhere. . . [. . .] if any language distinguishes inclusive and exclusive second-person plurals — I know of none that do, but expect that there are some — the forms would be: [. . .] (Zwicky 1977: 729; emphasis added)
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural [. . .] what appears to be a universal principle, with a few rare and doubtful exceptions, namely that languages do not distinguish in what are usually called secondperson non-singulars between 2 and 3. (Greenberg 1988: 14; emphasis added) [no particular language mentioned] I cannot, in fact, produce a single example of a language which does make a clear distinction between (2+2. . .) and (2+3. . .), but is obviously an empirical possibility to whose occurence we should be alert. (Greenberg 1989: 454; emphasis added) theoretically feasible, yet [. . .] unattested. (Cysouw 2002: 45) Overall, it seems implausible, if not impossible, for a language to have a grammaticalized category 2+2 in the pronominal paradigm. (Cysouw 2003: 76; emphasis added)
One should also add a passage from Lyons (1968) where he speculates about the possibility of a clusivity contrast in the second person, without any further indication of data:3 A distinction might also be made between an ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ use of the ‘second-person plural’ (in a slightly different sense of ‘inclusive’ v. ‘exclusive’). The English pronoun you may of course be either singular or plural [. . .]. As a plural form, it may be either ‘inclusive’ (referring only to the hearers present — in which case it is the plural of the singular you, in the same sense as cows is the plural of cow) or ‘exclusive’ (referring to some other person, or persons, in addition to the hearer, or hearers). (Lyons 1968: 277)
Answer type III: ‘Yes!’ Interestingly and in striking contrast to the authors just mentioned, several linguists who are concerned with the typology of person-number-paradigms have claimed that they do in fact know examples of second-person clusivity. The first typologist to draw attention to this distinction is Comrie (1980). Critisising Ingram (1978) for not being able to cover all possible types of pronominal systems, he mentions the case of an Oceanic language in passing (although he does not give a reference): One pair of combinations not discussed is the opposition between 2nd person nonsingular inclusive (i.e. including some third person) and exclusive, which is attested in Southeast Ambrym. (Comrie 1980: 837)
Some years later, Plank (1985) provides an insightful typological systematisation of the category person. He takes great care not to confuse the grammatical category ‘person’ with its real world counterpart ‘speech act role deixis’. By systematically holding these concepts apart, Plank deduces all conceivable relationships between the two and exemplifies them with attested linguistic systems where possible. Concerning second-person clusivity he writes: Einige wenige Sprachen — unter ihnen das Abchasische [. . .] und das Südost-Ambrynische (eine ostozeanische Sprache einer Insel der nördlichen Neuen Hebriden [. . .]) — identifizieren formal nicht die Referenz-Mengen “{adr . . .}” und “{adr . . ., unb . . .}”. (Plank 1985: 147)
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Plank quotes a grammar of Abkhaz by Hewitt (1979/1989a) and the afore-mentioned review by Comrie (1980) as references. Next, a somewhat obscure formulation can be found in Hagège (1995): [. . .] le Port-Sandwich (Nouvelles-Hébrides) distingue un inclusif et un exclusif (duel, triel, pluriel) à la 1re et même aux 2e et 3e personnes, selon les solidarités de groupes d’ego et de l’auditeur. (Hagège 1995: 119)
Apparently, Hagège claims that in the language concerned clusivity is a pervasive category, applying to all three person values and to all three non-singular number values.4 Furthermore, the existence of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second person is explicitly maintained in a comprehensive survey of morphological categories by Mel’čuk (1994): “vous exclusif ”, c’est “vous à qui je m’adresse mais personne d’autre”, et “vous inclusif ” — “vous et d’autres”. (Mel’čuk 1994: 172)
However, despite rich factual details elsewhere in his comprehensive survey of morphological differentiations, Mel’čuk does not give any hint as to which language he has in mind here, nor does he provide a bibliographical reference. For a great many cross-linguistic generalisations, the Universals Archive at the University of Konstanz provides a neat overview of the suggestions made in the literature so far. In our case, the relevant information is, naturally, part of the collection of rare linguistic traits, the ‘Grammatisches Raritätenkabinett’. In this inventory, the number of languages listed as possessing second-person clusivity has changed every now and then over the last few years. However, the following group (not incidentally coinciding with the languages mentioned above, of course) seems to remain constantly in the list: SE Ambrym, Port Sandwich, Abkhaz (?), Ghomala‘, Bavarian (?) (‘Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett’ at http://ling.uni-konstanz.de:591/universals/introrara. html; version of 11 June 2003)
A few other languages have been included occasionally in this somewhat unstable listing; among them are: Ojibwe, Yokuts and Ordos Mongolian. Now, what is the significance of all this? My short review of the typological literature on person-number-paradigms has shown that one finds a surprising amount of disagreement concerning second-person clusivity. While some researchers downright deny its existence, others are more cautious and admit that they just do not know enough facts to be sure. A third group even claims that clusivity is a real category in the second person; these authors mention particular languages that they believe to show the distinction. Given the significant discrepancy of opinions on a seemingly simple empirical question, I shall re-examine all the available data on second-person inclusives versus exclusives in the respective languages. It will turn out that the arguments in favour of the category adduced so far are not convincing — in fact, the discussion in the lit-
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
erature seems to be marred by misunderstandings and infelicities. However, I will present new data from a German dialect, Bavarian, where the opposition between two second-person plural pronouns might be interpreted as clusivity — albeit closely intertwined with the grammatical fallout of politeness: the category of respect. Before I plunge into the details of the relevant languages, let me point out the theoretical significance of the question this chapter examines.
2. Theoretical impact of the problem: morphosyntactic features One of the goals of grammatical theory is to provide a universal set of features (be they phonological or morphological or whatever else) that is comprehensive enough to be able to describe all the grammatical facts of human languages. Nevertheless, one should try to keep this set as restrictive as possible in order to fulfil general methodological requirements (Occam’s Razor, etc.) and to achieve the goals of scientific study, such as to provide elegant and pervasive solutions (for a concise critical discussion of these principles cf. Wasow 2002: 150–6). In the context of pronominal paradigms, several linguists have suggested universal inventories of morphosyntactic features (which some of them claim to be provided directly by an innate Universal Grammar). Among these suggestions of feature inventories are the following:5
(1) [±ego] [±tu]
Silverstein ([1976]1986: 169)
[±sp] [±hr]
Ingram (1978: 226)
[±I] [±you] [±participant]
Noyer (1997: 111 & 136–9)
The most recent — and most elaborate — discussion of person and number features in pronouns can be found in two closely related papers by Harley & Ritter (2002a, 2002b). In contrast to the authors mentioned above, they argue for an inherently structured array of features in form of a feature geometry that — so they say — not only can describe all existing pronominal paradigms, but that also constrains the order of acquisition of such paradigms in child language (see Figure 1).6 The interesting fact for our discussion is that none of the available proposals can capture the difference between the alleged pronouns A and B whose crucial distinguishing factor is neither the speaker nor the addressee; this differentiation would require some feature like [±other]. Noyer (1997: 110), e.g., explicitly excludes such a feature because of the assumed non-existence of the A-B-distinction.7 Consequently, the empirical question under review in the present chapter turns out to be of major theoretical importance. If Comrie, Plank etc. (cf. answer type
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participant Speaker
individuation
Addressee
Minimal Augmented
Group
class Animate Masc. Fem.
Inanimate/ Neuter
Figure 1. Morphological feature geometry according to Harley & Ritter (2002a: 25; similarly: 2002b: 486)
III above) are right in positing a clusivity distinction not only in first-person nonsingulars, but also in the second person, then the elegant analyses of the more theoretically inclined linguists have to be thoroughly revised. In what follows, I will go through each of the languages mentioned in the literature up to now, roughly in the order in which they were introduced into the discussion. By doing so, I shall look at the facts in more detail than can be accomplished in a broadly based typological investigation.
3. The data 3.1. South-East Ambrym The first language reportedly exhibiting second-person clusivity is South-East Ambrym, an Oceanic language spoken on the small island Ambrym in the Republic of Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides).8 It is mentioned in Comrie (1980: 837) and Plank (1985: 147): However, neither gives any data or any references (Plank refers to Comrie, though). The only publications dealing specifically with South-East Ambrym are, to the best of my knowledge, some short articles and a dictionary with a brief grammatical introduction by a single author from 1968 and 1970.9 And, indeed, two different second-person plural forms are listed in the dictionary, supplied with translation equivalents which explicitly refer to the clusivity distinction:
(2) xami ‘you (plural inclusive)’ xamim ‘you (plural exclusive)’
(Parker 1970: ix, 43)
No corresponding clusivity-forms are cited for the dual and the paucal, although regular pronouns exist for these numbers in the other person categories; this is in itself already highly suspicious since clusivity thus remarkably disturbs the regularity and symmetry of the paradigm. Furthermore, when it comes to subject–verb agreement, Parker (on p. v) gives only a single second-person plural prefix on verbs: mu‑.10
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
So, how can we come to grips with the data in (2)? Well, several other sources mentioning South-East Ambrym in passing provide pronominal forms that are relevant for us: Paton (1971: 121) gives hami for South-East Ambrym and kami for Paama (recall n. 8); similarly Ray (1926: 317, 335) already has the same form for Paama and cami for ‘Ambrim’ (however, in this case, it is unclear which specific variety is meant; it is probably from the north-west coast of the island); finally, Crowley (1992: 38) lists kamī for this language.11 So far, so good. But where does Parker’s exclusive pronoun xamim come from? Nobody seems to mention it. However, Wilfred Tasso (an informant from Maat village who is a native speaker of South-East Ambrym and whom Terry Crowley interviewed for me) says he uses xamim while recognising xami as typical for Taveak and Utas villages; both are “semantically equivalent” (T. Crowley, p.c.).12 This indicates that there might be something sociolinguistic or geographical about the two forms. Fortunately, a fair number of dialect data are available for the island of Ambrym. More than a dozen pronominal paradigms can be gleaned from the comparative lists in Tryon (1976: 443) and Paton (1971: 105). Together with hints from other sources (Ray 1926, Paton 1973, Tryon 1995, T. Crowley, p.c.), the following picture emerges: The second-person plural pronouns in these lists all end either in a vowel or in an -m. None of the varieties — with one noteworthy exception! — has both forms. Interestingly, the geographical distribution of the types does not seem to be arbitrary. Consider the map in Figure 2.13
Empty circle: 2nd p. plural pronoun ending in -V Filled circle: 2nd p. plural pronoun ending in -m Half circle: both forms reported
Figure 2. Geographical distribution of second-person plural pronominal forms on Ambrym
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Clearly, the empty circles (representing forms ending in a vowel) are scattered over the whole island, clustering towards the edges of it. In contrast to that, the full circles (symbolising the additional -m14) appear in an area along the south-western coast as well as in a place on the east coast.15 In the south-eastern corner of Ambrym, where the alleged second-person clusivity language is spoken, we find mostly vowel-final forms. Yet there is a highly significant complication concerning one village: Maat. This is the only Ambrym variety about which I happen to have conflicting data: Crowley (p.c.) tells me that his informant from this village uses xamim, whereas Tryon (1976: 443) gives γami in his list. Coincidentally, Maat is also the village where Parker’s two principal field work informants originally came from (Parker 1968: 27).16 Moreover, it might be important that — unlike most other places on Ambrym, and specifically those in the south-east — this village is somewhat inland, thereby possibly being nearer to the dialect boundary suggested by the distribution of the dots on the map.17 And, lastly, there seem to have been a lot of population movements of South-East Ambrym speakers — generally, and in particular with inhabitants of Maat, due to the volcanic destructions mentioned in n. 17. These relocations of speakers resulted, of course, in a certain amount of mixing with speakers of other linguistic varieties of the region, subsequently blurring dialectal distinctions. In sum, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that Parker’s description of two ‘distinct’ second-person pronouns (which he takes to represent the clusivity contrast) is in fact due to a conflation of two geographically defined systems. Presumably, Parker was led to misinterpret some formal variation in his informants’ speech, which was induced by dialect mixture, as being a grammatically significant opposition.18 I would therefore suggest to characterise the evidence for second-person clusivity in South-East Ambrym as a myth which was introduced into the literature because of insufficient analysis of the data. This language should therefore be dismissed from the list cited in section 1. At this point, of course, the problem still remains how the morphology of the pronoun with the final -m should be interpreted synchronically and diachronically. While it is pretty clear that the two pronouns xami and xamim are representative of two distinct linguistic systems (i.e., dialects), their formal differentiation must somehow be explained. Considering that the historical reconstructions all lack a final nasal, we can surmise that the last element in xamim is a later addition. Then, naturally, the question arises whether this -m should be granted some morphemic status of its own. In other words, should we interpret the younger form xamim (which has been misinterpreted as an exclusive) as xami+m consisting of a secondperson plural pronoun plus some morpheme of yet unknown meaning?19 It is not unheard of that pronominal forms grow larger over time. At least two variants of pronominal growth occur frequently: they arise through morphological reanalysis or through the clarifying addition of some element.20 Both of these developments can be exemplified by changes in Germanic languages. The first one is the case of wrong segmentation in a verb+pronoun sequence (quite common in
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
verb-second languages) as it has taken place in some Scandinavian languages (cf., e.g., Wessén 1969: 219f. for the history of the Swedish second-person plural ni) and in some Swiss German dialects (cf. Marti 1985: 95 and 64, n.4, for Bernese German): the final consonant of the verb form has been mis-interpreted as the first consonant of the following pronoun (originally beginning with a vowel), thus giving rise a preferred phonological CV-structure of the pronoun.21 The second type of pronominal growth occurs with extended pronouns, which are often connected to the polite use of pronouns of address: When the use of a second-person plural as a polite way of referring to a single addressee becomes fully generalised at the expense of the old singular pronoun — as it happened, for instance, in the history of English ye/you as a substitute for thou/thee — then the number distinction in the second-person pronouns is lost. What many languages (or rather their speakers) do as a remedy, is to invent a freshly pluralised form: In the case of English, this leads to pronouns such as youse or y’all (cf. Hickey 2003 for a recent overview); here, the additional element is a ‘normal’ plural morpheme as also found on nouns or a generalising quantifier. Similarly, the Modern Dutch second-person plural pronoun jullie goes back to a combination of jij (the old plural form, now singular) plus lieden, a nominal element meaning ‘persons, people’ (cf. Howe 1996: 209–11);22 this, in turn, is reminiscent of a semi-grammaticalised form like you guys, as used by some speakers of American English. Finally, a number of Romance varieties possess complex plural forms that are grammaticalised in varying degrees:23 vosotros/vosotras (Spanish), vous autres (Colloquial French; cf. Brunot 1965: 83), and voi altri (many Italian dialects; cf. Rohlfs 1949: 160f.). Some Northern Italian dialects have also had considerable influence on the structurally and lexically parallel pronominal systems in neighbouring isolated dialects of German (South Bavarian and South Alemannic).24 Coming back to the problem of the South-East Ambrym pronominal long form, one will want to speculate on the history of the -m: recall that the verbal prefix indicating the relevant person–number-specification is mu-. Since the basic word order in this language is SVO (cf. Crowley 2002b: 667 with examples), the possibility of reanalysis after faulty segmentation is quite obvious. This argumentation is also supported by the fact that the complementary explanation is much less likely: the little information on pluralising strategies in South-East Ambrym that is available does not provide a basis for a pronominal extension along the lines just discussed.25 Thus, apparently, we have an instance of morphological re-analysis parallel to the one well-known in Germanic. This development did have consequences for the actual phonological make-up of the form, but it did not have any relevance for the paradigmatic organisation of South-East Ambrym pronouns.
3.2. Abkhaz The second language that was brought to the attention of typologists interested in second-person clusivity is Abkhaz, which belongs to the group of Northwest
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Inclusive or general
Exclusive
First person Second person Third person
ħa(rà) š°a(rà)
ħart š°art
darà
Caucasian languages and is spoken primarily in the Abkhaz province of Georgia. It was first mentioned by Plank (1985: 147) in this context. For Abkhaz, the widespread grammars of Hewitt (1979/1989a, 1989b) boast the paradigm in Table 1. This seems to be a clear example of the category we are looking for. However, Hewitt himself has some reservations. He writes: “. . . the strictly inclusive forms may and usually do appear where one would expect the exclusives” (Hewitt 1979/1989a: 156).26 This statement somewhat blurs the picture. Especially when one notes that all the example sentences with a first or second-person plural pronoun that are cited in Hewitt (1979/1989a) have the forms ħa(rà) and š°a(rà) respectively, one starts to become suspicious.27 Moreover, the clusivity distinction does not seem to exist in the person prefixes on verbs marking subjects and objects (Hewitt 1979: 101–3), where only one second-person plural morpheme — albeit in several guises — appears.28 In accordance with Hewitt’s own reluctance to fully accept the distinction between an inclusive and an exclusive pronoun is the fact that many grammars of Abkhaz do not mention the forms ħart and š°art at all (cf., among others, Dirr 1928: 43 and Klimov 1994: 64; for grammars not available to me, this is also confirmed by observations by Michael Job, p.c.). Furthermore, none of the other closely related Northwest Caucasian languages that have been documented in Hewitt (ed.) (1989) (i.e., West Circassian, East Circassian, and Ubykh) has comparable pronominal forms, not even Abaza (which is merely “a divergent dialect” of Abkhaz) (Lomtatidze & Klychev 1989: 101). Also, the special exclusive forms do not show up in Chirikba’s (1996) data for the reconstruction of Common (North)West Caucasian (p. 394); and Nichols (1992: 353) flatly states in this context: “There is no evidence for an inclusive/exclusive opposition in this family.” Nonetheless, there are some hints in the literature that might support the idea of Abkhaz first and second-person clusivity. As early as the late 19th century, both hara/švara and harth/švarth turn up in a grammatical description of this language: in a comparative table of inflectional forms in Abkhaz and three Circassian dialects (von Erckert 1895/1970: 281), they appear in brackets in the Abkhaz column — and, significantly, already then with the label ‘exclusive’ attached to the latter forms.29 It is difficult to assess the exact functional load that the pronominal forms discussed here really carry. What is it precisely that Hewitt and von Erckert mean when they write about ‘exclusives’? — Interestingly, there have been several more linguistic works that feature the forms under consideration, but that — maybe be-
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
cause they were written in lesser known languages such as, for instance, Russian or French — did not find their way into the Anglophone typological literature. However, these books and articles shed new and significantly different light on the matter of clusivity in Abkhaz. Among the books that allow us to view the problem at hand from a different angle, is the comparative morphology of Northwest Caucasian languages by Dumézil (1932). Here, one finds an interesting note: A 1 pl. et 2 pl., on peut également dire har-t’, s°ar-t’ pour hara, s°ara; Uslar [a 19th century grammarian of Abkhaz, HS] dit avec raison que ces formes sont plus définies; elles s’accompagnent volontiers d’un geste. (Dumézil 1932: 109, n. 2)
Dumézil states that the t’-form as such is “obscure” (p. 109); in any case, its function appears to be connected to the sphere of demonstrativity/definiteness/determination — as pointed out by his reference to a deictic gesture (in the original sense of the word). In particular, the pronominal forms involving this ending seem to be used in specialised emphatic contexts. In a similar vein, Lomtatidze (1987) stresses, after reviewing some of the Russian literature on this subject, that the addition of such a ‘demonstrative’ suffix is quite typical for Abkhaz; it occurs with singular pronouns, too. When it comes to determining precisely what the relevant opposition expresses, the following remarks from a grammar published by the Georgian Academy of Sciences give interesting hints: The pronouns of the 1st ps.pl. ħara ‘we’ and the 2nd ps.pl. š°ara ‘you’ have parallel forms: ħara/ħart and š°ara/š°art. ħara has an inclusive meaning, i.e. the speaker includes also the listener into the ‘we’. The exclusive meaning, which excludes the listener to whom the text is addressed, is formed with the personal pronoun ħara ‘we’ and the suffix -t, ħar-t (cf. Abaz. ħarabarat ‘we without thee’). In an analogous way, the form for the 2nd ps.pl. is composed: š°ara ‘you’, š°ar-t (cf. Abaz. š°arabarat ‘you without me’). (Grammatika abxazskogo jazyka 1968: 35; translated for me by Koyka Stoyanova)30
Here the description of the two first-person plural forms is quite straightforward: apparently, we are dealing with the usual inclusive–exclusive distinction: [±addressee]. However, traditional clusivity does not seem to be a very felicitous concept for Abkhaz (and Abaza). The reason is this: As soon as we turn to the second-person forms, we run into problems; now we are facing the reverse situation, i.e., reference to a group including the addressee(s) with the specific exclusion of the speaker.31 In traditional person deictic terms, this would be a case of redundancy (in fact, bordering on terminological self-contradiction): a second-person plural entails the exclusion of the speaker anyway, otherwise it would be a first-person plural. Taking into account that the relevant suffix -t also occurs in third-person plural pronouns (Grammatika abxazskogo jazyka 1968: 36) makes it even less convincing to argue for a simple clusivity opposition. Rather, a different interpretation comes to mind: Taking up Dumézil’s above-mentioned idea of a deictic gesture, one should indeed analyse these forms as emphatic — without reference to the notion of clusivity.
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In fact, this is what the most recent grammatical description of Abkhaz now s uggests, too: “At present, at any rate, the inclusive–exclusive category does not seem to be existent in Abkhaz” (Chirikba 2003: 32). Therefore, when discussing Abkhaz clusivity in the typological literature on the basis of Hewitt’s grammar, one should bear in mind what he writes in the introduction of his grammar: “However, responsibility for the interpretation of the materials provided by my wife or culled from any other sources rests solely with me” (Hewitt 1979/1989a: 2).
3.3. Port Sandwich The third language that has found its way into the typological literature on the pretence that it possesses second-person clusivity is another Oceanic language from Vanuatu, incidentally from Malekula, an island just about 10 miles west of the aforementioned Ambrym: Hagège (1995: 119) mentions a language called Port Sandwich. Unfortunately, he does not give a reference for his claim, let alone any data. Moreover, confusingly, Hagège speaks of clusivity in all three person values. So, what can this mean? The only piece of work that I know of that is concerned with this language is a grammar by Charpentier (1979). In his discussion of the pronominal system (p. 49– 51), he presents the familiar Oceanic range of pronominal distinctions, i.e., dual, trial and plural pronouns in all three persons and an inclusive–exclusive-differentiation in the first-person non-singular forms.32 However, he lists only one secondperson plural pronoun: xamite (p. 50), which can possibly be segmented as xam-ite (‘2-pl’), similarly as the first-person plural exclusive. Yet, there is a long additional remark concerning a more unusual phenomenon, namely a special distinction relating to different groups of non-speech-act-participants.33 In this context, Charpentier establishes an opposition which he labels as “inclusif ” vs. “exclusif ”. Here he focuses on third-person plural and trial forms;34 the plural ones are described as follows (p. 50f.):
‘“ils/elles” (de l’autre groupe, toi et moi étant ensemble)’ [inclusive]35 xamit ana ‘“eux” (les tiens, sauf toi)’ [exclusive]
(3) xate
Charpentier explicates that the relevant distinguishing factor has to do with the social affiliations and the corresponding group solidarities of the speaker, the addressee and the group of non-speech-act-participants referred to (‘others’). He says that the inclusive and the exclusive are used in the following situations, respectively: – inclusive: “notre interlocuteur est supposé inclus à notre groupe” – exclusive: “le locuteur et l’interlocuteur appartiennent à des communautés différentes, ce dernier se trouve inclus dans le groupe du premier et exclu de son groupe d’origine” (Charpentier 1979: 50f.)
As an explanation for the importance of these concepts, Charpentier puts forward the ‘aggressive’ character of traditional Melanesian societies:
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural Dans ces communautés guerrières, il convenait de bien se situer par rapport aux siens et surtout par rapport aux autres. Lorsque l’on palabrait avec des “étrangers”, il fallait distinguer les gens à qui l’on parlait des autres (ennemis potentiels). (Char pentier 1979: 51)
It is hard to see why this phenomenon should have anything to do with clusivity (as Hagège’s characterisation would have us believe). Therefore, quite independently of the validity of Charpentier’s anthropological reasoning,36 it can be stated safely that what we are dealing with here has nothing to do with the role-deixis underlying the traditional concept of clusivity.37 Rather, the system seems to be governed by factors that are similar to the ones underlying the use of socially deictic linguistic elements in many (South)East Asian languages: In these systems, features such as group allegiances of all persons involved in the conversation are of paramount importance for the adequate usage of certain linguistic elements.
3.4. Ojibwe, Yokuts and a few other languages In a few descriptive grammars and also in some more theoretically oriented studies, one can find mention of a ‘second-person inclusive’, where this label is applied to a phenomenon not at all related to the one discussed in the present study (nevertheless, some of these languages are listed in the Konstanz Raritätenkabinett mentioned in the introduction). In these cases, one finds a certain type of syncretism in the pronominal paradigm that involves a pronoun referring to {sp. . ., addr. . .}. Most notoriously, the much-discussed Algonquian languages are mentioned in this context (Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Cree etc.; American Mid-West); but also a few other ones show up, e.g. Yokuts (Penutian; California) and Nama (Khoisan; Southern Africa). The most recent instance of labelling this particular syncretism with the term ‘second-person inclusive’ occurs in Harley & Ritter (2002a) and (2002b); in these articles, the phrase has even been promoted to the status of a chapter title.38 By way of illustration consider the paradigm in Table 2 from Southwestern Ojibwe (original data from Schwartz & Dunnigan 1986: 296). In this language, both prefixes and suffixes attach to a general pronominal stem, providing together the person and number specifications of the pronoun. Morphologically speaking, the inclusive plural form in the second line (kiinawint) shares one element with the first-person plural and one with the second-person plural each. However, syntactically, the Table 2. Paradigm of personal pronouns in Southwestern Ojibwe according to Harley & Ritter (2002a: 34)
1 2incl 2excl 3
Singular
Plural
n-iin * k-iin w-iin
n-iin-awint k-iin-awint k-iin-awaa w-iin-awaa
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inclusive plural clearly patterns with the second-person pronoun kiinawaa (as can be seen in agreement behaviour).39 Thus the syntax is parallel to the pure person prefixes (which appear also on verbs); these prefixes are therefore crucial for determining the paradigmatic status of the forms: a group consisting of speaker and addressee(s) receives the same prefix as a group consisting of addressees only or of addressee(s) and other(s).40 This is what leads Harley & Ritter to the labelling indicated in the left column in Table 2. Such an analysis presupposes the universal validity of the alignment of grammatical person on the one hand and role deixis on the other hand as it is found in more familiar languages such as the Indo-European ones:
(4) first person ⇔ speaker second person ⇔ addressee third person ⇔ other
However, this view has been challenged by various theoreticians of grammatical person. Most notably, Plank (1985) has argued that one should maintain the conceptual distinction between deictic role and morphosyntactic feature. The methodological rationale behind this idea is to say that the ‘most relevant’ deictic role in a system should determine to which pronominal form we assign the status of ‘first person’. Looking then at the prefixes in the data presented in Table 2, one can establish a different person hierarchy for Ojibwe:41
(5) if [+addr] then kif [−addr, +sp] then nif [−addr, −sp] then w-
Here the decision whether or not the addressee(s) is/are in the group referred to takes precedence over the question whether the speaker is referred to or not. In other words, ‘addressee’ constitutes the highest deictic role in the system and receives the label ‘first person’, spelled out as k-; the prefix n-, on the other hand, is only applied when the addressee is not in the reference set, but the speaker is; ‘speaker’ receives the value ‘second person’ then. Under this analysis, the clusivity distinction in Ojibwe vanishes. Instead, we have a simple three person paradigm again, differing only in the assignment of speech act roles to grammatical persons.42 Now, of course, one might argue that the unusual person hierarchy in Algonquian is somehow an artefact of the concentration on prefixes on the analyst’s part; one might therefore be led to believe that the picture would change if the suffixes were taken into consideration as well. However, in languages from other families a possible ‘suffix-complication’ (or anything similar) can be ruled out, simply because there are no relevant suffixes or the like; sometimes, there is no verbal inflection either. One such language, where the hierarchy just discussed can be seen very clearly, is Sanuma (from the group of Yanomami languages, spoken in the BrazilianVenezuelian borderland). Here, the paradigm that can be gleaned from Borgman (1990: 149) is as in Table 3:
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural Table 3. Paradigm of personal pronouns in Sanuma according to Borgman (1990: 149)
sp sp+addr addr oth
Singular
Plural
(kami)sa * (ka)wa kama
kami (ka)makö (ka)makö kama pö
The verbal description that Borgman offers for this paradigm reveals that he remains firmly in the terminological web of grammaticographical tradition: In the first-person plural there is also the distinction of exclusive and inclusive, excluding or including the listener or listeners. First-person plural inclusive and second-person plural have the same pronoun and only context determines which referent is intended. (Borgmann 1990: 149)
This is also evident from the glossing of the only relevant example in Borgman’s grammar:
(6) makö kali -palo mai kite 1pl.incl/2pl work -repet neg fut ‘We are not going to work’ or ‘You (pl) are not going to work.’ (Borgman 1990: 150)
Now, if it is only the context that determines the reference of the pronoun (ka)makö,43 it would be more appropriate to give up the semantic distinction between {sp+addr} and {addr} for this language. Both sets of referents can only be referred to using the very same pronoun, anyway. Therefore, Sanuma provides an excellent example of a language with the speech act role ‘addressee’ at the top of the person hierarchy, but lacking a clusivity opposition. Besides the languages just discussed (to which a few more could be added), there are some languages where there is no strict identity of the inclusive and the secondperson plural, but where we can nevertheless see strong connections between the two categories — either in the way they are built morphologically or in their peculiar syntactic behaviour. To give just two examples: First, in Yokuts, the inclusive pronoun may is derived from the same root as the second-person plural ma’an;44 the second-person singular is ma’ (Newman 1944: 231f.). This leads Newman (1967: 197) to postulate a common noun theme (ma·) for these forms, which he glosses as “second person”. Second, in Fula (Niger-Congo, spread over a large area in West Africa), the relevant pronouns (and affixes) share a similar phonological structure (cf. the paradigm in Arnott 1970: appendix 3, who even calls the inclusive pronoun a “second person”); moreover the subject pronouns seem to share certain word order characteristics when they enter interrogative clauses (thus contrasting with the first-person plural form) (McIntosh 1984: 118). In sum, some languages dis-
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play similarities between second-person plurals and inclusives in a way that causes some scholars to subsume the latter ones under second person, too. Summarising the discussion of pronominal systems in Algonquian and Sanuma as well as in the just mentioned languages Yokuts and Fula, we can say:45 No matter how we actually analyse these paradigms, there is no need for a feature [±other] which would be required to distinguish the groups specified in the initial question of this chapter. Either we stick to the traditional person/role-terminology (as Harley & Ritter and others do); then we have a second-person clusivity distinction indeed, albeit one that captures the inclusion vs. exclusion of the speaker instead of that of the addressee; this notion of a second-person inclusive is then very different from the one applied in the present approach. Or we adopt the idea advocated by Plank and others;46 then we get a different person hierarchy, but can do away with the clusivity distinction altogether (in these languages only, of course). What is most important for our present concerns: Either way, there is maximally one clusivity distinction in the paradigm; consequently, there is no need for a feature that explicitly relates to the speech act role ‘other’.
3.5. Ghomala′ Somewhat less clear than in the afore-mentioned languages is the situation in Ghomala′, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Western Cameroon. In this case, the analysis must be based on very scanty evidence, even if one includes some closely-related neighbouring languages. The only primary source available for Ghomala′ is the paradigm of pronominal forms printed in Wiesemann (1986: viii).47 Unfortunately, we know very little about the functioning of this system apart from what can be gleaned from the bare format of the paradigm. The relevant second-person forms are:
(7) a. b. c. d.
po poé poayʉ´ poapu
‘2nd pl.’ ‘addr+oth (dual)’ ‘addr+addr. . .+oth’ ‘addr+. . .+oth+oth. . .’
What can be stated safely is that we are dealing with at least two types of pronouns here: simplex ones and complex (or compound) ones.48 The latter ones are clearly polymorphemic; they are created through the addition of a second morpheme plus a linking element to the basic form. However, it is difficult to assess the exact piece of information that the usage of one of the complex forms (7b–d) entails in comparison to the simplex (7a). At any rate, the complex pronouns seem to combine two pieces of information: The second morpheme somehow specifies the reference of the first, more basic item. More specifically, the simplex pronoun po can refer to any kind of group involving at least one addressee, but not the speaker (thus, it behaves like a ‘normal’ second-person plural pronoun). If the speaker wants to be more explicit, s/he can use one of the forms (7b–d), as appropriate. The crucial point here
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
is that since po is not at all restricted to sets of addressees only, the use of any of the other forms does not convey the clusivity contrast we are looking for (a similar line of reasoning holds for the first-person non-singular pronouns, where the simple pronoun does not represent anything like a ‘choric’ we, either).49 Moving away from second-person pronouns for a moment, one can even find forms in the large paradigm of pronominal forms in Ghomala′ which seem to refer to sets such as {sp+addr} and {sp+addr+oth} respectively (each with several forms according to the particular number specification); although these are clearly firstperson pronouns, they must be mentioned here because — judging from the labelling in the paradigm — they appear to involve the possible feature [±other] alluded to in section 2 above. However, even after a careful morphological examination of the pronouns involved and a componential analysis, Cysouw (2003: 179f.) confesses that the meaning differences between the various items in the paradigm remain obscure. Fortunately, in a recent summary of previous work Wiesemann (2003, ms.) explains that the forms seemingly involving all three persons in fact are “reserved for special use, probably ceremonial, to specifically acknowledge the presence of the ancestors”; if this statement captures the semantics correctly, these pronouns express something quite special, which should not be subsumed under the notion of person-deictic pronominal distinctions analysed in the present chapter. For the time being, it will therefore be safe to keep in mind what Voorhoeve has written in connection with a comparable paradigm in Bamileke, a very closely related language exhibiting compound pronouns: The meaning of complex pronouns cannot be clearly distinguished from that of simple plural ones. [. . .] However, the composition of the group of participants is much clearer defined, if complex pronouns are used. It seems as if there are three contrastive levels in the pronominal system [. . .]: singular simple pronouns contrasting to plural simple pronouns; and plural simple pronouns contrasting to dual and plural complex pronouns. The pronominal system as a whole cannot be analysed with the methods of componential analysis, but the contrasting subsystems can. (Voorhoeve 1967: 428)
Similarly, Parker (1986: 135) writes with reference to Mundani, yet another Grassfields Bantu language: “Complex forms are used only when needed to clarify which members of a group are being referred to; otherwise, simple plural forms are preferred.”50 Apparently, the choice of the pronominal subsystem to be used in a particular speech act is determined by factors best characterised as ‘pragmatic’ in the wider sense. The large inventories of pronominal forms seem to allow optional choices that serve to emphasise group relations, to pick out particular sub-groups, or to include special entities in the reference set. At present no clear indication exists that we are dealing with a system primarily or even exclusively determined by straightforward role deixis alone. Therefore Cysouw’s (2003: 166) judgement should be kept in mind: “Until more specific descriptions of these compound pronouns become available, it seems best not to consider them as specific person markers.”51
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3.6. Mongolian and Mao Naga There are two further languages where rumour has it that they possess second-person clusivity: One is the Ordos dialect of Mongolian spoken in Inner Mongolia, China; the other is a Tibeto-Burman language from the eastern edge of India: Mao Naga. In the case of Mongolian (the Ordos dialect of which has only recently been included in the list of the ‘Konstanz Raritätenkabinett’), the picture that presents itself from a survey of the literature on various Mongolian varieties is somewhat unclear. It is quite obvious that there is an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the first-person plural — at least in most non-nominative case forms — in several varieties of Mongolian (both contemporary dialects and older stages of the language).52 However, the situation is less transparent when we turn to second-person pronouns. In none of the studies on Mongolian varieties mentioned in n. 52 is there anything described that could be interpreted as second-person clusivity. With regard to the Ordos dialect of Mongolian specifically, one of the two descriptions available to me does not mention clusivity at all (Soulié 1903: 44f.).53 Yet, strangely and confusingly, there are two independent remarks each concerning one of the two main dialects already mentioned, Ordos and Khalkha, that could, at first glance, be interpreted as referring to second-person clusivity. Neither of the studies, to be sure, explicitly applies the clusivity concept for the second person. One is the grammar of Khalkha by Beffa & Hamayon (1975).54 In this we find — as expected — the familiar first-person plural inclusive and exclusive (albeit called “collectif fortuit” and “collectif essentiel”, respectively; p. 161). Furthermore — and this is the interesting piece of information — there is one cell in the paradigm where we find two second-person plural pronouns: in the genitive (and only there!) (p. 162). One of the relevant forms is glossed as “de vous et des vôtres” (this might mean ‘inclusive’ in more traditional terminology); the other pronoun is described as: “se rapportant à toutes les personnes auxquelles le discours s’adresse” (p. 163), which might be interpreted as suspiciously similar to an ‘exclusive’. Regrettably, no example of usage is given. The other study appeared as an introductory chapter to a large collection of oral texts (songs, stories, speeches) in (Southern) Ordos Mongolian, explaining the morphology of the language in great detail: Mostaert (1937; in particular p. XXI–LXV). Even though there is only one form listed in the paradigm of personal pronouns itself (p. XXXII), one can find the remarkable note that the genitive plural forms are “sporadiquement” replaced by alternative forms (p. XXXIII). These replacements include a special affix (which, by the way, seems to be identical to the one reported for the Khalkha dialect by Beffa & Hamayon), whose function is described as follows: “indiquer un concept ou un groupe de concepts appartenant d’une manière ou d’une autre au concept exprimé par le nom qui s’est adjoint le suffixe” (p. XXXVI). The translation of the example contains the explication: “vous et les gens de votre maison”. Therefore the opposition is probably not one of person deixis alone, but includes notions already encountered in the discussion of other languages above.
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
Assessing the Mongolian evidence in general, we can state that whereas clusivity is almost omnipresent in the first-person plural, the literature is much less copious for second-person clusivity. In fact, this distinction would appear only in a small pocket of the paradigm — genitives — and even here, it is far from obvious that what we are dealing with is clusivity in the strict sense at all. It seems better to correlate the affix with the notion of ‘associativity’, something that can be similar to but is not identical with the inclusive–exclusive difference — since it is more pervasive in the grammatical system and, above all, does not necessarily involve speech act role deixis. Finally, the most recent addition to the second-person clusivity list has been made by Bhat (2004: 94). He maintains with regard to two different suffixes in Mao Naga, both of which express some kind of plurality: It is also possible to use these plural suffixes with the second-person pronoun in Mao Naga. In this case, they appear to indicate a distinction between the inclusion vs. exclusion of the third person. Giridhar (1994: 141) points out that ni-khru-müi ‘2-Pl1-person’ (2.Incl.Pl)’ would mean that all its referents are present; it cannot refer to anyone who is not present (i.e., third person). On the other hand, ni-ta-müi ‘2Pl2-person’ (2.Excl.Pl) could refer to persons who are not present as well.
Although this statement seems reasonably clear, the original source upon which it is based leaves at least some room for interpretation. In particular, there might be more to these two forms than just a clusivity difference. This can be surmised from the fact that the two affixes involved in the contrast (ta and khru) are not peculiar to the pronominal system, but occur freely with all kinds of nominals (Giridhar 1994: 114ff.). Then the question arises what kind of contrast they actually encode. In this context, it is worth quoting the original description in detail; Giridhar explains: The essential point is that ta indicates a singularity of identity, and a plurality of number which is homogeneous at some level of identity unlike -khru which signals plurality both of identity and number, a plurality which is heterogeneous at some level of identity. (Giridhar 1994: 140)
The affixes can be added not only to first- and second-person pronouns, but — as already mentioned — also to nouns and third-person pronouns; for the latter ones, one can find an instructive illustration: Both pfotamüi ‘they (excl.pl)[’] and pfokhrumüi ‘they (incl.pl)’ can be used to refer to the same referent, say, Indians as a whole, but NOT in the same frame of reference. pfotamüi would mean an exclusive subset of a larger set of nationality identities whereas pfokhrumüi would mean an inclusive mix of different intraset identities whatever they be. (Giridhar 1994: 140; emphasis original, HS)55
The two pronouns used here apparently possess the same referential potential: Both can denote groups of non-speech-act-participants, ‘others’. Again, as already discussed in this chapter for other languages (cf. above on Port Sandwich and Ghomala′), the relevant situations are distinguished by different group associ-
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ations and dissociations. And again, this means that we are dealing with a morphosemantic phenomenon that has much broader scope than just pronominal clusivity. Thus, the distinction between the two second-person plural pronouns in Mao Naga mentioned above seems to be a special case of describing particular group relations; therefore the role deictic differentiation is only an ‘accidental’ side-effect.56
3.7. Bavarian As I hope to have shown in the previous sections, the evidence for a clusivity distinction in second-person pronouns adduced so far is fairly weak. However, paradoxically, there might be some more convincing data in a language that has not been mentioned in this context until now:57 Bavarian, a dialect of German spoken primarily in the south-east of Germany and in most parts of Austria.58 In this language, there are two quite distinct sets of second-person singular pronouns (and corresponding verb forms and other inflectional elements, too); their difference encodes the category of ‘respect’, i.e. grammaticalised politeness.59 Together with a number distinction between singular and plural, the respect forms yield the paradigm of pronouns of address in Table 4.60 Table 4. Paradigm of pronouns of address in Bavarian, preliminary version Bavarian address
Non-honorative
Singular Plural
du/=d
Honorative
Sie/=S eß/=ts (/ihr)
Here, we see a neutralisation of the respect category in the plural; in other words, all groups of people are addressed in the same way, irrespective of which pronoun each of the addressees would be entitled to receive if s/he were addressed alone.61 By way of illustration cf. the extract from a drama in (8).62
(8) Excerpt from Zimmerschied (1983:166): ‘Der Besuch. Eine Alltagsszene’ Alwin: Auf den Schreck mix i Eich no wos. Hausherr: Kannt i a normals Weizen hom? Alwin: Hod’s Eana ned g’schmeckt? Hausherr: Scho, owa . . . Alwin: Na, iatzt moch i wos ganz wos guad’s, des schmeckt Eich bestimmt. Gem’s dawei Eana Glas’l da Rosmarie.
A: ‘After this shock I’ll mix you [pl] something.’ H: ‘Could I have a normal wheat beer?’ A: ‘Didn’t you [sg.hon] like it?’ H: ‘Well yes, but . . .’ A: ‘Hey, now I’ll make something really good, you [pl] will like that for sure. Give your [sg.hon] glass to Rosmarie in the meantime.’
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
Note that Alwin constantly switches between the singular honorative and the plural, in accordance with the decision whether he addresses the landlord alone or whether he includes the latter’s wife as well. This type of respect-neutralisation in the plural, as shown in Table 4, is fairly wide-spread in colloquial German (at least in the southern varieties).63 Now, the interesting point for our discussion is the following: Sometimes the Bavarian Sie-forms are used even in situations where a group is referred to (contrary, thus, to what is said about eß/ihr in Table 4). This happens in exactly those circumstances where an addressee plus some absent other(s) are meant and where the addressee is someone who would be entitled to receive Sie if s/he were spoken to in a singular context. And this different usage of eß/ihr and Sie is exactly the clusivity distinction between the two pronouns A and B we are looking for. Consider the following two cases:
(9) a. A : exclusive: everybody referred to is actually present and can count as addressee: Hab-ts eß heid scho ohne mi ãgfangd? have-2pl 2pl today already without me started ‘Have you already started without me today?’ b. B: inclusive: some of the people referred to are not present in the speech situation (‘others’): Über was ham=S heid gredt auf da Sitzung? about what have.2sg.hon=2sg.hon today talked at the meeting ‘What did you discuss at the meeting today?’
A natural context for the utterance of (9a) would be: The speaker is late for a committee meeting; when s/he enters the room and asks whether the other committee members have already started the meeting, s/he naturally includes all (and only!) people who are actually present in the situation; each of them counts as an addressee of the speech act: {addr, . . .}. In contrast to that, imagine a case when the speaker is so late that s/he actually misses the whole meeting; s/he could approach a single committee member afterwards and inquire about the topics discussed. Here, the reference of the pronoun of address includes not only the addressee him-/herself but also those persons who where at the discussion but happen not be present in the current speech situation {addr, oth, . . .}. If the speech act participants are on polite Sie-terms, Sie will be used in such a setting (9b), i.e., in reference to more than one person — even though this pronoun has been assigned the value [singular] in Table 4 above (therefore, the paradigm above is slightly misleading in this context; cf. below). The essential difference in usage between the two pronouns of address in (9a) and (9b) is one of inclusion vs. exclusion of the speech act role ‘other’: secondperson clusivity! At first sight, there would seem to be a straightforward way to dismiss the possibility of clusivity here and to discuss away this quite natural sounding example.64 One could say that what we are dealing with in (9b) is not an instance of plural
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address at all; one might maintain that in this case the speaker in fact addresses a single addressee (hence the ‘singular’ pronoun) and includes the other committee members quasi metonymically. However, it can be shown that the set of entities referred to by Sie is indeed being conceptualised as a group, a mixed group consisting of one addressee plus at least one non-speech-act-participant. The crucial examples come from contexts where the minimal pairs involve verbs which inherently require a plural subject: in such contexts, a metonymic interpretation can be ruled out. Relevant verbs in Bavarian include: se treffa ‘to meet each other’ (Standard German: ‘sich treffen’) and ananandagrån ‘to start to argue with each other’ (Standard German: ‘aneinandergeraten’).65 (10) a. A: excl.: Griaß Eana Herr Müller, griaß Eana Herr Meier. Hab-ts enk eß heid scho amoi troffa? ‘[polite greetings][hon]. Have you[2.pl.excl] (you[2.pl.excl.refl]) met already today?’ b. B: incl.: Ah Herr Müller, was i Eana gråd frång woid übern Herrn Meier, ham-S Eana heid scho amoi troffa? ‘[polite greeting][hon], what I just wanted to ask you about Mr. Meier. Have you[2.pl.incl] (you[2.pl.incl.refl]) met already today?’ (11) a. A: excl.: Sei-ts heid wieda amoi ananandagrån, eß zwoa? ‘Have you[2.pl.excl] started to argue yet again, the two of you[2.pl.excl]?’ b. B: incl.: San-S heid wieda amoi ananandagrån, Sie und der anda, der wo scho furt is? ‘Have you[2.pl.incl] started to argue yet again, you and the other one who has already left?’ These contrasts make it inevitable that the paradigm in Table 4 has to be modified to a certain extent. Instead of using a single cell for all instances of plurality, one has to split up this part of the paradigm in order to accommodate the inclusive–exclusive difference (see Table 5). Thus it seems that now, at last, we have found an instance of the category of clusivity. Table 5. Paradigm of pronouns of address in Bavarian, revised version Bavarian address (revised)
Non-honorative
Honorative
Singular
du/-d
Sie/-S
eß/-ts (/ihr)
Sie/-S eß/-ts (/ihr)
Plural
Inclusive Exclusive
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
Nonetheless, there are at least two quite unusual aspects about this paradigm which merit further reflection. First, quite strikingly, the distribution of oppositions contradicts what classic markedness theory in the spirit of Jakobson and Greenberg would lead us to expect. The additional category, clusivity, appears in the marked value of the respect category, the honorative — although this is the place where one would rather expect neutralisations, if anywhere.66 Second, there is a stunning homonymy between the second-person singular honorative and the second-person plural inclusive; and this holds true for all the other case forms of the two pronouns and the correlated verb forms not listed here, too. In all likelihood this is no coincidence. It seems quite obvious that there must be a deeper explanation for the curious shape of the paradigm — even if the clusivity contrast as such is well established. At least two lines of reasoning suggest themselves. First, since we are dealing with honorative pronouns, politeness considerations can offer a possible explanation. At this point, the most influential theory of politeness provides a useful framework (Brown & Levinson 1987). According to this model, speakers constantly monitor their addressees’ desire to be left undisturbed or to be flattered (negative and positive face, respectively); in accordance with a variety of factors (among them the relative social standing of the people involved and the weight of the face threat that a given speech act might impose), a speaker uses one or another of alternative ways of expressing the very same speech act. In situations where the inclusive form of the second-person plural pronoun is used, more often than not the group referred to will consist of only a single addressee plus some other person(s). In circumstances like that, it will be quite likely that the speaker attends to his/her addressee’s face wants more carefully than in circumstances where there actually is a whole group of addressees present (i.e. an exclusive situation). It will be potentially more embarrassing not to use the socially desirable polite form in an inclusive context than in an exclusive one. Hence, speakers might ‘over-use’ the unambiguously marked singular honorative form and make it thus a kind of inclusive. Second, one should be aware of the possible influence of the standard variety. Today, basically all speakers of Bavarian are bilingual in Standard German (whatever that means in the context of dialects). And in (northern non-colloquial) Standard German, the neutralisation pattern in the number-respect-paradigm is such that respect outranks number (cf. n. 63). Since politeness often correlates with formality (which typically entails less dialectally marked variants), many speakers will tend to use more standard-like forms in situations where they address somebody towards whom they wish to be polite. Therefore they will sometimes also accomodate to the usage norms of the standard variety even if the language they use is the dialect. We might hence consider this to be a case of pragmatic code-switching. Irrespective of the way we interpret the functional motivation behind the usage patterns described in this section, it seems to be clear that the minimal pairs in (9), (10), and (11) exist. They are the basic arguments for claiming a clusivity distinction in Bavarian — although the category seems to be quite marginal to the system.67
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4. Conclusions 4.1. Summary Our survey of languages reported to possess second-person clusivity is complete now. It is time to take stock of the factual results this investigation has brought about before I can draw a few general conclusions, reflect on methodological issues, and suggest some prospects for further research. First of all, on the level of the individual languages, it could be shown that — in all probability — the vast majority of languages does not have an inclusive–exclusive opposition involving two types of second-person plural pronouns in their grammatical system (although, of course, many do possess first-person clusivity). For instance, comparative dialect data for South-East Ambrym made it quite plausible that the original source for the claim (a short dictionary) mistakenly combined two forms into one system, although their distribution was determined by geography alone; then the two pronouns were erroneously assigned a semantic distinction. Next, there is a certain terminological confusion concerning a number of languages from various corners of the globe which all involve a particular type of syncretism (or at least a close morphological association): In those languages, the pronoun that is used to refer to a group including both speaker and addressee is identical (or similar) to the one referring to (an) addressee(s) but excluding the speaker, the common denominator thus being the addressee role. For this reason, there may be a certain justification for calling this form a ‘second-person plural inclusive’ — under the assumption that the addressee role automatically occupies the second-person slot. However, one must be aware of the fact that by doing so one stands against the terminological practice of the majority of researchers who reserve the term ‘second-person plural inclusive’ for another type of inclusion: {addr+oth}. One way out of this problem would be the radical re-assignment of speech act role and grammatical person in these languages with the addressee taking the rank of first person. In any case, what is linguistically most important is the fact that clusivity does not involve the feature [±other] under such conditions, and thus that there is maximally one clusivity opposition in the paradigm. Relevant languages are the Algonquian ones (Ojibwe etc.), but also, for instance, Yokuts or Fula. Some languages are more problematic to deal with: For these, one cannot discuss away the existence of pronominal differentiations that look similar to secondperson clusivity. That is, we can indeed find distinct forms; however, the function associated with these forms is more general than just speech-act-role deixis. It is not always clear from the available descriptions how the specific contribution of the morphemes involved should best be described. At any rate, the semantic values seem to revolve around notions like the distribution of speech act participants in different social groups (i.e., in-group and out-group markers), or the indication of different frames of reference, or maybe just simple emphasis. Presently, I am not in
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
a position to say whether the concepts involved in the various languages should all be subsumed under the same heading or whether we are dealing with slightly different distinctions in the first place. In order to decide such an issue, much deeper, anthropologically informed field-work will be necessary. It seems quite obvious, however, that straightforward role deixis is not the key to understanding these pronouns. Languages with relevant pronouns include Abkhaz, Mao Naga, Ordos Mongolian, and Port Sandwich. Then there is a whole group of languages in West Africa (most importantly Ghomala′) that exhibit extraordinarily large pronominal paradigms due to the fact that they blow up the system with semi-grammaticalised complex pronouns. The exact functional status of these forms is unclear at the moment. Yet, again, they seem to emphasise particular relations within the social community or pick out special sub-groups. It is not their primary function to specifically include or exclude ‘others’ in groups of addressees. Finally, a close examination of Bavarian revealed that we can find situations — that exactly fit the usage domain of second person — where there is a strong tendency to use different pronouns. However, the distinction involves a pronoun that is otherwise heavily grammaticalised as an honorific (i.e., it constitutes the honorative value in the respect category). Because of this connection with politeness, the influence of sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors must be taken into account. Whether one still wants to call this opposition ‘clusivity’ will depend on the way one views the interaction of the various linguistic sub-systems; in any case, functional pressures play a certain part here — aspects that, again, lie outside the domain of role deixis. As a summary, consider Table 6. So, reconsidering all the facts gathered in this chapter, one has to acknowledge that the existence of a clusivity distinction in the second person is quite unlikely in any language. On the contrary, the data rather clearly support the view that second-person clusivity was introduced into the typological literature because of some misunderstandings and infelicities — either due to a poor understanding of the Table 6. Overview of second-person clusivity in all languages mentioned in the literature Language
Second-person clusivity Comment with [± other]?
South-East Ambrym
No
Dialect conflation
Ojibwe, Fula, etc.
No
Terminological misunderstanding
Abkhaz, Port Sandwich, Ordos Mongolian, Mao Naga, Ghomala′
Not really
Function: emphasis, marking of (intra- and inter-)group relations in social sub-groups, not necessarily involving the feature [± other]
Bavarian
Usage tendency
Only in connection with ‘respect’
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rimary data or as a result of the inexact application of some basic morphosemanp tic concepts.
4.2. Methodological considerations and prospects for further research Now that the linguistic analysis proper is done, let me step back for a moment and reflect on some methodological issues. In this chapter I have re-examined all the languages that have been put forward in remarks concerning clusivity that involves two second-person pronouns. In each case I have tried to gather as much information as possible with regard to the particular language — not always an easy task given that many of the languages are remarkably underdescribed; where suitable I also collected some comparative data. In general, I tried to apply traditional philological methods when they seemed appropriate in the specific circumstances: in this way, I could use arguments from comparative reconstruction, dialect geography, and text philology, among others. In the vast majority of cases examined, it appeared that the relevant clusivity distinction is in fact a chimera — most probably at least. Of course, one must not forget the pitfalls of the type of argumentation I practised: While it is relatively straightforward to say that something exists, the opposite line of reasoning is much trickier. One can ‘prove’ that a certain phenomenon exists by simply pointing out an unmistakable instance of it; the contrary argument actually does not work if one takes it literally. As is of course well known, negative evidence is not easy to come by in empirical sciences, if at all. For instance in corpus based linguistics (and hence in all philologically oriented historical linguistics), one can never know why a certain structure is not found in the data. It is always possible that one is confronted with an accidental gap in the data and that the structure in question might indeed exist; it might just happen to be missing in the particular junk of language that one uses as material for the study. The very next piece of data one takes into consideration could provide the example one is looking for. For the discussion of clusivity in the present chapter, the problem of negative evidence becomes relevant primarily at the macro-level of the languages of the world: Over the past thirty years or so, a few languages have been included in the list step by step (not many anyway, but nevertheless a few have). Even if one manages to discredit the evidence for each of them (as I have tried to do in this chapter), one must always be aware of the possibility that someone comes up with an hitherto little described language (and there are many of those around) where the evidence for a clusivity distinction in the second-person plural is overwhelming (in a sense this is what I have played with in my analysis of Bavarian, where a small amount of imaginative ingenuity brought to light some startling facts about the pronominal system). For the time being, however, no unambiguous case of a language with an exclusively inclusive–exclusive distinction in second-person pronouns is in sight; the burden of proof, therefore, lies with those who still wish to maintain that such an opposition exists.
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural
The discussion of pronouns in Bavarian (and to a certain extent also that pertaining to Ghomala′ and the Grassfields Bantu languages in general) has brought up a further problem: the notion of a ‘grammatical category’ as employed in the Jakobsonian tradition relies on the ideas of obligatoriness and paradigmatic organisation.68 If the use of a certain linguistic element is not compulsory in a certain context, but nevertheless highly predictable and indeed somehow ‘normal’ (as is the case with Bavarian Sie in second-person inclusive situations), then it is not entirely clear how we should interpret these forms: Their use is governed by wide-ranging functional motivations so that pervasive tendencies can be detected. Yet, from the point of view of grammaticalisation, no clear cut-off point can be identified. It is unclear at what point a distinction should be elevated to the status of a ‘real’ grammatical opposition, in particular if one of the forms involved occurs also somewhere else in the system (again, recall Bavarian). It is therefore no coincidence that as soon as the discussion of data in this article could turn to native speaker judgements (and did not have to rely on secondary sources — such as reference grammars), interesting new facts came to light. The relevant forms are not fully grammaticalised; nevertheless speakers have strong intuitions about them. Would we expect a writer of a reference grammar to mention these facts? If not, we should be even more aware of the general possibility of circumstances comparable to those in Bavarian in other languages. Only a thorough understanding and careful examination of the interplay of grammar and pragmatics can help us to prevent failure to notice such semi-categories. Finally, there remains the explanatory problem. The main thrust of the present chapter is to argue that there is no language possessing second-person clusivity as a fully grammaticalised category and that there is thus no need for a grammatical feature contributing to this category. If this line of reasoning is valid, then the quite natural question arises why that is so. An easy answer would be to say that a feature [±other] is simply not provided by innate Universal Grammar, and that therefore no such clusivity contrast can be mentally encoded.69 However, for those researchers who do not presuppose the all-encompassing UG-argument, this answer will be unsatisfactory; for them, there will be the need to look for another kind of explanation. First of all, one observation concerning deixis might help to put the problem into perspective: If there existed clusivity in the second-person plural, it would by necessity involve reference to a set comprising addressees only (exclusive) in contrast to a set of addressees and others (inclusive). Now it seems that a cumulation of a single participant role — as would appear in the exclusive pronoun — does not occur anywhere else in a pronominal system: Apparently, no language has a special grammaticalised pronoun for ‘choric’ we, distinguishing groups consisting of a multitude of simultaneous speakers from other groups where the speaker role is combined with the ‘addressee’ or the ‘other’ role.70 If there is more than one firstperson plural pronoun, we always have a distinction between the inclusion or exclusion of the addressee; cumulation of the speaker role does not occur as a rele-
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vant factor. Presumably, this has to do with general principles of economy; or to put it cognitively: Linguistically speaking, speaker and addressee — or rather the roles they play in a conversational exchange — are always conceptualised as individuals, even if they happen to be more than one person.71 Another starting point for an explanation might lie in considerations of politeness. One of the reasons why so many languages distinguish clusivity in the first person might be that in certain circumstances it can be quite impolite not to let the addressee know whether s/he is included in the reference set or not. Consider a sentence like (12): (12) A to B: “C phoned to ask whether we’re going to the cinema tonight.” In English, a language without a clusivity distinction, uttering a sentence of this type can potentially cause embarrassment. (12) can have two interpretations, in particular if world knowledge does not help to disambiguate (such as ‘B hates movies and therefore A and C sometimes go to the cinema together without B.’): (12) a. Th e question was whether A and B are going to the cinema. (inclusive use of we) b. The question was whether A and C are going to the cinema. (exclusive use of we) Thus, there can be situations where B is forced to ask whether s/he was meant to be included in the reference set;72 of course, discussing such a question can sometimes be quite awkward. Speakers (or rather: addressees) of languages with first-person clusivity will not have any problems here. This might be one of the functional advantages of having clusivity.73 In the second person, however, clusivity would not be relevant for this type of politeness reasoning: Here it would concern the speech-actrole ‘other’ — a role that is much less important for polite considerations than the addressee. Hence, there is less functional need and therefore less likelihood for second-person clusivity to grammaticalise. So, looking back on this chapter as a whole, we see that our quest for some more thorough information concerning the possible existence of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person non-singular has taken us around the whole world. There have been rumours in the literature with respect to every linguistic macro-area. A philologically informed close examination of each of the relevant languages showed, however, that these reports have most probably been misguided. Therefore, at present, it seems best to consider this grammatical category not even a rarissimum, but rather a nonesuch (Bavarian!), if not a phantom.
Notes * The idea for the present chapter occurred to me during a typologically informed investigation of German pronouns of address in the late 1990s (Simon 2003a). Since then, I have had the opportunity to present the material in talks to several audiences: at the pronouns
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural workshop in Konstanz in December 2000, at a workshop on deictics during the DGfS meeting in Leipzig in March 2001, and at the ALT IV meeting in Santa Barbara in August 2001. I wish to thank all the audiences for their helpful discussions. In particular, I’d like to single out the hosts of the Konstanz workshop for creating such a stimulating atmosphere. Among the people who provided me with pieces of data are Terry Crowley, Jost Gippert, Ton Goeman, Michael Job, Manfred Krifka, Bruno Lainé, Wolfgang Schulze, and Michael Cysouw and Elena Filimonova (the last two also constantly encouraged me to finalise the chapter and gave useful hints). Elke Ronneberger-Sibold suggested an idea for the analysis of the SE Ambrym long form; Koyka Stoyanova and Iglika Goranova translated some pieces of Russian theoretical literature for me; Heike Wiese and Ulrike Freywald commented on the manuscript; the latter also drew the map in Figure 2. Thanks to them all. Last but not least, I wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a research fellowship which allowed me the time and concentration to finally write up this chapter in the present form. 1. Thanks to Viktor Elšík for suggesting this very useful term at the Konstanz workshop. 2. For a discussion of the connections between pronominal clusivity and the somewhat similar category of associativity cf. Corbett (2000: 101–11). 3. This is, in fact, the very first mention of such a contrast in the literature; note, however, that Lyons’ terminological assignment of inclusive vs. exclusive is exactly opposite to the one used in subsequent studies. 4. Here, it seems that an unusual notion of inclusive vs. exclusive is being employed; I will discuss this and similar terminological confusions below. 5. I list only the person features as given by the authors. For discussions of technical details of the feature inventories and the way they attribute to the attested paradigms, compare the respective original papers. 6. For the mechanics of the model cf. the concise exposition in Harley & Ritter (2002a). 7. His extra feature [±participant] is not helpful because it would yield contradictory values for the inclusive pronoun B. 8. There seems to be a general linguistic division between SE Ambrym and the other varieties on the island (cf. Parker 1968: 39f., n.4); SE Ambrym is said to be more similar to Paama on the neighbouring island than to the rest of Ambrym varieties (which are subsumed under the name of Lonwolwol). 9. They were condensed and somewhat updated in Crowley (2002b). 10. Similarly, this is the only form listed in the paradigm in Parker (1968: 36). T. Crowley (p.c.) confirms that mu- is the only possible prefix in this context. 11. The forms mentioned so far are nicely compatible with the forms reconstructed for earlier stages of the languages: Crowley (1992: 38) reconstructs *qamuyu for the immediately preceding proto-language; for the southern neighbouring proto-language so to speak, Lynch (1986: 267) has *gamiu. Also, the forms assumed for even older stages are quite similar (cf. Lynch, Ross & Crowley 2002: 67) and Zorc (1995: 1197). 12. In fact, Crowley (2002b: 662) lists both xami and xamim next to each other as apparently optional variants. 13. Since none of the three maps of the island of Ambrym available to me (Paton 1971: iv, O’Byrne & Harcombe 1999: 198, Crowley 2002b: 661) gives a complete picture of the vil-
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Horst J. Simon lages I have data for, this map conflates information from the ones just mentioned. Note, however, that the original maps differ in some details: consequently, the exact location of some of the places could not be determined for sure. 14. Recall from n. 11 that the reconstructed forms all lacked this final consonant. 15. Let me mention in passing that this distributional picture of forms on the roughly triangular island looks suspiciously similar to what we find in dialect geography when an innovative form spreads from a centre outwards and where the outer edges still retain the old form. However, this cannot be a good characterisation of the diachrony of the pronouns in the varieties of Ambrym because this would entail an innovation by the volcanos. “It is really difficult to imagine anything as silent, desolate and lifeless as the landscape of central Ambrym” (O’Byrne & Harcombe 1999: 205); “I think you can be pretty certain that the centre of the island was totally unpopulated. It is nothing but ash plain and a lake of boiling lava” (T. Crowley, p.c.). 16. This is also confirmed by the fact that Parker’s forms generally correspond best to the Maat variety as represented in Tryon (1976: 438–53). 17. The (former) exact location of the village of Maat is difficult to pin-point because it was destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 1950. Consequently, most of its inhabitants were relocated (O’Byrne & Harcombe 1999: 121, 198; Crowley 2002b: 660). 18. In an additional note to his first sketch of verbal morphology in South-East Ambrym, Parker (1968: 40b) writes that he has found out about the existence of the form xami only during his second field trip. In this publication, he describes it as a simple second-person pronoun without further specification, while xamim (which he later calls ‘exclusive’) is said to refer “to a group of definite size”; regrettably, he does not explicate what he means by this characterisation. 19. Interestingly, in Abkhaz — to be discussed in detail in the following section — it is also the so-called exclusive pronoun which is longer than its counterpart. Here the morphemic status of the additional element is uncontroversial, if somewhat difficult to pinpoint in its exact semantics; at any rate, it seems to have something to do with determination. 20. Michael Cysouw (p.c.) informs me that his ongoing research points to a further source: ‘reinforcement’ of the free form which can occur when verbal inflection becomes grammaticalised from (clitic?) pronouns. 21. I thank Elke Ronneberger-Sibold for first suggesting this connection to me. Howe (1996: 90f.) lists a number of comparable cases from other Germanic varieties; interestingly, by the way, all of them are second-person pronouns (mostly non-singulars). 22. This morphemic pattern is also partly generalised to other person forms in some dialects of Dutch, from where it was transmitted into Afrikaans as well (Howe 1996: 235–7). 23. Equivalent first-person plural forms exist, too. 24. Here, one meets forms like iar and iaråndre in Cimbrian Bavarian (cf. Tyroller 2003: 158), and very similar forms in the Alemannic South Walser dialects (cf. Zürrer 1997: 159–62). 25. Moreover I know nothing about possible polite uses of address forms in South-East Ambrym. 26. Likewise, Hewitt admits in the short version of the grammar: “Though they exist, the exclusive forms [. . .] are not common” (Hewitt 1989b: 48). Sadly, it must be noted that,
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural more often than not, such reservations are lost when typologically oriented linguists quote descriptive grammars. Bubenik (1993: 170), for example, simply gives Hewitt’s paradigm, omitting the information about the rarity of the exclusive forms. Curiously, in his latest overview of Northwest Caucasian languages, Hewitt (2005: 104) simply lists the relevant forms without any further comment. He does not give any further information: neither concerning semantic distinctions nor with regard to possible usage restrictions. 27. According to Hewitt (1979/1989a: 156), the -rà ending is entirely optional (?!); it seems not to have any significance in the present context. 28. The alternative forms listed for the plural forms reflect phonologically driven allomorphy without any special morphosemantic content. 29. On the other hand, there are several other places in von Erckert’s book where one would expect mention of the relevant distinction, but fails to find one: neither do the so-called ‘exclusive’ forms ending in -th occur in the other paradigmatic listings of Abkhaz pronouns (p. 268 and p. 279) nor are they ever employed in the sample sentences. 30. The linguistic variety referred to in brackets is Abaza, the closely related dialect mentioned above. 31. And not, as one might be led to believe, exclusion of non speech-act-participants, i.e. ‘others’. 32. Oddly, Charpentier glosses plurals as “plus de quatre personnes” throughout. Since the language has only trials (and not quadrals), it is most likely that what he means here actually is ‘more than three people’. 33. The description Charpentier offers is not very lucid; nevertheless it seems that this is the place where Hagège got his information from. 34. There is no indication of a particularly second-person form, though. 35. This form xate is also the form given for this language in Tryon (1976: 447, 1995: 2: 262f.). 36. Incidentally, there is a striking parallel to this Charpentier type of argumentation in van Ginneken (1954: 99), where the author speculates that consideration of alliances within and without the clan-community might underlie the use of different plural pronominals in an isolated dialect of Dutch. 37. This might also be the reason why Crowley (2002a: 652) does not mention anything in this direction in his brief grammatical summary of Charpentier’s book. 38. The chapter in Harley & Ritter (2002b: 504f.) is an almost literal repetition from Harley & Ritter (2002a: 33–5) — with very few exceptions. Strangely, the only major difference concerns the omission of the note from Harley & Ritter (2002a: 37) where they acknowledge the existence of the research tradition pertaining to the clusivity distinction as discussed in the present contribution. . . 39. Harley & Ritter (2002a: 34f., 2002b: 505) refer in this context to the detailed analysis in Déchaine (1999). Wunderlich (1997: 286–94) discusses similar data from a closely related language. 40. Such a focus on prefixes can be traced back at least to Bloomfield’s treatment of Algonquian (1933: 256). 41. Plank exemplified his idea with comparable data from another Algonquian language, Potawatomi.
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Horst J. Simon 42. Cf. also Hewson (1991) and the contributions by Cysouw and by Daniel in the present volume; the latter two provide further evidence from a great variety of languages against the traditional, but all too simple identification of deixis and grammatical person. In particular Daniel discusses such analyses at length. 43. The choice of long vs. short form seems to be influenced by factors such as clause type and emphasis; at any rate, it has apparently nothing to do with grammatical person (Borgman 1990: 149–51). 44. Also noted by Jacobsen (1980: 213). 45. The same can be asserted in relation to Nama, which appears on Harley & Ritter’s list in addition to Ojibwe (Algonquian) and Yokuts; cf. Cysouw (this volume) for discussion. 46. Which seems much more reasonable to me, at least in the case of complete identity of forms as in Algonquian and Sanuma. 47. This description became quite famous since it claims to represent the largest inventory of personal pronouns to be found anywhere (as such it is, e.g., cited in full by Sasse 1993: 670f.). 48. Apparently, compound pronouns are an areal feature typical of some of the Bantoid languages of Cameroon. A thorough discussion of the present knowledge concerning this phenomenon can be found in Cysouw (2003: 166–84). 49. A clear statement in this direction can be found in relation to gaps in the paradigm in Aghem, another language with complex pronouns: “In some [hypothetical] cases the same persons would be combined, which is not possible, e.g. ‘you + you’” (Hyman 1979: 54). In a similar vein, Cysouw (2003: 170, n. 4) dismisses the possibility of second-person clusivity in Aghem, too. 50. Sadly, Parker’s (1986: 136) pair of sentences which is meant to illustrate the usage restrictions on simple pronouns is not very helpful: the examples do not constitute a real minimal pair since the number distinction plays a role here, too. 51. Given the enormous relevance of the Grassfields Bantu complex pronouns for a better understanding of the workings of large pronominal paradigms, a focused study based on fieldwork would be highly desirable. 52. Cf. e.g. Poppe (1974: 50) and Grønbech & Krueger (1976: 31) on the classical, literary language, and Poppe (1951: 71, 1970: 125) on the Khalkha dialect, which is the basis of the contemporary standard language. Hambis (1945: 18f.; on Written Mongolian) and Whymant (1926: 12; on Khalkha) list the relevant forms, too, but do not tell what their functional difference is. Bosson (1964: 70) remarks, however, that “[t]he feeling for this difference in meaning [first-person clusivity; HS] has nearly disappeared in Modern Mongolian, and, excepting in the genitive case, the inclusive form predominates in popular usage.” 53. However, this grammar makes a rather unreliable impression. 54. This is a fairly traditional description, despite the title of the series in which it appeared. 55. More examples demonstrating the effects of the two plural affixes can be found in the chapter on number (Giridhar 1994: 114–16) and in the cited passage on pronouns (p. 140f.). 56. The only other source I could consult on Mao Naga does not talk about the affix -ta at all (note that the author uses the language name ‘Sopvomā’ instead of Mao Naga): Grierson (1903: 453) mentions merely -kru as a plural suffix for pronouns (similarly on p. 455); and in the comparative vocabulary lists of related languages (p. 246f. and 480f.) no reflex of plu-
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural ralising -ta can be detected. [Unfortunately, Giridhar (1980), a grammar of an apparently closely related language, was not available to me.] 57. With the exception of two brief sections in recent work by myself: Simon (2003a: 171– 5; 2004: section 3). It is apparently because of a preliminary version of the first-mentioned study that Bavarian is referred to in the ‘Konstanz Raritätenkabinett’, cited in the introduction. 58. For detailed information on this language in general cf. e.g. Wiesinger (1989); a very brief analysis of its address system can also be found in Simon (2003b: 106–9). 59. For in-depth discussions of the Bavarian respect data against a broad typological background cf. Simon (2003a: 167–87, 2004). That we are indeed dealing with a distinct grammatical category ‘respect’ is clear for a variety of morphosyntactic reasons, the most obvious one being the fact that the form Sie does not appear anywhere else in the pronominal paradigm, not even as might be suspected in the face of Standard German data in the thirdperson plural: here we have se; comparable formal distinctions hold for the agreeing verb forms, too. 60. Note that the plural form ihr is a more modern, ‘urbanised’ variant of the traditional eß. The distribution of these forms is based on geographical and social factors; it has no semantic relevance at all (cf. Scheuringer 1990: 272f. and Merkle 1996: 123). Also, the distribution of full forms vs. their clitic variants is organised according to syntactic principles and involves factors such as stress and focus; the clusivity distinction does not play a role here. 61. This fact is somewhat surprising from the point of view of Standard German; cf. also n. 63. 62. Here, the forms Eich and Eana are different case variants of ihr [pl] and Sie [sg.hon], respectively. Context of the passage: Alwin and his wife Rosmarie are visited by their landlord and his wife Hase. Alwin offers home-made cocktails. During the whole scene, Alwin is most submissive to the landlord (‘Hausherr’). 63. Cf. Merkle (1996: 131) for a remark in that direction; cf. also, e.g., Weber (1987: 161) for rural varieties of Swiss German dialects around Zurich. This stands in stark contrast to more formal varieties of Standard German (particularly in the north), where the pronominal paradigm involves basically the same forms as urbanised Bavarian, but where the neutralisation is the other way round: Here, Sie is used in all respect-contexts, the number of addressees being irrelevant; the domain of usage of (Northern) Standard German ihr is thus considerably smaller than in Bavarian (only a group of du-addressees). 64. Although I cannot produce an authentic example from a real (or fictional) piece of discourse, due to the infrequency of unambiguously relevant passages in the dialectal dramatic literature (which does not abound in Sie-using characters, anyway), my interviews with native speakers of (rural) Bavarian unanimously confirmed the contrast: they could all differentiate the two form-meaning-pairs. 65. Note that both verbs could also be construed with a comitative phrase (and would thus again be suspect to a metonymic reading: se mid ebban treffa (lit. ‘to meet oneself with somebody’) and mid ebban ananandagrån (lit. ‘to get close with somebody’). This construction notwithstanding, without such a mid-phrase the real plurality of the verb is quite clear. 66. We are indeed dealing with a value pair ‘honorative/non-honorative’ in this case and not with one which is the other way round (‘intimative/non-intimative’ or the like); for a discus-
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Horst J. Simon sion of markedness in similar Standard German data cf. Simon (2003a: 158–67), with the classic arguments (language acquisition and language loss, range of usage etc.). 67. Note that strictly speaking this argumentation holds true only for the instances where we have a single addressee in the inclusive. The ultimate test case for a clusivity distinction would be in reference to a group consisting of more than one addressee plus other(s) ({addr, addr, . . ., oth, . . .}). Unfortunately, however, the native speakers of Bavarian I consulted do not have any intuitions about which pronoun to use in such a situation. 68. Cf. the exposition in Simon (2003a: 24–62). 69. This is the type of argumentation practised by many of the researchers mentioned in section 2, most explicitly Harley & Ritter. 70. Cf. Cysouw (2003: 73f.) and recall the discussion concerning Ghomala′ in section 3.5 above. 71. Cf. also McGregor (1989: 440). 72. Note that — provided the language does not possess special logophoric markers — there is no way to specify inclusion vs. exclusion of C in the reference set; that is, there is no commitment in (12a) whether C is going to join A and B or not. This is due to the unavailability of a [±other]-feature. 73. Though, of course, the general inclination towards vagueness due to negative face politeness mentioned in section 3.7 somewhat contradicts this argumentation.
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Horst J. Simon Hewitt, B. G. 1979/1989a. Abkhaz (reprint). London: Routledge. Hewitt, B. G. 1989b. Abkhaz. In B. G. Hewitt (ed.), 38–88. Hewitt, B. G. 2005. North West Caucasian. Lingua 115: 91–145. Hewitt, B. G. (ed.). 1989. The indigenous languages of the Caucasus. Vol. 2: The North West Caucasian Languages. Delmar NY: Caravan Books. Hewson, J. 1991. Person hierarchies in Algonkian and Inuktitut. Linguistics 29: 861–75. Hickey, R. 2003. Rectifying a standard deficiency. Second-person pronominal distinctions in varieties of English. In I. Taavitsainen & A. H. Jucker (eds), Diachronic perspectives on address term systems, 343–74. Amsterdam: John Benjamins [Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 107]. Howe, S. 1996. The personal pronouns in the Germanic languages. A study of personal pronoun morphology and change in the Germanic languages from the first records to the present day. Berlin: de Gruyter [Studia Linguistica Germanica 43]. Hyman, L. M. 1979. Phonology and noun structure. In L. Hyman (ed.), Aghem grammatical structure with special reference to noun classes, tense-aspect and focus marking, 1–72. Los Angeles: University of Southern California [Southern California Occasional Papers in Linguistics 7). Ingram, D. 1978. Typology and universals of personal pronouns. In J. H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of human language. Vol. 3: Word structure, 213–47. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1980. Inclusive/exclusive. A diffused pronominal category in Native Western North America. In J. Kreiman & A. E. Ojeda (eds), Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora, 204–27. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Klimov, G. A. 1994. Einführung in die kaukasische Sprachwissenschaft. Hamburg: Buske [transl. J. Gippert, originally 1986]. Lomtatidze, K. V. 1987. K voprosu ob inkljuzive i èkskljuzive v abxazskom i abazinskom jazykax. Iberiul-kavkasiuri enatmecnierebis celicdeuli 14: 113–17. Lomtatidze, K. & Klychev, R. 1989. Abaza. In B. G. Hewitt (ed.), 89–154. Lynch, J. 1986. The Proto-Southern Vanuatu pronominal system. In P. Geraghty, L. Carrington & S. A. Wurm (eds), FOCAL II: Papers from the fourth International conference on Austronesian linguistics, 259–87. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 94]. Lynch, J., Ross, M., & Crowley, T. 2002. The Oceanic languages. London: Curzon. Lyons, J. 1968. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marti, W. 1985. Berndeutsch-Grammatik für die heutige Mundart zwischen Thun und Jura. Bern: Francke. McGregor, W.B. 1989. Greenberg on the first-person inclusive dual: Evidence from some Australian languages. Studies in Language 13: 437–51. McIntosh, M. 1984. Fulfulde syntax and verbal morphology. Boston: KPI and University of Port Harcourt Press. Mel’čuk, I. 1994. Cours de morphologie générale (théorique et descriptive). Vol. II: Deuxième partie: Significations morphologiques. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Merkle, L. 1996. Bairische Grammatik (6th ed). München: Hugendubel. Mostaert, A. 1937. Textes oraux ordos. Peip’ing: Universitas Catholicae Pekini and Editions Henri Vetch [Monumenta Serica. Monograph Series 1]. Newman, S. 1944. Yokuts language of California. New York: Viking Fund [Publications in Anthropology 2].
The alleged inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second-person plural Newman, S. 1967. Yokuts. Lingua 17: 182–99. Nichols, J. 1992. The Caucasus as a linguistic area, 1: Personal pronouns. In B. G. Hewitt (ed.), Caucasian perspectives, 343–59. Unterschleissheim: Lincom Europa. Noyer, R. 1997. Features, positions, and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. New York: Garland. O’Byrne, D. & Harcombe, D. 1999. Vanuatu (3rd ed). Melbourne: Lonely Planet. Parker, E. 1986. Mundani pronouns. In U. Wiesemann (ed.), 131–65. Parker, G. J. 1968. Southeast Ambrym verb inflection and morphophonemics. In A. Capell, G. J. Parker & A. J. Schütz, Papers in linguistics of Melanesia No. 1, 27–40b. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics A 15]. Parker, G. J. 1970. Southeast Ambrym dictionary. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 17]. Paton, W. F. 1971. Ambrym (Lonwolwol) grammar. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 19]. Paton, W. F. 1973. Ambrym (Lonwolwol) dictionary. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 21]. Plank, F. 1985. Die Ordnung der Personen. Folia Linguistica 19: 111–76. Poppe, N. 1951. Khalkha-Mongolische Grammatik. Wiesbaden: Steiner [Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur. Veröffentlichungen der orientalischen Kommission 1]. Poppe, N. 1970. Mongolian language handbook. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Poppe, N. 1974. Grammar of written Mongolian (3rd ed). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz [Porta linguarum orientalium. N. S. 1]. Ray, S. H. 1926. A comparative study of the Melanesian island languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rohlfs, G. 1949. Historische Grammatik der Italienischen Sprache und ihrer Mundarten. Vol. II: Formenlehre und Syntax. Bern: Francke [Bibliotheca Romanica I, V]. Sasse, H.-J. 1993. Syntactic categories and subcategories. In J. Jacobs et al. (eds), Syntax. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung. Vol. 1, 646–86. Berlin: de Gruyter [Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 9]. Scheuringer, H. 1990. Sprachentwicklung in Bayern und Österreich. Eine Analyse des Substandardverhaltens der Städte Braunau am Inn (Österreich) und Simbach am Inn (Bayern) und ihres Umlandes. Hamburg: Buske [Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 3]. Schwartz, L. J. & Dunnigan, T. 1986. Pronouns and pronominal categories in Southwestern Ojibwe. In U. Wiesemann (ed.), 285–322. Silverstein, M. [1976]1986. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In P. Muysken & H. van Riemsdijk (eds), Features and projections, 163–232. Dordrecht: Foris [Studies in Generative Grammar 25]. Simon, H. J. 2003a. Für eine grammatische Kategorie ‘Respekt’ im Deutschen. Synchronie, Dia chronie und Typologie der deutschen Anredepronomina. Tübingen: Niemeyer [Linguistische Arbeiten 474]. Simon, H. J. 2003b. From pragmatics to grammar. Tracing the development of respect in the history of the German pronouns of address. In I.Taavitsainen & A. H. Jucker (eds), Diachronic perspectives on address term systems, 85–123. Amsterdam: John Benjamins [Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 107]. Simon, H. J. 2004. Respekt — die Grammatik der Höflichkeit im Bairischen. In S. Gaisbauer & H. Scheuringer (eds), LINZERSCHNITTEN. Beiträge zur 8. Bayerisch-österreichi schen Dialektologentagung, zugleich 3. Arbeitstagung zu Sprache und Dialekt in Ober
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Horst J. Simon österreich, in Linz, September 2001, 355–70. Linz: Adalbert-Stifter-Institut des Landes Oberösterreich [Schriften zur Literatur und Sprache in Oberösterreich 8]. Simon, H. J. & Wiese, H. (eds). 2002. Pronouns — grammar and representation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 52]. Sokolovskaja, N. K. 1980. Nekotorye semantičeskie universalii v sisteme ličnyx mestoimenij. In I. F. Vardul’ (ed.), Teorija i tipologija mestoimenij, 84–103. Moskva: Akademija Nauk SSSR. Soulié, M. G. 1903. Éléments de grammaire mongole (dialecte ordoss). Paris: Leroux. Tryon, D. T. 1976. New Hebrides languages. An internal classification. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 50]. Tryon, D. T. (ed.). 1995. Comparative Austronesian dictionary. An introduction to Austronesian studies. Berlin: de Gruyter [Trends in Linguistics. Documentation 10]. Tyroller, H. 2003. Grammatische Beschreibung des Zimbrischen in Lusern. Stuttgart: Steiner [Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik. Beihefte 111]. van Ginneken, J. 1954. Drie Waterlandse dialecten. Deel I: Grammatica — phonologie — klank leer (bezorgd door A. Weijnen). Alphen aan den Rijn: Samsom [Publicaties van de Stich ting voor het bevolkingsonderzoek in de drooggelegde Zuiderzeepolders 18]. von Erckert, R. 1895/1970. Die Sprachen des Kaukasischen Stammes (reprint). Wiesbaden: Sändig. Voorhoeve, J. 1967. Personal pronouns in Bamileke. Lingua 17: 421–30. Wasow, T. 2002. Postverbal behavior. Stanford CA: CSLI Publications. Weber, A. 1987. Zürichdeutsche Grammatik. Ein Wegweiser zur guten Mundart. Zürich: Rohr [Grammatiken und Wörterbücher des Schweizerdeutschen 1]. Wessén, E. 1969. Svensk språkhistoria. Vol. 1: Ljudlära och ordböjningslära (8th ed). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Wiesemann, U. 1986. Preface. In U. Wiesemann (ed.), vii–ix. Wiesemann, U. (ed.). 1986. Pronominal systems. Tübingen: Narr [Continuum 5]. Wiesemann, U. 2003. Inclusive, exclusive or preeminence? Examining data from African, AmerIndian and Papua New Guinea languages. Ms. Wiesinger, P. 1989. The Central and Southern Bavarian dialects in Bavaria and Austria. In C.V. J. Russ (ed.), The dialects of Modern German, 438–519. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Whymant, A. N. J. 1926. A Mongolian grammar outlining the Khalkha Mongolian with notes on the Buriat, Kalmuck, and Ordoss Mongolian. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Wunderlich, D. 1997. A minimalist model of inflectional morphology. In C. Wilder, H.-M. Gärtner & M. Bierwisch (eds), The role of economy principles in linguistic theory, 267–98. Berlin: Akademie Verlag [Studia grammatica 40]. Zimmerschied, S. 1983. A ganz a miesa, dafeida, dreckada Dreck san Sie (2nd ed). Passau: Andreas Haller Verlag. Zorc, R. D. 1995. A glossary of Austronesian reconstructions. In D. T. Tryon (ed.), 1105–97. Zürrer, P. 1997. Systemveränderungen in Südwalser Sprachinseldialekten. In A. Ruoff & P. Löffelad (eds), Syntax und Stilistik der Alltagssprache. Beiträge der 12. Arbeitstagung zur alemannischen Dialektologie, 155–69. Tübingen: Niemeyer [Idiomatica 18]. Zwicky, A. M. 1977. Hierarchies of person. In W. A. Beach, S. E. Fox & S. Philosoph (eds), Papers from the thirteenth regional meeting, 714–33. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Chapter 5
Inclusive and exclusive in free and bound person forms Anna Siewierska
Dik Bakker
Lancaster University
University of Amsterdam
It is generally recognized that in languages which have both free and bound person markers the semantic distinctions encoded in the latter may be less elaborate than those encoded in the former. This is typically attributed to the process of grammaticalization which in addition to a formal dimension also has a semantic one involving some semantic bleaching. The present chapter examines to what extent free and bound person markers differ with respect to the encoding of the semantic domain of inclusivity and to what extent less elaborate semantic encoding correlates with reduction in morpho-phonological encoding. The investigation is carried out on the basis of a cross-linguistic sample of 394 languages. Keywords: person form, paradigm, grammaticalization, clitic, affix
1. Introduction It is generally recognized that in languages which have more than one paradigm of person markers the semantic distinctions encoded in each paradigm need not be the same.1 Differences between person paradigms in the nature of the semantic distinctions expressed are seen to be particularly likely in languages, which have both free and bound person markers. This is due to the fact that the latter are typically assumed to derive from the former via the process of grammaticalization, which, in addition to a formal dimension involving loss of independent morphological status and phonological reduction, may also have a semantic dimension, reflected in decrease of semantic distinctions encoded (cf. Givón 1976; Lehmann 1982b: 233–41; Bresnan & Mchombo 1986,1987; Siewierska 1999).2 While incidental examples documenting differences in paradigmatic structure in line with the above abound in the literature, there do not appear to be any studies devoted specifically to this issue. The present chapter seeks to fill in this gap in regard to the semantic dimension of inclusivity. It presents a detailed comparison of the encoding of the distinctions involving the groupings of speaker and hearer in free person markers and their bound counterparts in a cross-linguistic sample of 394 languages. The free person markers considered are morphologically independent nominative or absolutive forms or, in the case of languages lacking such forms, the so called cardinal forms that may be used as single word answers to questions
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such as “Who is coming?” The bound markers include weak pronouns, clitics and affixes functioning as the arguments of intransitive (S) and transitive clauses (A and P) and the possessors in adnominal possessive constructions (Poss). The chapter is organized as follows. Section two presents and illustrates the approach to the domain of inclusivity that we have adopted and the nature of the semantic distinctions that we have made within this domain. Section three provides the data on the encoding of the domain of inclusivity in the free and bound person forms among the languages in our sample concentrating in particular on the paradigmatic differences encountered. In section four we consider to what extent the differences in the encoding of inclusivity among reduced person forms are related to their degree of grammaticalization with respect to morpho-phonological form, i.e. in relation to the weak pronoun vs clitic vs affix distinction and in relation to Siewierska’s (1999) tripartite typology of person agreement markers, i.e. pronominal, ambiguous and syntactic. Finally, section five offers some concluding remarks.
2. The inclusive–exclusive distinction Our approach to the domain of inclusivity is strongly based on the illuminating typology of person paradigms elaborated by Cysouw (2003) which takes as its point of departure the eight person distinctions shown in (1).
(1) Singular 1 2 3
Group 1+2 minimal inclusive 1+2+3 augmented inclusive 1+3 exclusive 2+3 3+3
In place of the familiar singular/plural distinction, this paradigm reflects a distinction between single persons and groups of more than one person. The singular category subsumes markers which refer to exactly one person or object and the group category markers that refer to more than one person or object, provided they are not specified with respect to the number of participants (e.g. dual, trial, paucal) and do not include within their scope regular reference to singular entities (Cysouw 2003: 66–72). We see that the paradigm differentiates between each of the three persons in the singular, having a distinct marker for each of the three persons, 1, 2 and 3. In the group it makes a five-way distinction between the speaker- addressee dyad 1+2, a configuration of the speaker, addressee and at least one other 1+2+3, a grouping of the speaker and at least one other but not the addressee 1+3, a constellation of the addressee and at least one other but not the speaker 2+3 and a grouping of at least two third parties 3+3. Thus what is of relevance for the group categories is not so much the number of participants, but their nature. Of particular signifi-
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
cance in the context of the present discussion is, of course, the three-way distinction within the group first-person complex. The traditional inclusive–exclusive distinction involves the separation of groups involving the speaker and addressee, i.e. 1+2 & 1+2+3 from those that involve the speaker and some other party but not the addressee 1+3. In the paradigm in (1), however, the traditional category of inclusive is further subdivided into 1+2 (minimal inclusive) and 1+2+3 (augmented inclusive). Needless to say, the actual person paradigms found in languages are frequently considerably less differentiated than the paradigm in (1). As far as the first-person complex is concerned, some paradigms have no separate form for non-singular first person, i.e. they have no “we” as distinct from “I”. This is the case in Mura Pirahã (2), a language isolate of Brazil, which according to Everett makes no distinction in regard to number of any type, not only in its person markers. The examples below are of the free forms.
(2) Mura Pirahãã (Everett 1986: 280–1) 1 ti 2 gíxai 3 hiapióxio
We will refer to paradigms such as that in (2) as exhibiting a nowe pattern.3 Other paradigms have only one form for non-singular first person covering all three interpretations, 1+2, 1+2+3 and 1+3. Such paradigms, which we will call unified we (unif we) are familiar from English and most other European languages. For completeness an example is given in (3) from Dagbani, a Gur language spoken in northern Ghana.
(3) Dagbani (Olawsky 1999: 21) Singular Group 1+2 ti 1+2+3 ti 1 ŋ 1+3 ti 2 a 2+2 yi 3an o 3+3an bE 3inan di 3+3inan di/ŋa
In yet other paradigms there is a special form for 1+2 & 1+2+3 but not for the exclusive 1+3. This pattern will be called only inclusive (only incl). It is illustrated in (4) from the Otomanguean language Chalcatongo Mixtec spoken in south-central Mexico, Oaxaca. The paradigm in (4) is of the free person forms but the corresponding clitics have the same paradigmatic structure.
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(4) Chalcatongo Mixtec (Macaulay 1996: 139) Singular Group 1+2 žó?ó 1 rú?ú 1+2+3 žó?ó 2 ró?ó 3m càà 3f nā?ā 3animal kɨtɨ 3supernatural í?a, íža
In Chalcatongo Mixtec, as in other languages exhibiting the only incl pattern, the exclusive 1+3 combination is expressed by the first-person form accompanied by non-singular number marking as shown in (5b) and (5c) where -rí is the first-person clitic corresponding to rú?ú. Number is indicated in the language by a variety of morphological and syntactic means including the addition of the prefix ka- to the verb, as in (5b) and the use of the plural particle xina?a , as in (5c) or both.
(5) Chalcatongo Mixtec (Macaulay 1996: 139, 81, 114) a. ni- žee-rí compl-eat-1 ‘I ate (it).’ b. ka-satiu-rí pl-work-1 ‘We’re working (exclusive of hearer).’ c. kužaa-ri núndua xina?á-ri live-1 Oaxaca plural-1 ‘We (exclusive) will live in Oaxaca.’
In the case of the inclusive person forms additional number marking is also typically found as in (6) but appears not to be obligatory.
(6) ni-ka-čaà-žó nùu bé?e compl-pl-arrive-1 face house ‘We came to the house.’
A fourth type of subdivision of the first-person complex is the traditional inclusive– exclusive distinction (incl/excl) involving the grouping of of 1+2+3 & 1+2 as opposed to 1+3. An example is given in (7) from the Nilo-Saharan language So.
(7) So (Carlin 1993: 79) Singular Group 1+2 1+2+3 1 aya 1+3 2 bia 2+3 3 ica 3+3
inia inia isia bitia itia
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
And finally there is the three way split within the first-person nonsingular where there are separate forms for the minimal inclusive, augmented inclusive and exclusive. Such a three way distinction, which we will term minimal augmented (min/ aug) is found, for example, in the independent person markers of the Adamawa language Koh, spoken in Cameroon and Chad.
(8) Koh (Glidden 1985: 230) Singular Group 1+2 ná 1+2+3 nári 1 mì 1+3 bburu 2 mù 2+2 ì 3 ka 3+3 i
The above five subdivisions of the first-person complex have been captured by Cysouw (2003: 98) in the first-person hierarchy as shown in (9). (9)
The first-person hierarchy no we > unif we > only incl > incl/excl > min/aug
This hierarchy represents the successive differentiation of the first-person complex from no separate form for we at all, through the presence of one undifferentiated form of we, then of a special form of we just for the inclusive category, followed by two different forms of we as in the traditional inclusive–exclusive distinction, and culminates in the three way distinction shown in the maximally differentiated paradigm in (1) above. This is depicted in Table 1 in the columns labelled (a) through (e), respectively. (The — means absence of a form.) Given the above typology of the first-person complex, the dimension of inclusivity is richer than under the traditional inclusive–exclusive distinction which covers only the pattern in d), as it encompasses the possibilities of c) and e) as well. The typology that we have adopted for this study differs from that of Cysouw’s only in two minor respects, namely in the addition of two patterns both attested in Cysouw (2003: 91) and also discussed earlier by Greenberg (1988: 9).4 The first of these is what we have called the minimal inclusive pattern (min incl) in which there is a separate from for the speaker-hearer dyad 1+2 and another form covering both 1+2+3 and 1+3.5 This is illustrated in (10) on the basis of the independent pronouns Table 1. The subdivisions of the first-person complex in Cysouw’s (2003) hierarchy a
b
1+2 1+2+3 1+3
—
A
c
d
A
A
—
B
e A B C
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in the Austronesian language Uma, spoken by around 20.000 people in Sulawesi. (10) Uma (Martens 1988: 169) Singular Group 1+2 kita’ 1+2+3 kai’ 1 aku’ 1+3 kai’ 2 iko 2+2 koi 3 hi’a 3+3 hira’ In the second additional pattern, which we will refer to as the augmented inclusive pattern (aug incl), there is a special form for 1+2+3 and another form covering 1+2 and 1+3 as exemplified in (11) from Bunuba a language of Western Australia. (11) Bunuba (Rumsey 1999: 138) Singular Group 1+2 ngiyirri 1+2+3 yaarri 1 ngayini 1+3 ngiyirri 2 nginji 2+2 yinggirri 3 niy 3+3 biyirri The two readings of ngiyirri can be distinguished by the addition of number suffixes, the suffix ‑way for the 1+2 reading and the suffix ‑yani for the 1+3 reading.6 Neither, however, is obligatory. The augmented inclusive pattern is de facto simply a dual vs plural distinction within the first person, as the 1+2+3 form is also used for any combination of 1+3 other than that involving only two individuals. We have included this pattern within the domain of inclusivity provided that the first-person dual is the only category specifically covering two individuals in the person paradigm. Otherwise we have recognized a distinct category of dual number.7 Thus under our analysis the independent pronouns in a language such as Kapau, a Highland language of Papua New Guinea, are taken to display a straightforward dual–plural contrast, as shown in (12), and not an augmented inclusive pattern, though exactly the same distinctions, within the first-person complex are made. (12) Kapau (Oates & Oates 1968: 17, 45) Sg Du Pl 1+2 yäl 1+2+3 nai 1 ni 1+3 yäl 1+3+3 2 nti 2+2 qi 2+2+2 3m ago 3m+3 aqoä’u 3m+3+3 3f I 3f+3 isä’u 3f+3+3
nai hai aqoä i’yoä
In sum, our analysis of the distribution of the encoding of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in free and bound person markers will be based on the subdivisions of the first-person complex shown in Table 2.
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms Table 2. The subdivisions of the first-person complex in our typology
1+2
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
—
A
A
A
A
A
A
B
B
1+2+3 1+3
—
A
B B
C
It must be pointed out that neither of the two additional patterns that we have included in our typology, i.e. pattern d) nor e) fits neatly into Cysouw’s first-person hierarchy, as this hierarchy is conceived of as consisting of a series of interdependent choices such that a split in the inclusive category occurs only after the emergence of a distinct exclusive category. This is not the case in either the min incl pattern (d) or the aug incl pattern (e), as there is a special form for 1+2 and 1+2+3 respectively but no special form for the exclusive. In pattern d) the exclusive falls in with the augmented inclusive, and in pattern e) with the minimal inclusive. Our typology reflects the number of special forms used for the expression of the groupings of 1+2, 1+2+3 and 1+3 without overlap with the 1 person singular form. It may be viewed as defining a hierarchy but only in the loose sense of the term. It does not constitute a typological hierarchy. Therefore our typology is expressed in (13) as an ordered grouping not in hierarchical form. (13) 0 forms 1 form 2 forms 3 forms
nowe unified we only inclusive minimal inclusive augmented inclusive inclusive–exclusive minimal augmented
(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)
3. The data The data for our study of the relationship between the encoding of the inclusive– exclusive distinction in free and bound person markers are drawn from a data base on person markers and grammatical relations currently consisting of 394 languages. The languages together with their areal distribution are presented in the appendix.8 We took a fairly liberal interpretation of what constitutes a person marker which subsumes the celebrated noun-like expressions found in Thai, Vietnamese and other South-East Asian languages. Accordingly all but one of the languages in the sample (Mbay, a Nilo-Saharan language of southern Chad) emerged as having free person markers. One other language, Acoma, does have free person markers, but
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not for argument functions. As for bound person markers, we took into account affixes, clitics and also so-called weak pronouns.9 The last of these are not actually either phonologically nor morphologically bound to a constituent. However, as they are phonologically reduced forms and differ from free forms in syntactic distribution (Bresnan 2001), we decided to group them together with clitics and affixes.10 A case in point is that of what Sohn (1975) calls the subjectives in the Melanesian language Woleaian, which as shown in (14) function as person agreement markers. (14) Woleaian (Sohn 1975: 150–51) a. Gaang i ta weri-Ø I 1sg not see-3sg ‘I did not see it.’ b. Gaami gai lag! you:pl 2pl go ‘You(pl) go!’ c. John ye weri-Ø Mary John 3sg see-3sg Mary ‘John saw Mary.’ Only bound person markers in S or A or P or Poss function were taken into account.11 The encoding of the first-person complex among all the languages exhibiting free or bound person markers (for the first person) in terms of the typology presented in section two is shown in Table 3. Before we proceed to consider these figures, a point of clarification is in order. Although, ideally one should apply the typology outlined in (13), separately to paradigms exhibiting a singular/group opposition and those in which there is a further contrast involving higher numbers, i.e. the dual and/or trial or paucal, as in Cysouw
Table 3. Frequency of the encoding of the first-person complex in the five types of person marker in the sample N=394
Indep pro
S marker
NoWe UnifWe OnlyIncl MinIncl AugIncl Incl/Excl SplInclExcl MinAug
8 (2.0%) 26 (8.7%) 25 (8.3%) 37 (15.6%) 21 (8.5%) 224 (57.0%) 166 (55.0%) 165 (55.0%) 119 (50.2%) 135 (54.7%) 8 (2.0%) 15 (5.0%) 15 (5.0%) 11 (4.6%) 12 (4.9%) 6 (1.5%) 4 (1.3%) 4 (1.3%) 3 (1.3%) 3 (1.2%) 2 (0.7%) 2 (0.7%) 2 (0.8%) 1 (0.4%) 4 (1.0%) 124 (31.5%) 76 (25.0%) 74 (24.6%) 54 (22.8%) 68 (27.5%) 4 (1.0%) 3 (1.0%) 3 (1.0%) 4 (1.7%) 2 (0.8%) 15 (3.8%) 8 (2.7%) 8 (2.7%) 7 ( 3.0%) 5 (2.0%)
Total
393
302
A marker
300
P marker
237
Poss marker
247
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
(2003), we have not done so. Consequently some of the encoding patterns in Table 3 must be understood as being relevant to whatever non-singular oppositions the paradigm displays, be it just group, or group and dual or group and dual and trial etc. This applies essentially to the unif we pattern, the incl/excl pattern and the min/ aug pattern. Significantly, we have included under the min/aug pattern the famous five “we” paradigms found among some of the non-Pama Nyungan languages of Australia (see e.g. McKay 1979).12 Under the traditional analysis these paradigms are seen as having an inclusive–exclusive contrast in the dual and plural and an inclusive trial encompassing 1+2+3. Under Cysouw’s (2003: 265) analysis the trial is treated as a special type of dual. Instead of a straightforward inclusive–exclusive opposition in the dual and plural, there is an opposition between an augmented inclusive vs exclusive, and the minimal inclusive 1+2 is undifferentiated. This is shown in (15) on the basis of Mangarayi. (15) Mangarayi (Merlan 1982: 102) Sg Du (restricted) Pl (group) 1+2 ŋi 1+2+3 ŋa-r 1+2+3+3 ŋa-ļa 1 ŋaya 1+3 ŋi-r 1+3+3 ŋi-ļa 2 ñaŋgi 2+2 nu-r 2+2+3 nu-ļa Paradigms which display other differences in the encoding of inclusivity across the non-singular categories have been collapsed in Table 3 in the row labelled split inclusive–exclusive (split incl/excl). These include paradigms which are described as displaying: • an inclusive–exclusive distinction only in the plural, as in the Papuan language Yava illustrated on the basis of the actor prefixes in (16); (16) Yava (Jones 1986: 42) Sg Du 1+2 ririm- 1 sy- 1+3 ririm- 2 n- 2+2 ip- 3m p- 3+3 y- 3f m-
Pl 1+2+3 1+3+3 2+2+3 3+3+3
wamreamwapw-
• an inclusive–exclusive distinction only in the dual, as in the case of subject prefixes in Tanimbili, an Oceanic language of Utupua Island, shown in (17); (17) Tanimbili (Tryon 1994: 628) Sg Du Pl 1+2 si- 1+2+3 1 nyi- 1+3 me- 1+3+3 2 nu- 2+2 mwa- 2+3+3 3 I- 3+3 ŋgi(li)- 3+3+3
misumisumukuŋgu-
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• a dual–plural contrast only within the inclusive category, as in the Ponapean free person markers illustrated in (18) ; (18) Ponapean (Rehg 1981: 158) Sg Du 1+2 kita 1 ngehi 1+3 kihit 2 kowe koh 2+2 kumwa 3 ih 2+3 ira
Pl 1+2+3 kitail 1+3+3 kihit 2+2+3 kumwail 3+3+3 irail/ihr
• a dual–plural contrast only within the exclusive category, as in the free (and also clitic) forms in Yagua (19); (19) Yagua (Payne 1990: 28–9) Sg Du Pl 1+2 nayin 1+2+3 1 ráy 1+3 nááy 1+3+3 2 jiy 2+2 saadá 2+2+3 3 nii 3+3 naadá 3+3+3
nayin núúy jiryéy riy
Let us now have a look at the figures in Table 3. We see that on the whole the distribution of the patterns of encoding of the first-person complex across the five types of person markers is strikingly similar. The two patterns which are of least interest to us, as they fail to differentiate between the inclusion and exclusion of the hearer in any way, have quite distinctive distributions. The nowe pattern is infrequent overall and also clearly less frequent in free person markers than in bound ones. The unif we pattern is the dominant pattern overall and prevails in all five person markers. Moreover its distribution within each type of person marker, given its commonality, is about the same. Turning to the five patterns that do distinguish between the inclusion and exclusion of the hearer in one way or another, by far the most common is the traditional incl/excl pattern. Depending on the person form in question, the straightforward incl/excl pattern accounts for between 77% and 67% of the encodings of inclusivity, with the figure of 77% being manifested in the free forms. Of the three inclusive patterns, the only incl is the most common and the aug incl the least.13 Interestingly enough the only incl pattern is slightly more frequent in the bound person markers than in the free forms. Quite the opposite holds for the aug incl pattern. The split incl/excl pattern is attested with all the markers, but again very infrequently. As for the min/aug pattern, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, among the free person markers, it is the second most common form of encoding inclusivity but for the incl/excl pattern. The difference in the frequency of the latter relative to the former is, however, around 8:1. Having reviewed the overall distribution of the encoding of the first-person complex in the five types of person markers, let us now turn to a consideration of the differences in the encodings exhibited by the various types of bound person markers
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
relative to the free forms within languages. Only languages with both free and (at least one type of) bound person markers will be considered. 14 Of the 330 languages which have both free and bound person markers, 179 (54%) have no encoding of the inclusive–exclusive domain. In other words, all the relevant person markers in question are either of the nowe or unifwe type. Of the remaining 151 languages which do encode the inclusive–exclusive domain in some subset of their person markers, 74 utilize the same pattern of encoding of the inclusive–exclusive domain for the free person markers and whatever set of bound person markers they display. Unsurprisingly, the most frequent pattern of encoding of the domain of inclusivity which is manifested by all the person forms in these 74 languages (77%) is the incl/excl pattern. It is exhibited in 57 of the 74 languages. In 43 (60%) languages, the inclusive–exclusive distinction is encoded only once in the paradigm, i.e. the various paradigms have no higher numbers. It is encoded twice (plural and dual) in 9 languages and three times (plural, dual and trial or paucal) in 5 languages. All the other patterns of encoding are also attested throughout the person paradigms found in languages, but rather infrequently. The relevant figures are summarized in Table 4. Moving on from similarities in the encoding of inclusivity to differences, there are 77 languages which exhibit differences in the encoding of inclusivity among the person markers that they have. The relevant differences may be grouped into two types: increases in the distinctions encoded and decreases. The increases may in turn be subdivided into introductions of the distinction and further elaborations. The decreases, on the other hand, may be subdivided into complete loss of the distinction and reduction. Needless to say, whether a particular difference constitutes a case of increase or decrease depends on which pattern one takes as one’s point of departure. As we are interested in the encoding of inclusivity in bound forms as compared to free forms, our point of reference will be the encoding pattern found in the free forms. We will view as cases of introduction any difference involving free forms manifesting a nowe or unifwe pattern and bound forms displaying one of the other of the encoding patterns. A case of introduction is shown in (20) on the basis Table 4. Uniform encoding of the inclusivity domain Pattern of encoding of inclusive–exclusive domain
Number of languages
Incl/Excl once in paradigm Incl/Excl twice in paradigm Incl/Excl three times in paradigm Only Incl Split Incl/Excl Aug Incl Min Incl Min Aug
43 9 5 6 2 1 3 5
Total
74
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of the Tibetan language Chepang, in which the free person markers have a unifwe pattern, i.e. they do not exhibit any encoding of inclusivity, while the person affixes have an incl/excl pattern in both the dual and plural. (20) Chepang (Caughley 1982: 54–5) Free 1 ŋa 2 naŋ 3 ?ow? 1+2; 1+3 ŋici 2+2 niŋji 3+3 ?o?nis 1+2+3; 1+3+3 ŋi 2+2+3 niŋ 3+3+3 ?ow?iem
Person suffixes 1 -ŋa 2 -naŋ 3 Ø 1+2 -ŋə-cə 1+3 -təyh-cə 2+2 -naŋ-jə 3+3 -ce 1+2+3 -ŋ-sə 1+3+3 -təyh-?i 2+2+3 -naŋ-sə 3+3+3 -?i/sə
As instances of complete loss we will, in turn, consider any difference involving nowe or unifwe in the bound forms and one of the other patterns in the free forms. An example of complete loss is illustrated in (21) from the Mongolic language Daur in which the free person markers display a simple incl/excl pattern while the S and A person suffixes a nowe pattern. (21) Daur (Wu 1996: 21, 27) Free SA suffixes in non-past 1sg bi: 1sg bəəi-bi 2sg ši: 2sg bəi-ši 3sg in 3sg bəi-sul 1+2(+3) bed 1pl bəi-ba: 1+3 ba: 2pl ta: 2pl bəi-ta: 3pl a:n 3pl bəi-sul The other differences between free and bound forms, i.e., those which we have classified as involving further elaboration, or alternatively reduction are listed in (22). (22) a. b.
when no higher numbers are involved only incl vs all others (but for nowe, uniwe) aug incl or min incl vs incl/excl, min aug incl/excl vs min aug when higher numbers are involved incl/excl vs incl/excl du (tr pau) pl split incl/excl vs inc/excldu (tr pau) pl incl/excldu(trpau)pl vs min aug
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
An example of a reduction involving a min/aug pattern in the free forms and an incl/ excl one in the bound is given in (23) from Tiwi, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of Northern Australia, in which the incl/excl pattern is found in the P suffixes. (The S/A prefixes display a min/aug pattern, like the free ones.) (23) Tiwi (Osborne 1974: 54, 27) Free P prefixes 1 ŋia 1 məni2 ŋin̪ t̪a 2 mən̪ i3m ŋara 3 Ø3f ŋira 1+2 mua 1+2 mani1+3 ŋawa 1+3 məwəni1+2+3 ŋaya 1+2+3 mani2+2 nua 2+2+3 mani3+3 wuta 3+3 wəni An instance of elaboration involving free person markers displaying a min incl pattern and bound S/A markers with a min aug pattern is presented in (24) from the West Papuan language Hatam. (24) Hatam (Reesink 1999: 40) Free SA prefixes 1 da 1 di2 na 2 a3 no(k) 3 Ø/ni1+2 sa 1+2 si1+2+3 nye 1+2+3 i(g)1+3 nye 1+3 ni2+2 je 2+2 ji3+3 yo(k) 3+3 i(g)Taking the patterns of encoding in free person markers as our starting point, the number of languages exhibiting a decrease in the encoding of the inclusivity domain in some set of their bound person markers is nearly four times as large as that displaying increases, namely 71 vs 15. This is what we would expect given the assumption that bound markers originate from free ones and, in the process of grammaticalization, often undergo semantic bleaching.15 Semantic distinctions, however, may also be lost or reduced, over time, in free person markers. If this happens after the development of bound person forms, the result may be that the latter may manifest a distinction no longer in evidence in the former. Accordingly, the existence of increases in the encoding of inclusivity in bound markers vis a vis free forms is not surprising. Nonetheless, since the potential loss of semantic distinctions in free forms is likely to be due to factors other than grammaticalization, we may expect the increases to be far less common than the decreases. And this is indeed so.
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There is, of course, also the possibility of an inclusive–exclusive distinction developing in the free forms after the emrgence of the bound. As discussed by various scholars (e.g. Jacobsen 1980; Nichols 1992 and Sakel (this volume)), the inclusive– exclusive distinction appears to be particularly amenable to borrowing. Although typically instances of borrowing of the inclusive–exclusive distinction are not confined to just free forms, this is precisely what has happened in the Khoekhoe languages (!Ora, Eini, Nama). According to Güldemann (2002) these languages have borrowed from the !Ui-Taa-family (Southern Khoisan) the first-person nonsingular form si and in doing so innovated the inclusive–exclusive distinction in their free forms. As we see in (25), on the basis of Nama, the bound forms in contrast to the free exhibit no inclusive–exclusive opposition either in the dual or the plural. (25) Nama (Hagman 1973: 83, 87) Free Clitics 1sg m tiíta 1m 1sg f tiíta 1f 1+2m saákxm 1+2; 1+3m 1+2f saám 1+2; 1+3f 1+2c saám 1+2; 1+3c 1+3m siíkxm 1+2+3; 1+3+3m 1+3f siím 1+2+3; 1+3+3f 1+3c sim 1+2+3;1+3+3c 1+2+3m saáke 1+2+3f saáse 1+2+3c saáke 1+3+3m siítà 1+3+3f siíse 1+3+3c siíke
-ta - ta -kxm -m/-ìm -m/-ìm -ke -se -tà
As for the distribution of the subtypes of increases vs decreases in the four kinds of bound person marker, this is presented in Table 5. We see that the dominance of decreases vs increases holds very clearly for each bound person marker, the difference between the two ranging from over three times in the case of S and A markers to nine times in the case of the Poss markers. The fact that Poss markers display a slightly higher decrease in the encoding of the inclusivity domain vis a vis the free personal pronouns may be in part due to the fact that they are more closely related to free possessive pronouns than to the personal ones. Another reason for the above is that some languages have defective paradigms of bound possessor markers with bound forms only for certain person and/or number combinations. For example in Lele (Frayzyngier 2001: 61), an East Chadic language spoken in Chad, Koh Lakka (Glidden 1985), a Niger-Congo language of the Adamawa branch spoken on the boarder of Chad and Cameroon and the North Australian language of the Daly River family Maranungku (Tryon 1970: 16) there are bound possessor forms only for singular possessors, while non-singular ones are expressed by free forms. In the
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms Table 5. Increases and decreases in the encoding of inclusivity in bound person markers relative to free person markers Type of difference in the encoding of inclusivity N=77
Smrk N=68
Amrk N=69
Pmrk N=57
Possmrk N=58
Introduction Elaboration Sum Increases Loss Reduction Sum Decreases Total diff
9 (13%) 2 (2.9%) 11 (16.2%) 23 (33.4%) 13 (11.1%) 36 (52.9%) 47 (69.1%)
9 (13%) 2 (2.9%) 11 (15.9%) 22 (31.9%) 9 (13.0%) 37 (53.6%) 48 (69.6%)
5 (8.8%) 2 (3.5%) 7 (12.3%) 26 (45.6%) 9 (15.8%) 35 (61.4%) 42 (73.6%)
2 (3.4%) 2 (3.4%) 4 (6.9%) 25 (43.1%) 11 (19.0%) 36 (62.0%) 40 (70.0%) 41 (
Papuan language Mountain Koiali (Garland & Garland 1975: 420) and the Brazilian language Trumai (Guirardello 1999), by contrast, there are bound forms only for the third-person singular and non-singular. Again free person markers are imployed for the other person/number combinations. And in Adzera, an Austronesian language spoken in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea, the bound possessor forms distinguish only person but not number. Consequently, they are used in conjunction with free forms, which, unlike, the bound display both a number contrast and an incl/excl pattern. The paradigms of the relevant Adzera free and bound forms are given in (26) and examples of the co-occurrence of the bound froms with the free in (27). (26) Adzera (Holzknecht 1986: 96–8) Free Poss 1 dzi -ŋ?-gan? 2 u/agu -m-gam 3 araŋan -n-gan 1+2 (+3) aga/agai 1+3 agal 2+2 agam 3+3 rib (27) a. b. c.
dzi gudzu-ŋ?-gaŋ? 1sg head-1-poss ‘my head’ agi gudzu-ŋ?-gaŋ? 1incl head-1-poss ‘our (inclusive) heads’ aga gudzu-ŋ?gaŋ? 1excl head-1-poss ‘our (exclusive) heads’
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Among the decreases, the vast majority are instances of complete loss. This again holds for each of the bound person markers. Although about three quarters of the losses are relative to a straightforward incl/excl pattern, all the other possibilities of complete loss are also attested in our data. An example involving min/aug and nowe is presented in (28) from the previously mentioned Australian language Maranungku. (28) Maranungku (Tryon 1970: 15–16) Free Poss 1 ngany -ni 2 nina -la/-le/-li 3m nankuny -na 3f ngankuny -nga 1+2 ngangku 1+2+3 kitya 1+3 ngatya 2+2 nitya 3+3 witya Given that bound markers for the S, A, P and Poss need not all develop at the same time, nor from the same source, nor grammaticalize at the same rate, it is difficult to have any strong expectations in regard to which markers should most likely exhibit a decrease in the encoding of inclusivity vis a vis the free person forms. The best contenders are indubitably markers of the S and A since they are typically seen as developing before P markers or Poss markers. They could therefore be expected to have undergone more desemanticization than the P markers. However, no strong correlations emerge from the data in Table 5. Among the 28 languages with both bound A and P markers in which at least one of the two displays a decrease in the encoding of inclusivity vis a vis the free pronoun, there are only two in which the SA marker shows less encoding of inclusivity than the P marker. The first of these is the Austronesian language Yapese. We see in (29), that the SA weak forms display reduced encoding of inclusivity as compared to the free forms; the former exhibit an only incl pattern (there is a separate form covering 1+2 & 1+2+3 but the 1+3 forms are homophonous with the 1), the latter an incl/excl pattern both in the dual and plural. The P markers, unlike, the SA markers, exhibit the same distinctions as the free forms. (29) Yapese (Jensen 1977: 132–42) Free SA P 1 gaeg gu -eeg 2 guur mu -eem 3 qiir i/Ø Ø 1+2 gadow da -dow 1+3 gamouw gu -mow
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
2+2 3+3 1+2+3 1+3+3 2+2+3 3+3+3
gimeew yow gadaed gamaed gimeed yaed
mu ra da gu mu ra
-meew -row -daed -maed -meed -raed
The second language is the Australian language Nyulnyul, the person markers of which are depicted in (30). (30) Nyulnyul (McGregor 1996: 23, 40, 47) Free SA Nonfut Fut 1 ngay nga- nga- 2 juy mi- wa-/mi- 3 kinyingk I- yu- 1+2 yay ya- ya- 1+2+3 yarrad ya- ya- 1+3 yarrad ya- ya- 2+2 kurr ku- wa- 3+3 irr/yirr i- yu-
P -ngay -juy/ji Ø -yay -yarrad -yarrad -kurr -yiir
According to McGregor (1996: 23), the free person markers of Nyulnyul formerly displayed a min/aug pattern of encoding, with the form yadir used for 1+2+3. However, this form appears to have been lost, as it was lacking from McGregor’s corpus. Consequently, we have classified the free person markers as displaying a min incl pattern. This is also the pattern displayed by the P suffixes. The SA prefixes, on the other hand, have a unif we pattern.16 As the paradigms in (29) and (30) illustrate, in both languages the P markers are phonologically closer to the free forms than the S and A markers. The opposite situation to the above, that is more encoding of inclusivity in A markers than in P markers occurs more frequently in our sample; it obtains in six of the 28 languages. Three of these languages, however, display a nowe pattern, i.e. they simply have no encoding of the first person at all, or no encoding of just the first-person non-singular. Accordingly, the possibility of encoding inclusivity does not arise. In another language, Hanis Coos, the P markers are always fused with the A markers, which is what may underlie the lack of encoding of inclusivity in the P markers. The remaining two languages which have less marking of inclusivity in P forms than in A forms are: Guaraní (31) and Kwaza (32), an unclassified language of Southern Rondonia, Brazil.
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(31) Guaraní (Gregores & Suarez 1967: 131, 141) Free A/S(A) P/S(P) 1 še a- če2 ne re- ne1+2 yané ya- yane1+2+3 yané ya- yane1+3 oré ro- yane2+2 pee˜ pe- pene3 o- i-/iy (32) Kwaza (van der Voort 2000: 154, 163, 169) Free SA P 1 si -da -ta 2 çyi -ça -nī’nā 3 ĩ -Ø -Ø 1+2 txana -a -eteja 1+2+3 txana -a -eteja 1+3 tsi’tsğε (si +tsε) -aça -eteja 2+2 çyi’tsε -ça(ça) -eteleçwa 3+3 ĩ -Ø -Ø In both languages the free and SA forms display an incl/excl pattern, the P markers a unifwe pattern. We have no explanation to offer for why there should be no marking of inclusivity in the P forms. The situation in regard to increases in the encoding of inclusivity among S, A, P and Poss markers relative to the free forms is analogous to that of decreases. No clear statistical implications emerge from our data. Analogously to what we observed in the case of the decreases, the overwhelming majority of the increases involve introductions rather than elaborations of the marking of inclusivity. The vast majority of the introductions are relative to a unif we pattern in the free forms, as shown earlier on the basis of Chepang. An introduction involving the other possibility, a nowe pattern, is illustrated in (33) from the Tanoan language Kiowa in which the inclusive–exclusive distinction is made only in the agentive prefixes. As (33) illustrates the inclusive is homophonous with the second-person plural and the exclusive with the third-person inverse. (33) Kiowa (Watkins 1984: 100, 113, 115) Free S prefixes 1 n à2 ám èm3 Ø3 inverse è1+2(+3) bà1+3 è-
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
2+2 3+3(hum)
bàá-
4. The encoding of inclusivity and grammaticalization of person markers Although, as pointed out by Lehmann (1982a: 236), we should not expect there to be an 100% correlation among all the various parameters of grammaticalization, the assumption underlying grammaticalzation theory is that the semantic, morphological and syntactic changes will tend to coincide. This suggests that the less elaborate encoding of the inclusivity domain in some bound as opposed to free person markers discussed above may have correlates on other dimensions of grammaticalization. We will consider two of these, namely the actual morpho-phonological form of the bound person markers and their co-occurrence possibilities with corresponding NPs.17 The bound person markers that we have been considering may be grouped in terms of their decreasing morphological independence and reduction in phonological form as in (34), with degree of grammaticalization increasing from left to right. (34) weak > clitic > affix All things being equal, the more grammaticalized markers from the point of view of morpho-phonological form should also exhibit more evidence of decrease in the encoding of the inclusivity domain, as compared to their free counterparts than the less grammaticalized markers. In other words, there should be relatively more instances of loss of the marking of inclusivity and reductions in the distinctions made among the affixes than among the clitics or weak forms. The distribution of the three types of bound markers among the languages in the sample is very unbalanced as the affixes are overwhelmingly dominant and the weak forms very poorly attested. This holds for all four types of person markers, the S, A, P and Poss. Nonetheless, despite the skewed distribution, the relationship between morpho-phonological form and degree of encoding of the inclusivity domain (relative to free person markers) is as expected. This is documented in Table 6 on the basis of the S markers. The differences between the types of encoding of inclusivity in S markers as opposed to free person markers in weak forms, clitics and affixes are marginal. They do, however, go in the right direction. There are no instances of loss among the weak forms and loss among clitics (2.2%) is marginally less frequent than in affixes (7%). Slightly more robust is the relationship between the encoding of inclusivity in bound forms relative to free forms and degree of grammaticalization when viewed in terms of the tripartite typology of bound person markers in (35).18
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Weak N=5
Clitic N=45
Affix N=246
Loss Reduction Increase No difference
0 (0%) 1 (20.0%) 0 (0 4 (80.0%)
1 (2.2%) 1 (2.2%) 1 (2.2%) 42 (93.3%)
18 (7.3%) 11 (4.5%) 10 (4.1%) 207 (84.1%) 208
(35) pronominal agreement markers > ambiguous agreement markers > syntactic agreement markers This typology builds on the widely held position that there is no good basis for distinguishing between agreement and antecedent-anaphora relations, even when cross-clausal (see e.g. Givón 1976; Moravcsik 1978; Lehmann 1982a,b; Corbett 1991; Andersen 1992). It is based on the co-occurrence possibilities between bound person markers and their corresponding NPs. Pronominal agreement markers are markers that are in complementary distribution with their corresponding NPs, be it nominal or pronominal, in the same construction. One language which has such person markers is the Carib language Macushi; note the presence of an S person prefix aa- in (36b) as opposed to (36a). (36) Macushi (Abbott 1991: 84) a. u-yonpa-kon João ko’mamî-‘pî miarî 1-relative John remain-past there ‘Our relative John stayed there.’ b. aa-ko’mamî-‘pî asakîne wei kaisarî day up:to 3-remain-past two ‘He remained two days.’ Ambiguous agreement markers are markers which occur both in the presence and the absence of a corresponding NP in the same construction as in the case of the S/A prefixes in Gumawana (37), an Oceanic language spoken in the Milne Bay province of New Guinea. (37) Gumawana (Olson 1992: 326) a. Kalitoni i-paisewa Kalitoni 3sg-work ‘Kalitoni worked.’ b. i-situ vada sinae-na 3sg-enter house inside-3sg(inal) ‘He entered the inside of the house.’
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms
And syntactic agreement markers are markers that necessarily require the presence of a corresponding NP in the same construction. Such markers are very infrequent outside western Europe. They are illustrated in (38) on the basis of Dutch. (38) Dutch a. Hans zie-t Kees elke dag. Hans see-2/3sg Kees every day ‘Hans sees Kees every day.’ b. *(Hij) zie-t Kees elke dag. he see-2/3sg Kees every day ‘He sees Kees every day.’ The increasing degree of grammaticalization from pronominal via ambiguous to syntactic markers is reflected in their growing reliance on the presence of a corresponding NP in the same construction, from inability to co-occur with such an NP to the inability to occur without such an NP. Given the above, we expect relatively more instances of loss and reductions of the encoding of inclusivity relative to free forms the further to the right we proceed on the hierarchy in (35). Accordingly, we should find more instances of loss in syntactic markers than in ambiguous ones, and more in the latter than in pronominal markers. That this is indeed so is suggested by the figures in Table 7 again pertaining to S markers and excluding languages with bound forms only for the third person. As in the case of the weak–clitic–affix distinction, the figures are heavily skewed due to the fact that distribution of pronominal, ambiguous and syntactic agreement markers is far from uniform. The vast majority of the bound person markers are ambiguous ones. Pronominal markers are not uncommon, especially in the case of P and Poss forms. Syntactic markers in turn are very rare and appear to be found only in S or A functions. As the figures in Table 7 reveal, pronominal markers are the least likely and syntactic markers the most likely to exhibit loss or reduction in the encoding of inclusivity. Table 7. Differences in the encoding of inclusivity between free forms and S markers relative to the tripartite typology of agreement markers Type of difference in the encoding of inclusivity N=296
Pronominal marker N=32
Ambiguous marker N=257
Syntactic marker N=7
Loss Reduction Increase No difference
0 (0%) 3 (9.4%) 1 (3.1%) 28 (87.5%)
18 (7.0%) 10 (3.9%) 10 (3.9%) 219 (85.2%)
2 (28.6%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 5 (71.4%) 6
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5. Concluding remarks Our comparison of the encoding of inclusivity in free and bound person markers has revealed that there is only a small difference in the frequency with which this semantic dimension is encoded in free as opposed to bound person markers. Free person markers are the most likely (42%) and P markers (34%) the least likely to display some encoding of inclusivity. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the type of inclusivity distinctions that are encoded in free and bound forms are necessarily the same. We have seen that among the 330 languages in our sample which have both free and bound person markers (of some type), the same pattern of inclusivity encoding is manifested in only 74, i.e. 22%. In nearly a quarter of the relevant languages there are some differences in how inclusivity is encoded in the various person paradigms. The vast majority of these differences involve presence of the encoding of inclusivity in free as compared to bound forms, though the reverse is also found. More subtle differences, involving changes in the type of inclusivity encoded are attested as well, such as that between minimal augmented and inclusive–exclusive, or inclusive–exclusive and only inclusive etc. The loss or reduction in the encoding of inclusivity in bound person markers as compared to free ones correlates with two other facets of the grammaticalization of bound person markers, namely changes in their morpho-phonological form and their co-occurrence possibilities with corresponding NPs. The correlations are not as strong as the parallel path hypothesis would lead one to expect, even assuming Lehmann’s (1982b: 236) caevet, mentioned at the beginning of section 4. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is the unbalanced distribution of affixes as compared to weak forms and clitics, on the one hand, and ambiguous as compared to both pronominal and syntactic markers on the other. The second is, the potential lack of a relationship between bound and free forms in some of the languages considered. Although, bound forms typically derive from free forms, the free forms in question are not necessarily those currently attested. The above notwithstanding, the data do suggest that loss and reduction of the encoding of inclusivity are more common among affixes than among weak or clitic forms, and more common among syntactic and ambiguous markers than among pronominal ones. Thus, at least as far as the encoding of inclusivity is concerned, the semantic parameter of grammaticalization is in tune with the morpho-phonological and syntactic. To what extent this holds also for other semantic features encoded together with person, such as number, gender, politeness etc. remains to be determined.
Abbreviations 1 2 3 an
first person second person third person animate
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms as(A) c compl du excl f hum inal inan incl m min/aug pau pl poss ps(P) sg tr unif
actor common gender completive dual exclusive feminine gender human inalienable inanimate inclusive masculine gender minimal augmented paucal plural possessed undergoer singular trial unified
Appendix (N=394) Africa (N=76) Amharic, Ani, Arabic (Egyptian), Babungo, Bagirmi, Bambara, Bari, Beja, Berta, Bilin, Burunge, Coptic, Dagare, Diola-Fogny, Dizi, Dogon, Dongolese Nubian, Doyayo, Ewe, Fula, Fur, Geez, Grebo, Gude, Hamar, Hausa, Hebrew, Igbo, Iraqw, Kanuri, Katla, Kera, Kisi, Koh (Lakka), Kolokuma (Ijo), Koma, Kongo, Koromfe, Koyra Chiini, Kreol (Mauritian), Krongo, Kuku, Kunama, Lango, Lele, Luvale, Maale, Maba, Mbay, Mende, Mesalit, Mumuye, Mupun, Murle, Nama, Nandi, Ndonga, Ngiti, Nkore Kiga, Noon, Nupe, Oromo (Harar), Pari, Sandawe, Sango, So, Songhay (Koyraboro), Supyire, Swahili, Tamazight (Ayt Ndhi), Turkana, !Xu, Yaoure, Yoruba, Zande, Zulu Eurasia (65) Abkhaz, Ainu, Akkadian, Albanian, Armenian (Eastern), Basque, Bawm, Brahui, Burushaski, Byansi, Chepang, Chinese (Mandarin), Chukchi, Crimean Tatar, Dagur, Dong, Dutch, English, Evenki, Finnish, French, Garo, Georgian, German, Gilyak, Greek (Modern), Hindi, Hittite, Hungarian, Hunzib, Ingush, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Ju chen, Kannada, Kashmiri, Ket, Khalkha, Khasi, Korean, Kurdish (Central), Ladakhi, Lahu, Lak, Latvian, Lepcha, Lezgian, Limbu, Lushai, Meithei, Mundari, Nenets, Ossetic, Persian, Polish, Remo, Russian, Sema, Spanish, Sumerian, Turkish, Udihe, Welsh, Yukaghir (Kolyma) South-East Asia (31) Acehnese, Atayal, Burmese, Chrau, Hmong Njua, Indonesian, Kapampangan, Karo Batak, Kayah Li, Khmer, Khmu, Konjo, Larike, Makian (West), Mlabri (Minor), Muna, Paiwan, Rawang, Sahu, Savu, Semelai, Sundanese, Taba, Tagalog, Temiar, Thai, Tidore, Tsou, TukangBesi, Uma, Vietnamese
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Notes 1. We will use the term ‘person marker’ rather than ‘pronoun’ as not all bound person forms are pronominal, i.e. they cannot be used referentially. 2. This characterization of grammaticalization is, of course, a simplification. For a more detailed analysis of the parameters of grammaticalization see Lehmann (1982a: 234–41; 1982b); Heine & Reh (1984: 16–46), Bybee et al (1994: 19) and Croft (2000: 157–65). 3. The labels for the various patterns of encoding of the first-person complex that we are using are either directly taken over from Cysouw (2003) or are elaborations of his labels.
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms 4. Our minimal inclusive pattern corresponds to Cysouw’s type P(f) and our augumented inclusive pattern to his type P(g). Both patterns were attested very poorly in his sample but are somewhat more common in ours and therefore have been included. 5. The only minimal inclusive pattern is referred to by Greenberg (1988: 9) as the Assiniboine-type, but Assiniboine can only be regarded as displaying the only minimal inclusive pattern if the separate number suffixes are taken into account. The paradigm of the actual person prefixes is of the straightforward unified we type. 6. The same suffixes can also be added to the second- and third-person non-singular to achieve a dual vs plural reading. 7. This is also the position taken by Corbett (2000) and Cysouw (2003). 8. As we are interested in how the inclusive–exclusive distinction is encoded in free and bound forms, the sample is skewed in favour of languages which manifest the inclusive–exclusive distinction. Therefore the overall frequency of the encoding of this distinction is about 10% higher than what is suggested by Nichols (1992) or Bickel and Nichols (this volume). 9. We took as definitive of clitc as opposed to affixal status of a form its ability to attach to a variable host. 10. It is often difficult to determine whether a particular person marker is a clitic, e.g. a proclitic to the VP or a weak pronoun. 11. In the case of Poss markers, somewhat arbitrarily, we took into account only markers bound to the possessed, not to a classifier or an adposition. 12. These paradigms are often referred to as the unit augmented type. They are considered to be extensions of the minimal augmented type with the 1+2 category being treated as a “singular”. For details see McKay (1979). 13. Crevels & Muysken (this volume) note that the only incl pattern is rather common among the languages of central-western South America. It occurs in just over 20% of the languages in the area which exhibit some marking of inclusivity. 14. We are not assuming that the current free and bound person markers in a language are necessarily related. The latter may have developed from forms which are no longer in existence. It must also be noted that the free forms may in fact be based on the bound 15. It is worth mentioning in this context LaPolla’s (this volume) findings with respect to the distribution of the encoding of inclusivity among the Tibeto-Burman languages. Of the 41 languages which encode the distinction among free forms only the Kiranti languages and some Chin languages also encode the distinction among their bound forms. 16. In Nyulyul the non-singular SA prefixes occur with additional plural markers which may be separated from the person prefixes by tense or mood prefixes. The ya- prefix sometimes occurs without a plural marker in which case it denotes 1+2. The 1+2 reading, however, is also available when there is an additional plural marker. Thus it appears that the ya-prefix, definitely is a unified we one. 17. That semantic reduction should be accompanied by phonetic reduction is particularly stressed by Bybee et al. (1994: 19). 18. This typology builds on the distinction between anaphoric and syntactic agreement discussed by Lehmann (1982a: 219) and the distinction between anaphoric and grammatical agreement elaborated by Bresnan & Mchombo (1986, 1987).
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References Abbott, M. 1991. Macushi. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazonian languages, Volume 3, 23–160. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Andersen, S. R. 1992 Amorphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bresnan, J. & Mchombo, S. A. 1986. Grammatical and anaphoric agreement. In A. Farley, P. Farley & K. McCullough (eds), Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 22. Papers from the parasession on pragmatics and grammatical theory, 278–97. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. Bresnan, J. & Mchombo, S. A. 1987. Topic, pronoun and agreement in Chichewa. Language 63: 741–82. Bresnan, J. 2001. The emergence of the unmarked pronoun. In G. Legendre, J. Grimshaw & S. Vikner (eds), Optimality-theoretic syntax, 113–42. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Bybee, J., R. Perkins & Pagliuca, W. 1994. The evolution of grammar. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. Carlin, E. 1993. The So language. Köln: Institut für Afrikanistik. Caughley, R. C. 1982. The syntax and morphology of the verb in Chepang. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 84]. Corbett, G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett, G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, W. 2000. Explaining language change. London: Longman. Cysouw, M. 2003. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Everett, D. L. 1986. Pirahã. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazonian languages, Volume 1, 200–325. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Frajzyngier, Z. 2001. A grammar of Lele. Stanford: Stanford Monographs in African Languages. Garland, R. & Garland, S. 1975. A grammar sketch of Mountain Koiali. In T. E. Dutton (ed.), Studies in languages of Central and South-East Papua, 413–70. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 29]. Givón, T. 1976. Topic, pronoun and grammatical agreement. In C. Li (ed.), Subject and topic, 151–88. New York: Academic Press. Glidden, S. H. 1985. The Koh verbal system. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session 29: 223–82. Greenberg, J. 1988. The first-person dual as an ambiguous category. Studies in Language 12: 1–18. Gregores, E. & Suarez, J. A. 1967. A description of colloquial Guaraní. The Hague: Mouton. Guirardello, R. 1999. A reference grammar of Trumai. Ph. D. dissertation, Rice University, Texas. Güldemann, T. 2002. Die Entlehnung pronominaler Elemente des Khoekhoe aus dem!uiTaa. In T. Schumann, M. Reh, R. Kiessling & L. Gerhard (eds), Aktuelle Forschungen zu afrikanischen Sprachen: Sprachwissenschaftliche Beiträge zum 14. Afrikanistentag, Hamburg, 11.–14. Oktober 2000, 43–61. Köln: Köppe. Hagman, R. S. 1973. Nama Hottentot grammar. Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University. (also 1977 Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University.) Heine, B. & Reh, M. 1984. Grammaticalization and reanalysis in African languages. Hamburg: Buske.
Inclusive exclusive in free and bound person forms Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1980. Inclusive–exclusive: A diffused pronominal category in native western North America. In J. Kreiman & A. E. Ojeda (eds), Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora. Chicago Linguistic Society, April 18–19, 1980, 326–406. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. Jensen, J. T. 1977. Yapese reference grammar. Honolulu HI: University Press of Hawaii. Holzknecht, S. 1986. A morphology and grammar of Adzera (Amari Dialect), Morobe province, Papua New Guinea. Papers in New Guinea Linguistics 24: 77–166. Jones, L. K. 1986. The question of ergativity in Yawa, a Papuan language. Australian Journal of Linguistics 6: 37–56. Lehmann, Ch. 1982a. Universal and typological aspects of agreement. In H.-J. Seiler & J. Stachowiak (eds), Apprehension. Das sprachliche Erfassen von Gegenständen. Volume 2, 201–67. Tübingen: Narr. Lehmann, Ch. 1982b. Thoughts on grammaticalization: A programatic sketch, Volume I. Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft [Arbeiten des Kölner Universalien-Projekts 48]. Macauley, M. 1996. A grammar of Chalcatongo Mixtec. Berkeley: University of California Press [University of California Publications in Linguistics 127]. Martens, M. 1988. Notes on Uma verbs. Papers in Western Austronesian Linguistics 4: 167– 237. McGregor, W. 1996. Nyulnyul. München: Lincom Europa. McKay, G. 1979. Pronominal person and number categories in Rembarrnga and Djeebana. Oceanic Linguistics 17: 27–37. Merlan, F. 1982. Mangarayi. Amsterdam: North-Holland [Lingua Descriptive Studies 4]. Moravcsik, E. A. 1978. Agreement. In J. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of human language, Volume 4, 331–74. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. Oates, W. & Oates, L. 1968. Kapau pedagogical grammar. Canberra: The Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 10]. Olawsky, K. J. 1999. Aspects of Dagbani grammar. München: Lincom Europa. Olson, C. 1992. Gumawana (Amphlett Islands, Papua New Guinea): Grammar sketch and texts. In M. D. Ross (ed.), Papers in Austronesian linguistics 2, 251–430. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics A 82]. Osborne, C. R. 1974. The Tiwi language. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Payne, D. L. 1990. The pragmatics of word order: Typological dimensions of verb-initial languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Reesink, G. P. 1999. A grammar of Hatam. Canberra: The Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 146]. Rehg, K. L. 1981. Ponapean reference grammar. Honolulu HI: The University Press of Hawaii. Rumsey, A. 1996. On some relationships among person, number, and mode in Bunuba. In W. McGregor (ed.), Studies in Kimberley languages in honour of Howard Coate, 139–48. München: Lincom Europa. Siewierska, A. 1999. From anaphoric pronoun to grammatical agreement marker: Why objects don’t make it. Folia Linguistica 33(2): 225–51. Sohn, H. 1975. Woleaian reference grammar. Honolulu HI: University Press of Hawaii. Tryon, D. T. 1970. An introduction to Maranungku. Canberra: The Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 15].
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Chapter 6
Inclusive imperative* Nina Dobrushina State University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Valentin Goussev Institute of linguistics, Moscow
Imperative is the only verbal category whose clusivity pattern is typically asymmetrical. In many languages, there is only one first-person plural imperative, which is inclusive, with no exclusive alternative. This bias towards inclusives is natural: the imperative category is addressee-oriented and thus not readily compatible with exclusive semantics. We consider data from languages with rare ‘unbiased’ imperative clusivity patterns using exclusive or neutral (clusivity-indifferent) imperatives. Another conclusion is that the number opposition in first-person non-singular imperatives (dual vs. plural) actually is singular vs. plural opposition that counts addressees. Most languages interpret non-singular first person imperatives inclusively, as ‘speaker and addressee’ vs. ‘speaker and addressees’. Formally, the number distinction in first person imperatives is grammaticalised as singular vs. plural. Keywords: inclusive, exclusive, clusivity, imperative, addressee, (co)hortative
1. Introduction Most work dedicated to the clusivity phenomenon has dealt with the independent pronouns or, more rarely, with the verb “in general”; in the majority of cases, the author has investigated only indicative forms. However, there is a part of the verbal system in which the inclusive–exclusive distinction turns out to be much more important. This is the imperative. Of all inclusives, the form which is most likely to appear in a language is the firstperson plural imperative. It expresses the exhortation to the addressee to carry out an action together with the speaker. Along with requests or commands, the invitation to a common action is one of the most frequent activities in human life. All languages we know of have a certain means to express it, using either a morphologically dedicated form (like Tatar (Turkic) aš-ijk! ‘let’s eat!’) or some other means (like English Let’s go! or German Lass uns arbeiten! ‘let’s work!’). There is a great variety of labels used for these forms; they are referred to as hortative (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994: 179), exhortative (Chung & Timberlake 1985: 247), jussive (Palmer 1986: 111), cohortative (van der Auwera & Ammann 2002), or first-person plural imperative
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( Xrakovskij (ed.) 2001: 24). Here, we adopt the last of these terms, assuming that, despite an obvious particularity of meaning, these constructions have enough in common with the usual second person imperatives to be called by the same term. Not one of the numerous works dedicated to clusivity takes non-indicative verbal forms into account. The present chapter seeks to attract attention to the inclusive formation that is most widespread across languages, the inclusive imperative. Our aim is to show that the imperative is more receptive to the inclusive–exclusive distinction than any other verbal form. It is typical for the imperative to distinguish between exclusive and inclusive forms even if other moods do not make this distinction. We shall try to show that this peculiarity of the imperative results from its semantics. In Section 2 we consider the possible types of interaction between clusivity and the semantics of the imperative. The exclusive meaning is not typical for the imperative; however, dedicated exclusive imperative forms exist and we discuss their possible interpretations in Section 2.1. In Section 2.2, we cite examples of languages that distinguish exclusive and inclusive forms in the imperative but nowhere else. In Section 2.3, we proceed to the languages which have only one form in first-person plural imperative — the inclusive one. Some examples of languages which nevertheless make no distinction between exclusive and inclusive imperatives will be cited in Section 2.4. In Section 3, we argue that the imperative prefers the inclusive meaning. That means that in the languages which have both inclusive and exclusive imperatives the form of the inclusive imperative occurs much more frequently. Also, the inclusive interpretation is more natural than the exclusive one in languages which allow both interpretations. For instance, English let us work will normally be understood as an invitation to work addressed to the hearer (at least some speakers accept this interpretation only). The semantics of the imperative offers an explanation of why the imperative prefers inclusivity. Section 4 examines the forms of inclusive imperatives that are often called “firstperson dual” as opposed to “first-person plural”. Our survey of languages has shown that the contrast of two inclusive imperatives in which the number of addressees is grammaticalised is also very widespread. The distinction of inclusive imperatives addressed to one person from those addressed to several persons is typical for languages which have no dual–plural opposition anywhere else. We refer to these oppositions as minimal inclusive imperative vs. augmented inclusive imperative (instead of dual vs. plural), at least in the languages which do not distinguish between dual and plural. Thus, the inclusive imperative often distinguishes more categories than other inclusives. We suggest an explanation for this fact.
2. Clusivity within and beyond the imperative The main function of the imperative is to urge the addressee to perform an action. Thus, the central form in the imperative paradigm is the second person. The first-
Inclusive imperative
person inclusive imperative is also common in the languages of the world, since the addressee is one of its referents. While the second person imperative means that the speaker requests the addressee to perform an action, the inclusive forms imply that the speaker requests the addressee to perform an action together with himself (i.e. with the speaker). Although somewhat less frequent, third person imperatives are attested in most languages; here, the addressee plays a part of mediator between the speaker and the non-locutor. As a rule, it is implied that he communicates the order/request to the non-locutor or requests him to perform an action (Let him bring the book = ‘Make him know that he has to bring the book’/‘make him bring the book’). The first-person exclusive imperative, on the contrary, has no plausible imperative interpretation. Since this form combines the speaker and the non-locutor in a group as opposed to the addressee, the latter cannot play a part of a mediator between them, as in the third person imperative. The first-person singular is likewise incompatible with an imperative meaning. It is possible in some situations to give an order to oneself. But then the speaker treats himself as a hearer, so the second-person form is appropriate here; cf. Palmer’s (1986: 111) example Keep calm (= I must keep calm). To the best of our knowledge, no language uses a first person imperative form in such contexts. Thus, the imperative situation implies a set of specific relations between speech act participants. In the following sections, we will consider how this is reflected in inclusive–exclusive imperative morphology.
2.1. Exclusive imperatives Though quite untypical, the exclusive imperative occurs in some languages. This form is usually called imperative because it is formally (morphologically) homogeneous with genuine imperative forms. Indeed, there are languages which possess a full paradigm of imperative forms, available in all person–number combinations. For instance, Even (Tungusic) is very rich in imperatives. It has three imperative paradigms. One of them is only available in the second person, first-person inclusive, and third person, but the other two have all person–number forms, including exclusive (Malchukov 2001). See the paradigms of the verb ga- ‘take’:
Imperative 1
Imperative 2
Imperative 3
SG 1 2 3
ga-li (ga-gan)
ga-da-k.u ga-da-j ga-da-n
ga-d’inga-v ga-nga-nri ga-d’inga.va-n
PL
ga-gar (ga-galda) ga-lra/ga-lilra (ga-gatan)
(ga-da-t/ga-davur) ga-da-k.un ga-da-vur ga-da-tan
ga-d’inga-vur ga-d’inga-vun ga-nga-san ga-d’inga.vu-tan
1 inclusive 1 exclusive 2 3
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As is clear from the table, both exclusive forms of Imperative-2 and Imperative-3 have the same marker as the rest of the imperative paradigms (-da-, -d’inga-). What do the exclusive imperative forms mean — provided they cannot have any plausible imperative interpretation? For one possible option consider evidence from Even presented in the Malchukov’s comprehensive description. The Even exclusive imperative in -da-k.un is said to be “semantically close to indicative verb forms” (Malchukov 2001: 163). The main use of this form, like that of the first-person singular, is to ask for permission or to give consent. In Malchukov’s opinion, “there is certain evidence that first-person [. . .] forms in -da-ku [1st sg.] and -da-kun [1st excl.] are currently developing into future indicative forms; for example, they may be used in interrogative sentences to ask for permission [. . .] which can be described as a deviation from their prototypical imperative function” (Malchukov 2001: 172). In our opinion, these usages of the imperative (deliberative questions and request for permission) do not necessarily indicate the development of the Even exclusive imperative into future indicative. These meanings are quite common for “central” imperative forms, such as first-person inclusive and second person (cf. Goussev 2002: 196–7). Thus, although incompatible with the core imperative meaning (a request to perform an action), exclusive forms share its peripheral meanings. These are basically deliberative questions and, for the first person, requests for permission and statements of intention. We illustrate these meanings with data from Khakas (a Turkic language of Southern Siberia). There exist three forms of the first-person non-singular imperative. Two of them are inclusive, distinguished by the number of the addressee: the form in ‑aŋ1 refers to one addressee (traditionally called dual, cf. Baskakov 1975: 189), while the form in -aŋar2 refers to several addressees (traditional “plural”). The third form, in -ibïs, is cited among various other forms of the imperative in Baskakov (ed.) (1975: 189) and Anderson (1998: 31–3). The former description does not provide any interpretation of this form, while the latter considers it as a “form of consent”. Our field work in the Sagay dialect of Khakas (see n. 3) shows that in this dialect the form in -ibïs functions as a first-person plural exclusive imperative in Even (thus, it cannot be used in the context of consent). Note, that, unlike Even, the Khakas form in -ibïs has no formal markers common with other imperative forms, which is not surprising, since the Khakas imperative paradigm has no common imperative marker at all: 1 2 3
Singular Dual inclusive -îm -aŋ -∅ -sïn
Plural inclusive -aŋ-ar -ŋar -sïn-nar
Exclusive -ibïs
We consider the form in -ibïs to be an imperative on typological grounds. As is shown below, this form has the same set of usages as the Even exclusive impera-
Inclusive imperative
tive. The interrogative context is illustrated by example (1a), while (1b) is a request for permission, and (1c) states an intention (-îps is the dialectal variant of the literary ‑ibïs):
(1) Khakas (personal fieldwork)3 a. Abakan-zar xajdî par-îps? Abakan-lat how go-imp.1pl.excl ‘How can we get to Abakan?’ b. Pis seg’e polïs pîr-îps (šibe). we you.sg.dat help give-imp.1pl.excl (part) ‘Let us help you/Do you want that we help you?’ c. Sîn ps-ke künek pîr, a pis sege sug axl you.sg we-dat bucket give and we you.sg.dat water bring pîr-îps. give-imp.1pl.excl ‘Give us a bucket, we’ll bring you water.’
Cf. a similar example from Maba (Nilo-Saharan, Maban):
(2) Maba (Trenga 1947: 117) Mi-ag né-ta-nu bur’-zi ka manél’ né! you.sg-emph have.2sg-emph-cond do-imp we hear imp.1/3 ‘If you have (something to say), say (it), we shall listen.’
The same range of meanings is characteristic of the form that can be referred to as first-person singular imperative. Because it is more widespread than the exclusive imperative, it is also usually identified on formal grounds. For instance, the first-person singular imperative is found in most Turkic languages and is usually marked in the same way as the first-person plural imperative. Compare these two forms in Balkar (fieldnotes of Nina Dobrushina): bar-aj-ym (go-imp.1-sg), bar-ajyq (go-imp.1-pl). In its most common usage, the Balkar first-person singular imperative conveys the intention to perform an action and at the same time a request for permission. In Bamana (Niger-Congo, Mande), an indispensable element of the first-person singular imperative situation “is the presence of a ‘higher-authority’ listener who is expected in some way or other to endorse the action to be performed by the speaker” (Bergelson 2001: 493). In Bamana, as well as in many other languages, a first-person singular imperative utterance suggests that “instead of actually urging himself/herself to perform the action, the speaker rather applies to the listener for a permission to do so” (ibid.). A number of Russian hortative constructions are formed with the particle davaj, derived from the verb davat’ ‘give’. This particle is used to build inclusive form of the imperative, but it also occurs in several constructions which do not have the addressee among their referents.
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(3) Russian a. Davaj ja je-j pozvon’-u. part.sg I she.dat call.fut-1sg ‘Let me call her.’ b. Davaj on je-j pozvon’-it. part.sg he she.dat call.fut-3sg ‘Let him call her.’
According to the analysis of Podlesskaya (2005), these constructions “are used in the interactive register as the speaker’s request for the hearer’s approval”, particularly to ask if the hearer has any objections. The contexts of asking for permission and giving consent, typical for Even and Khakas exclusive imperatives, are interpretable in terms of what is generally admitted to be core imperative semantics. Indeed, both situations imply the participation of the addressee; he is expected to permit the action. Thus, even those imperative forms which don’t have the addressee among their referents still include an appeal to the addressee. There is more evidence of the addressee’s role in the first person imperative situation to be discussed in Section 4.1.
2.2. Inclusive vs. exclusive The fact that some languages have an exclusive form of the imperative can be explained by a tendency to have a full imperative paradigm parallel to that of the indicative. This explanation, however, can be applied only to the languages which have an opposition of inclusive and exclusive forms in other parts of language apart from imperative (like Even). Amazingly, there are languages which mark this distinction only in the imperative. The first example is Khakas. In Khakas, neither pronouns nor possessive suffixes nor non-imperative verb forms distinguish between inclusive and exclusive meanings; see the personal pronoun paradigm and the present tense indicative forms in Baskakov (ed.) (1975: 146, 201–2):
(4) Khakas a. Pronouns Singular Plural 1 mîn pis 2 sîn sirer 3 ol olar b. present indicative forms of the verb at- ‘shoot’ Singular Plural 1 at-ča-m at-ča-bïs 2 at-ča-zïŋ at-ča-zar 3 at-ča at-ča-lar
Inclusive imperative
In the imperative, as mentioned above, there exist three forms of the first-person non-singular: 1Du inclusive (-aŋ), 1Pl inclusive (-aŋar), and 1Pl exclusive (-ibïs). Here are examples from the Sagay dialect:
(5) Khakas, Sagay dialect (personal fieldwork) a. Abakan-zar par kîl-eŋ. Abakan-all go come-imp.1du.incl ‘Let’s (you-singular and me) go to Abakan.’ b. Abakanan-zar par kîl-eler. Abakan-all go come-imp.1pl.incl ‘Let’s (you-plural and me) go to Abakan.’ c. Pis par kîl-îps Abakan-zar, a sîn mïnda xal we go come-imp.1pl.excl Abakan-all and you.sg here remain tur-Ø. stand-imp ‘We (two or more) go to Abakan, and you stay here.’
The inclusive form in the latter example is also possible, but only when the speaker changes the addressee: d. Abakan-zar par kîl-eler, a sîn mïnda xal Abakan-all go come-imp.1pl.incl and you.sg here remain tur-Ø. stand-imp ‘Let us (all) go to Abakan, and you (addressing to another person) stay here.’ Cf. another pair of examples with a similar semantic distinction:
(6) Khakas (personal fieldwork) a. Pis îb-zer par-îps šibe, am orəj. we house-all go-imp.1pl.excl part now late ‘We’ll go home, it is late already’ (for instance, when a guest is speaking to the host). b. Îb-zer par-aŋ, am orəj. house-all go-imp.1du.incl now late ‘Let’s go home, it is late already’ (a guest speaking to another guest).
The second example is West Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut). Its imperative paradigm is illustrated below (we cite the markers for intransitive verbs):
(7) West Greenlandic (Fortescue 1984: 291) a. Singular Plural 1 -la-nga Excl. -la-ta Incl. -ta 2 -git -git-si 3 -li -li-t
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Nowhere except in the imperative are inclusive and exclusive forms distinguished. Compare the set of personal suffixes of intransitive verbs in the indicative (ibid.: 288): b.
1 2 3
Singular -vunga -vutit -vuq
Plural -vugut -vusi -pput
Thus, the distinction of inclusive from exclusive forms in Khakas and West Greenlandic imperatives cannot be explained by a tendency to comply with the general pattern of person marking in the same language. We claim that the reason is that the inclusive–exclusive distinction is of more importance in the imperative than in any other part of language. It seems that a similar system with an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the imperative only exists in Nanai (Avrorin 1959–61, II: 128, 130–5). However, three languages are not many. If the inclusive–exclusive distinction is so important for the imperative, one might expect to find systems similar to those of Khakas and West Greenlandic across the world. Apparently, the absence of such systems is due to the fact that the imperative not only tends to distinguish between the exclusive and inclusive meanings but also clearly prefers the latter.
2.3. Inclusive only One can hardly imagine a language which would have no means of expressing exclusive reference, i.e. of saying ‘we (without you)’, at all. However, for the imperative, the lack of exclusives is typical. Since a request is normally directed to the addressee and may not easily be applied to the speaker or non-locutors, exclusive forms may not have a standard imperative interpretation. It thus seems a plausible hypothesis that most languages would not provide a means to convey an atypical meaning. This hypothesis is supported by our data. The inclusive interpretation of a first-person plural imperative form is always the preferred one. Moreover, in the imperative, unlike with pronouns and in other moods, most languages have no means to express the exclusive meaning at all. This type of imperative system is rather widespread.4 We cite here the example of Spanish (like most European languages, Spanish normally does not mark clusivity). In Spanish, it is impossible to use first-person plural imperative forms if the hearer is not involved in the action. Thus, the following examples are not well-formed:
(8) Spanish (César Montoliu-García, p.c.) a. *Vámonos y vosotros quedaos aquí. go.imp.1pl and you.pl remain.imp.2pl here ?‘Let us go and you (pl.) remain here.’
Inclusive imperative
b. *Hagamos la comida y tú, mientras, descansa un poco. do.imp.1pl the meat and you.sg while rest.imp.2sg a few ?‘Let us cook and you (sg.) take a rest in the meantime.’ The only way to make the first example correct is to break it into two sentences and change the addressee; one would first speak to those who are going away and then to those who stay:
(9) Spanish Vámonos. Y vosotros quedaos aquí. go.imp.1pl and you.pl remain.imp.2pl here ‘Let us go. And you remain here.’
Otherwise the present form is necessary. Note that the present tense does not impose any restrictions on the involvement or non-involvement of the addressee: (10) Spanish Nosotros nos vamos y vosotros os quedáis aquí. we refl go.prs.1pl and you.pl refl go.prs.2pl here ‘We are leaving ,and you will be staying here.’ With virtually all Spanish verbs (the only exception is ir ‘go’), the first-person plural imperative is formally identical to the subjunctive. Note that in non-imperative usages, the subjunctive is acceptable in both exclusive and inclusive contexts: (11) Spanish Nadie se cree que hagamos la comida mientras nobody refl believe.prs.3sg that do.subj.1pl the meat while tú descansas. you.sg rest.prs.2sg ‘Nobody believes that we shall cook while you will rest.’ (Cf. example (8b), in which the form hagamos — formally the same — was impossible in an exclusive context.) French has a similar system: in the imperative, forms like chantons ‘let us sing’ can only have an inclusive reading. But when used as present indicatives, the same forms can have both meanings: [nous] chantons ‘we sing with you’ or ‘without you’. In Hungarian (Finno-Ugric), the first-person plural imperative forms are only used inclusively. So, a form like men-j-ünk ‘go-imp-1pl’ means an invitation to go addressed to the hearer and cannot be used in reference to the speaker and a nonlocutor. In the latter case, the present form megy-ünk must be used.5 In Japanese, the first-person plural imperative has no exclusive interpretation: (12) Japanese6 *Watashi-tachi wa ik-oo ga anata wa koko ni noko-tte ne. I-pl top go-imp.1 but you top here dat stay-conv part ‘We will go but you stay here.’
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According to Sridhar (1990: 33–4), in Kannada (Dravidian) the first person imperative form (with the suffix -o:Na) is only possible in an inclusive meaning, at least in independent sentences. In Aghul (North-East Caucasian, Lezgic), a combination of the hortative particle ša(w) (derived from the verb ‘to come’) and the infinitive/future of the main verb is used only if the addressee is involved: (13) Aghul (Solmaz Merdanova, p.c.) ša(w) xin meʕni q’-a-s(-e) part we.incl song make-ipf-inf-(fut) ‘Let us sing!’ According to Frajzyngier (2002: 274), in Hdi (Chadic) second person imperatives have no overt subjects, while other forms of the imperative are used with pronouns. Frajzyngier notes that “the only subject pronouns that can be added to the imperative are first-person dual inclusive and first-person plural inclusive”. From this it follows that the first-person exclusive is impossible (together with third person imperatives).7 In Russian, the future indicative form is normally used in the first-person plural imperative meaning. Although it is usually interpreted inclusively, some speakers allow exclusive interpretation. Apart from the future indicative, there exists a dedicated first-person plural imperative form, which is used for several addressees (or for one addressee in polite register). It is formed by addition of the second-person plural ending -te to the first-person plural future (=first-person plural imperative) form: pojdem-te ‘let’s go (we all)’. This form is always inclusive; examples like (14) are ungrammatical: (14) Russian *Pojd-em-te, a vy ostavaj-te-s’. go.fut-1pl-2pl and you.pl remain.imp-2pl-refl ?‘Let’s go and you remain (here).’ Finally, let us cite the examples of Negidal (Tungusic) and Limbu (Tibeto-Burman). Unlike the languages mentioned so far in this section, these two distinguish inclusive and exclusive forms both in pronouns and in verbs. Again, the imperative is an exception: it has no exclusive forms. Thus in Limbu, in which exclusive and inclusive forms are distinguished in the first-person dual and plural indicative, only the inclusive forms can drop their subject prefix (which is the only means to form imperatives; van Driem 1987: 184). For Negidal, see the paradigms of the present indicative tense and of the imperative (the verb va- ‘kill’; Tsintsius 1997: 198):
Inclusive imperative
(15) Negidal a. Present Indicative Singular 1 vā-m Excl. Incl. 2 vā-s 3 vā-ya-n b. Imperative Singular 1 vā-xta Excl. Incl. 2 vā-xal 3 vā-ŋin
Plural vā-ya-vun vā-ya-p vā-sun vā-ya Plural — vā-ŋaj vā-xan vā-ŋi
In other words, languages usually distinguish between inclusive and exclusive imperatives, but most of them do so simply by not having exclusive imperatives at all.
2.4. No inclusive–exclusive distinction There is one more possible type of first-person plural semantics. The so-called “neutral”, or “unified”, first-person plural marker (which can convey both inclusive and exclusive meanings) is widespread in non-imperatives (108 languages in the sample of Cysouw 2001): “The meaning of a morpheme like the English ‘we’ is best characterised as a group of more than one person, including the present speaker, but unmarked as to the other persons in the group” (Cysouw 2001: 75). In imperatives, the “unified” type is very rare. We know of three languages which are not sensitive to the involvement vs. non-involvement of the addressee in first-person plural imperative forms; see below in this section. Compare the following Nganasan (Samoyedic) example from a legend: (16) Nganasan Ŋəmsu-muʔ bətə-bü-tü, əmə heliə kəi-təə kubu meat-1pl remain-cond-3sg this other side-adj.loc hide.gen təhuəd’aʔku-təni̮ ŋimiaʔ-kuə-mi̮ʔ . . . Tənə ŋimiaʔ-kə-tə, remnant-loc drag-imp.fut-1pl.o you.sg drag-imp.fut-2sg.o ńi-sy tonuntə-ʔ . . . Mi taa-j tonuʔ-kuə-mi. neg-inf whip-cn we.du reindeer-acc.pl whip.up-imp.fut-1du.o ‘If some meat remains, we‘ll drag it on the side of this hide . . . You drag (the meat) without whipping (the reindeer). . . We two, we’ll whip the reindeer.’ There are three brothers here who have just killed a wild reindeer. The elder brother decides how its carcass (if any of it remains after they will have eaten) will be brought home. First, he addresses both of his interlocutors, explaining to them the way in which three of them will bring the meat. He uses the first-person plural form;
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if he meant himself and only one of his younger brothers, the dual would be appropriate. Then, he addresses only the youngest (this is known from the context): it is he who will drag the meat, and the two elder brothers (note the dual ending) will whip the reindeers. Here we see that the same form (except for the usual difference of dual and plural) is used first in the inclusive meaning (‘we all’) and then in the exclusive one (‘we two without you’). An example in which the second person and the first person imperatives are used in the same sentence is (17); compare the inadmissibility of such contexts in Spanish (8) and Russian (14) above: (17) Nganasan Təə ďaδikü mi̮-ŋi̮-ri, tə, mii büü-gü-ni. that.gen to go-imp.2–du.s part we.du leave-imp.1–du.r ‘You (two children) go that way, and we (the speaker and his wife) are leaving.’ Similarly, in Upper Chuvash (Turkic) the same imperative form can be used in both exclusive and inclusive contexts: (18) Upper Chuvash (personal fieldwork) a. Xuzana kaj-ar! Kazan go-imp.1pl ‘Let’s go to Kazan!’ b. Ese jaška š ji, epir parank š ji-er you.sg soup eat.imp.2sg we potato eat-imp.1pl ‘Eat the soup, and we (exclusive) will eat potato.’ c. — Man-ăn ăn-a čin-es kil j-mes-t j I he-acc call-part.fut want-neg-prs.3sg ‘— I don’t want to invite him.’ — Epir ăn-a čin-er. we he-acc call-imp.1pl ‘— Let us invite him then!’ In Balkar (Turkic), the first-person plural imperative form allows both inclusive and exclusive interpretations: (19) Balkar (personal fieldwork) a. Üge bar-ajyq! home go-imp.1pl ‘Let’s go home!’ b. Biz üge bar-ajyq, sen mïnda qal. we home go-imp.1pl you.sg here stay.imp ‘We (exclusive) shall go home, and you, you stay here.’ Note that none of these languages distinguishes exclusive and inclusive forms in pronouns or non-imperative verb forms.8
Inclusive imperative
Nganasan, Chuvash, and Balkar exemplify the rare type of language whose firstperson plural imperative allows the exclusive interpretation as well as the inclusive one. Nevertheless, the exclusive usage is so rare and atypical that it is not easily found among the examples in descriptive grammars. The first-person plural imperative form is generally understood as an appeal to the addressee, and other meanings are not likely.
3. The preference for inclusivity The following is a list of linguistic types according to how a language treats the inclusive–exclusive opposition in the imperative and elsewhere. • The language has both inclusive and exclusive imperatives, and clusivity occurs elsewhere, e.g. in pronouns (Even). • The language has an inclusive imperative only, and clusivity occurs elsewhere in the language (Kannada, Aghul). • The language has both inclusive and exclusive imperatives but lacks clusivity elsewhere (Khakas, West Greenlandic). • The language has an inclusive imperative only and lacks clusivity elsewhere (Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese). • The language has just the first-person plural imperative used both in- and exclusively, and lacks clusivity elsewhere (Nganasan, Chuvash, Balkar). What we did not find are languages which have an opposition of inclusive/exclusive in pronouns or non-imperative verbs but do not distinguish clusivity in the imperative. Presumably, they do not exist. Our hypothesis is that the inclusiveexclusive distinction can not be absent in the imperative but present elsewhere. The inclusive bias of the imperative is an effect of core imperative semantics. In all tense–aspect–mood categories except in imperative, the opposition between inclusive and exclusive (including first-person singular; cf. the bold line in Figure 1) meanings is independent of the TAM categories. In We write or We walk, the meaning of the present tense and that of the indicative mood remain the same whether we write or walk with or without the hearer, so there are no particular reasons to mark this distinction if it is not marked in the language anyway.
1Sg
1Pl.excl 1Pl.incl
2Sg
2Pl
3Sg
3Pl
Figure 1.
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For the imperative, this opposition becomes crucial. As we said, the 1Sg and 1Pl exclusive forms cannot be used in the standard imperative meaning. Roughly, we can say that there can be no imperative above the bold line in the Figure 1.
4. Counting the addressees The centrality of the role of the addressee in the imperative has another reflection in the first-person plural imperative. The grammatical meaning that is most frequently distinguished in the forms of first-person plural imperatives is the number of addressees. Below, we consider the semantic and formal varieties of the first-person plural imperative which deal with the number of addressees.9
4.1. Number distinctions in the first-person plural imperative Apart from first-person plural imperative, many grammars mention the form of first-person dual imperative. An example is the African language Dogon (isolate) (Plungian 1995), in which the first-person inclusive imperative distinguishes between plural and dual forms: (20) Dogon (Plungian 1995: 27) a. yaa-mεŋ go-imp.1pl ‘let’s go!’ (you-plural and me) b. yaa-mɔ go-imp.1du ‘let’s go!’ (you-singular and me) In this section, we show that what is referred to as an opposition of dual and plural is more likely to be an opposition of minimal vs. augmented inclusives.10 The minimal inclusive (= dual) imperative expresses exhortation to one addressee, thus referring to a group of two people, the speaker and the addressee. The augmented inclusive (=plural) imperative expresses exhortation to the speaker and several addressees or one or more addressees plus non-locutor(s). Minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives are opposed to basic inclusive imperatives, which do not distinguish the number of referents. An example of a language with a construction of the latter type is Aghul, which expresses the first-person plural imperative by a combination of the particle ša(w) with the bare stem of the main verb or its infinitive. This construction is used as an invitation to one or more persons, and there is no grammatical means to make the construction less ambiguous; see (21)).
Inclusive imperative Table 1. Semantic types of inclusive imperatives Basic inclusive imperative Minimal (=dual) inclusive imperative Augmented inclusive imperative
The speaker + the addressee(s) / the addressee(s) and non-locutor(s) The speaker + the addressee The speaker + the addressees / the addressee(s) and non-locutor(s)
(21) Aghul (Solmaz Merdanova, p.c.) ša(w) xin meʕni q’-a-s(-e) part we.incl song make-ipf-inf-(fut) ‘Let us sing!’ (you-singular or you-plural and me) Different types of inclusive imperatives are presented in Table 1. The contrast of minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives is very widespread across languages. Many languages have minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives along with basic imperative, thus having three forms of inclusive imperative. In this case, the basic inclusive appears to be formally less complex than minimal and augmented inclusives, which are derived from the basic inclusive. For instance, Hebrew uses a future indicative form with first-person plural imperative meaning: (22) Hebrew (Malygina 2001: 274) nelex go.fut.1pl ‘Let’s go!’ (you-plural or you-singular and me) This form can be modified with the particle bo’, which is an imperative of the verb ‘to come’. In the singular, this yields a minimal inclusive imperative, while in the plural it forms an augmented inclusive imperative: (23) Hebrew (Malygina 2001: 274) a. bo’ nelex come.imp.2sg.m go.fut.1pl ‘Let’s go!’ (you-singular and me) b. bo’-u nelex come.imp.2m-pl go.fut.1pl ‘Let’s go!’ (you-plural and me) Russian is another language that derives inclusives distinguished as minimal vs. augmented from a basic inclusive. In Russian, several patterns of inclusive imperative are present. Just as in Hebrew, the basic inclusive is expressed by a present or future indicative: (24) Russian Pojd-em! go.fut-1pl ‘Let’s go!’ (you-singular or you-plural and me)
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Another possibility is a combination of the particle davaj (< second person imperative of the verb davat’ ‘to give’) and the future, present, or infinitive of the main verb. The singular and plural forms of this particle denote minimal and augmented inclusive, respectively: (25) Russian a. Davaj pojd-em! part.2sg go.fut-1pl ‘Let’s go!’ (you-singular and me) b. Davaj-te pojd-em! part-2pl go.fut-1pl ‘Let’s go!’ (you-plural and me) Apart from constructions with the particle davaj(te), the Russian augmented inclusive can also be formed by attaching a second-person plural marker to the first-person plural of a present or future indicative verb. Compare (26a) and (26b): (26) Russian a. Pojd-em-te! go.fut-1pl-2pl ‘Let us go!’ (you-plural and me) b. Idi-te! go-2pl ‘Go!’ (you-plural) This form, however, is nowadays restricted to a number of verbs — first of all idti ‘go’ and its derivative pojti ‘go, leave’. Though pojdem-te formally matches pojdem, they do not match semantically. While the first is an augmented inclusive form, the latter is not specialised to the expression of a minimal inclusive meaning only. It can be addressed to one or more persons, though the second usage is already nontypical for it. We suppose that this form shows a preceding stage of grammaticalisation. We would expect that pojdem is likely to shift to the expression of an appeal to a single addressee only, thus developing into the minimal inclusive category. The opposition of minimal vs. augmented inclusive imperatives is very common across languages. Minimal and augmented forms are often formally derived from a basic imperative, while the opposite direction of grammaticalisation is not observed. The frequency of this opposition is much higher among imperatives than among personal pronouns and non-imperative personal affixes. According to Michael Cysouw’s data, the opposition of minimal vs. augmented inclusive in nonimperatives is found only in 24 languages out of 257 (Cysouw 2001: 344). Indeed, there are many languages which distinguish minimal and augmented forms in the first person imperative only. That is the case with Dogon, Awa Pit (South-American, Barbacoan), Khakas (Turkic), and many other languages. They have neither duals nor a minimal/augmented opposition outside inclusive imperative forms.
Inclusive imperative
The question arises, why is the opposition of minimal and augmented inclusives so typical for imperatives? By uttering a second person imperative, the speaker tries to cause somebody to perform an action. This somebody is the subject of this action. So, the number expressed in the imperative form shows the quantity of causees and the quantity of subjects at the same time, because all causees are subjects and vice versa. The first-person plural is the only imperative form in which the number of causees does not match the number of subjects. Causees are addressees (or sometimes addressees and non-locutors), but the action has to be performed by them together with the speaker. The number of subjects is always greater than that of causees. Which number is to be coded in the first-person plural imperative, then? Most European languages (such as English and French) indicate only the number of subjects; so English let’s go can refer to two persons (i.e. one causee) or more than two (two or more causees). However, as we have seen, many languages (e.g. Russian) indicate both number values: that of the subjects (by use of the non-singular form of the verb—pojd-em ‘go.fut-1pl’)—and that of the causees (by use of special markers—davaj pojd-em ‘part.2sg go.fut-1pl’, davaj-te pojd-em ‘part-2pl go.fut‑1pl’). Remarkably, a similar opposition is found even in first-person singular imperative, that is, in the form which does not have addressee among its referents. Cf. these example from Russian: (27) Russian a. Davaj-ka ja je-mu pozvon’-u. part.sg-part.imp I he-dat call.fut-1sg ‘Let me call him’ (an appeal to one addressee). b. Davaj-te-ka ja je-mu pozvon’-u. part-2pl-part.imp I he.dat call.fut-1sg ‘Let me call him’ (an appeal to several addressees). As discussed above (cf. Section 2.1), although the addressee is neither the subject nor the causee of the first-person singular imperative, the addressee still plays an important role in the situation which is denoted by this form. Thus, the number of the causees turns out to be so crucial for the imperative that it is reflected in the opposition of minimal vs. augmented forms.
4.2. Formal patterns of inclusive imperatives In this section, we consider inclusive imperatives of different types from a formal standpoint. Our main interest is the contrast between minimal and augmented imperatives (Section 4.2.1). In Section 4.2.2 we discuss the difference between minimal augmented imperative systems and dual/plural inclusive imperative systems, and in Section 4.2.3 we consider the means of expressing the basic inclusive imperative in comparison with minimal and augmented inclusives.
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4.2.1. Minimal inclusive imperative vs. augmented inclusive imperative
Cross-linguistically, minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives occur as both morphological and syntactic categories. As mentioned above, the most common pattern of correspondence between minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives is the derivation of the augmented inclusive from the minimal. The Northern Turkic languages Tuvan, Shor, Altai, and Khakas are often described as distinguishing between dual and plural in the first person imperative only (cf. Baskakov (ed.) 1975: 189). While the “dual” (=minimal) inclusive imperative has a morphologically non-transparent marker, the plural inclusive is formed as a combination of the minimal with the marker of plurality (‑lar/-nar/-tar), which is common for all verbal paradigm as well as for nominals:
(28) Altai Singular 1 -ajyn 2 -Ø/-gyn 3 -zyn
Dual Plural -aalyk/-alyk -aalyk-tar/-alyk-tar -yg-ar -zyn/-zyn-dar
(29) Khakas Singular Dual Plural 1 -оm -aŋ -aŋ-ar 2 -Ø -y-ŋar 3 -syn -syn-nar Other Turkic languages, for example Turkmen and Yakut, derive the augmented inclusive from the minimal by appending the marker of the second-person plural. Like Tuvan, Shor, Altai, and Khakas, they distinguish dual and plural in the first person imperative only. The Turkmen imperative affixes are cited below: (30) Turkmen Singular Dual Plural -aly -aly-ŋ 1 - ajyn 2 -Ø/-gyn -yŋ 3 -syn -syn-lar In Yakut, there are two formal types of augmented inclusive marker, which are distributed dialectally: -yaγ-yŋ and -yax-aj-yŋ. Both of them are based on the minimal inclusive form and contain the marker of the second-person plural: (31) Yakut Singular Dual Plural 1 -yym -yax -yaγ-yŋ/-yax-aj-yŋ 2 -Ø -yŋ 3 -dyn -dyn-nar Note that Tuvan, Shor, Altai, and Khakas have no special marker of the second-person plural in the imperative paradigm. The marker -lar/-nar/-tar is the only marker
Inclusive imperative
of plurality used in imperatives in these languages, whereas Turkmen and Yakut have two plural affixes in imperatives (-lar/-nar in the third person and -ŋ/-yŋ in the second person). A tentative implication can be stated: when there is a choice between different plural markers it is the second-person marker that is chosen for the augmented inclusive imperative. The minimal/augmented inclusives opposition is found outside Turkic languages as well. Luvale (Bantoid) suffixes the second-person plural pronoun to the minimal inclusive, thus forming an augmented inclusive imperative. The minimal inclusive is identical to the first-person plural subjunctive. “When addressing another one, the simple subjunctive is used, but when addressing a number, the second-person plural absolute pronoun enu is suffixed” (Horton 1949: 130): (32) Luvale (Horton 1949: 130) a. Tw-imb-e mw-aso. 2sg-sing-subj cl-song ‘Let us sing a song’ (you-singular and me) b. Tw-imb-enu mw-aso. 2sg-sing-subj.2pl cl-song ‘Let us sing a song’ (you-plural and me) Note, that enu functions as a pluraliser in the second person imperative as well: (33) Luvale (Horton 1949: 114) a. linga do ‘do!’ (you-singular) b. ling-ĕ`nu do-2pl ‘do!’ (you-plural) In Kanuri (Saharan), as in Luvale, the minimal inclusive imperative is identical to the first-person plural form of the subjunctive mood. Apparently, the augmented inclusive imperative is formed on the base of the minimal inclusive by appending the second-person plural marker (Hutchison 1976: 53). See examples of imperative forms of the verb ‘to go’ below: (34) Kanuri (Hutchison 1976) Inclusive minimal lèn-y-ê augmented lèn-y-ówó
2nd p. singular lèn-é plural lèn-ówó
More often, the contrast of minimal and augmented inclusives is expressed syntactically, by means of auxiliary words. To express a minimal inclusive, Hebrew, Russian, and Chuvash use an auxiliary word marked as a second-person singular imperative. An augmented inclusive is expressed by means of a second-person plural imperative.
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The imperative of the verb ‘to go’ forms minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives in Hebrew (Malygina 2001: 146). The combination of the basic inclusive and the second-person singular imperative of the verb ‘to go’ is used for the minimal inclusive, while the augmented inclusive imperative is expressed by the basic inclusive with the second-person plural imperative of the same verb (see examples (23a, b)). In a similar manner, minimal/augmented inclusives are expressed by imperatives of the verb ‘to give’ in Russian. Those are added to the basic inclusive expressed by the present or future indicative or to the infinitive: (35) Russian a. Spoj-em! sing.fut-1pl ‘Let’s sing!’ (you-singular or you-plural and me) b. Davaj spoj-em! part.2sg sing.fut-1pl ‘Let’s sing!’ (you-singular and me) c. Davaj-te spoj-em! part-2pl sing.fut-1pl ‘Let’s sing!’ (you-plural and me) Three inclusive imperatives are distinguished in Chuvash. Apart from the basic inclusive imperative (36a), there are minimal and augmented inclusives, which are expressed syntactically by the particle ajda (36b, c). This particle occurs in two forms: with zero marking to express singular and with the second-person plural ending to express plural. (36) Chuvash (personal fieldwork) a. Kunda lar-ar. here sit.imp-1pl ‘Let’s sit here!’ (you-singular or you-plural and me) b. Ajda kunda lar-ar. part.sg here sit.imp-1pl ‘Let’s sit here!’ (you-singular and me) c. Ajd-âr kunda lar-ar. part-2pl here sit.imp-1pl ‘Let’s sit here!’ (you-plural and me) This particle is not specialised for first person; it can be used with the second person imperative as well:
d. e.
Ajda kunda lar. part.sg here sit.imp.2sg ‘Sit here!’ (you-singular) Ajd-âr kunda lar-âr. part-2pl here sit.imp-2pl ‘Sit here!’ (you-plural)
Inclusive imperative
The same opposition is found in Éwé (Niger-Kongo, Kwa). While the main verb is inflected for a first-person plural subject, the auxiliary occurs in the singular or plural form of the second person imperative, depending on the number of addressees: (37) Éwé (Agbodjo & Litvinov 2001: 395) a. na mí-yi give we-go ‘Let’s go!’ (you-singular and me) b. mi-na mí-yi you.pl-give we-go ‘Let’s go!’ (you-plural and me) In Luo (Nilotic), the contrast between minimal and augmented inclusives is expressed syntactically. The Luo minimal inclusive imperative is identical to the second-person singular imperative, marking the distinction only with a pronoun: (38) Luo (Schafer) a. riNgí run ‘Run!’ (you-singular) b. wa riNgí we run ‘Let’s run!’ (you-singular and me) The augmented inclusive combines the second-person plural imperative and the first-person plural pronoun: (39) Luo a. riNgí uru run pl ‘Run!’ (you-plural) b. wa riNg uru we run pl ‘Let us run!’ (you-plural and me) Thus, in Luo the person of the imperative construction is distinguished only by a pronoun, while plural/augmented number is expressed with the marker of plurality uru, which is opposed to zero in the singular/minimal. In all the languages discussed above, the augmented inclusive imperative is derived from the minimal inclusive by means of a plural or second-person plural marker. In the languages to be discussed below, the augmented inclusive is not derived from the minimal; however, its morphological marking is similar. The South American language Awa Pit (Barbacoan) has two inclusive forms, which are referred to as first-person dual and plural imperatives. However, Awa Pit has no duals, either in verbal forms or in nominals (Curnow 1997: 244–9). Below, we cite the first- and second-person imperative affixes:
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(40) Awa Pit Singular Minimal Augmented 1 -tu -pay -sh-ayŋ 2 -ti -t-ayŋ While the first-person singular and minimal inclusive affixes cannot be easily segmented, the first-person plural contains the marker ‑ayŋ, which is also used in the second-person plural. Although the minimal inclusive does not serve as a base for the augmented inclusive, the augmented inclusive marker can be analysed into shand the plural marker -ayŋ. In Dogon, not only is it the case that the augmented inclusive contains the marker of plurality, but also that the minimal inclusive has a singular marker (Plungian 1995: 27): (41) Dogon Singular Minimal Augmented 1 — -mɔ -mεŋ 2 -∅ -ŋ 3 3Sg pronoun + verb-mɔ 3Pl pronoun + verb-mεŋ An unusual grammaticalisation of inclusive imperatives is found in Makah (North American, Wakashan) and Kabardian (North-West Caucasian). Inclusive imperatives are formed as a second person imperative with a causative marker, a second person subject marker, and a first-person plural object marker: (42) Makah (Matthew Davidson, p.c.) a. čaqšiƛudi’cux̣ čaq-šiƛ=’ap=’idi’cux̣ w push-mom=caus=imp.2sg/1pl ‘Let’s push it!’ (you-singular and me) The second person imperative with a first-person plural object has no causative marker:
b.
čaqšiƛidi’cux̣ čaq-šiƛ=’aƛ=’idi’cux̣ w push-mom=imp.2sg/1pl ‘Push us!’ (you-singular)
Makah makes a distinction between one addressee and several addressees by means of a singular or plural subject marker:
c.
čaqšiƛudo’wacux̣ čaq-šiƛ=’ap=’ido’wacux̣ w push-mom=caus=imp.2pl/1pl ‘Let’s push it!’ (you-plural and me)
Inclusive imperative
Compare:
d.
čaqšiqƛido’wacux̣ čaq-šiƛ=’aq=’ido’wacux̣ w push-mom-imp.2pl/1pl ‘Push us!’ (you-plural)
The same construction for the inclusive imperative is found in Circassian languages, e.g. in Kabardian: (43) Kabardian (Kumaxov 1971: 239) a. dy-ʁa-k’we 1pl-caus-go ‘Let’s go!’ (you-singular and me) b. dy-v-ʁa-k’we 1pl-2pl-caus-go ‘Let’s go!’ (you-plural and me) That is, the inclusive imperative forms are almost identical to the second-person plural imperative of the causative verb; the only difference is the absence of a pronoun in the inclusive imperative construction: (44) Kabardian a. we dy-ʁa-k’we you.sg 1pl-caus-go ‘permit us to go’ b. fe dy-v-ʁa-k’we you.pl 1pl-2pl-caus-go ‘permit us to go’ Thus, the minimal inclusive imperative in Makah and Kabardian contains the second-person singular marker, while the augmented inclusive has a second-person plural marker. Note that the exotic formal pattern of inclusive imperative observed in Makah and Kabardian is just the inflectional analogue to syntactical constructions found in many languages of the world, such as English let’s go (lit. ‘permit us to go’). The parallel is even more clear with the Russian constructions Davaj spojem, Davajte spojem (35b, c), which contain the semantically bleached causative verb inflected for second-person singular or second-person plural, while the main verb contains the first-person plural ending. The observed formal patterns of minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives are summarised in Table 2. Thus, in all languages we have considered, the augmented imperative contains some sort of plural marker. Moreover, many of them use the marker of the secondperson plural or, in case of analytical constructions, the auxiliary in the form of the second-person plural imperative.
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202 Nina Dobrushina and Valentin Goussev Table 2. Formal patterns of minimal vs. augmented inclusive imperatives
Tuvan, Shor, Khakas, Altai Turkmen, Yakut Luvale, Kanuri Russian, Chuvash, Hebrew Éwé, Luo Awa Pit Dogon Makah, Kabardian
Minimal inclusive
Augmented inclusive
dedicated* dedicated 1pl subjunctive basic inclusive + imp.2sg 1pl verb form + imp.2sg dedicated sg 1pl.subj + 2sg.obj causative
minimal + pl minimal + 2pl 1pl subjunсtive + 2pl basic inclusive + imp.2pl 1pl verb form + imp.2pl dedicated + pl pl 1pl.subj + 2pl.obj causative
* Non-analysable affixes are considered dedicated.
The minimal inclusive imperative is often morphologically primary, serving as a base for the augmented inclusive. It is marked either as first-person plural or as firstperson plural plus second-person singular imperative. The Dogon minimal inclusive contains a singular marker common for all persons.
4.2.2. Minimal/augmented vs. dual/plural
The opposition of minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives is often described as an opposition of dual and plural numbers. Indeed, languages which have a dual/ plural opposition somewhere outside the imperative paradigm distinguish between the same semantic types of inclusive imperatives as the languages without dual number. That is, the first-person dual imperative refers to a group of two persons which contains one hearer and is thus semantically identical to the minimal inclusive. Still, the difference between minimal/augmented and dual/plural inclusive imperative systems is displayed in their paradigmatic and formal structure. For instance, the Trans-New Guinea language Kobon has dual number in the whole verbal paradigm, not excepting the imperative (Davies 1981: 23). It has the following affixes for the imperative: (45) Kobon Singular Dual Plural -ul -un 1 -ɨn/-in 2 -Ø -ɨl -im 3 -aŋ -ɨl -laŋ The morphological structure of the first-person forms is as follows. The marker -lstands for dual, and -n- stands for first-person plural (similar number markers are attested in the first-person non-singular independent pronouns hol ‘we.two’, hon ‘we.plural’). It seems likely that -u- codes first-person non-singular. However, the first-person dual imperative is just as complex as the first-person plural imperative. The dual does not serve as a base for the plural, and the first-person plural contains neither a marker of second-person plural nor a plural marker observed elsewhere in the verbal paradigm.
Inclusive imperative 203
Likewise, the opposition of dual and plural verbal forms is found in Yupik ( Eskimo-Aleut) in all verbal forms, including the imperative (Menovščikov & Vaxtin 1990: 105). The imperative has a particular set of markers, not identical to any of the indicative sets. Though the markers of dual and plural inclusive imperatives have a lot in common, neither of the two is derived from the other, nor does the plural inclusive contain the marker of plurality. (46) Yupik Singular Dual Plural 1 -liaŋa -λtuŋ -λta 2 -Ø, -i, -tyn -tyk 3 -li -lik -lit In Fijian (Oceanic), Warembori (Lower Mamberamo), and Indonesian (Malayic), inclusive imperatives distinguish between one and several addressees by use of firstperson dual and plural pronouns, respectively: (47) Warembori (Mark Donohue, p.c.) a. kui ki-ra 1du 1nsg-go ‘let’s go!’ (you-singular and me) b. ki ki-ra 1pl 1nsg-go ‘let’s go!’ (you-plural and me) Thus, the same semantic opposition (one addressee vs. several addressees) has different formal patterns depending on whether the language has or does not have dual number as a grammatical category. Languages with dual number have no clear formal correlation between minimal and augmented inclusives. The augmented inclusive is not derived from the minimal, nor does it contain the second-person plural marker. From the point of view of formal structure, ‘dual’ languages treat the inclusive that refers to the speaker and one addressee as dual, thus counting the total number of referents. Languages which have no dual number tend to grammaticalise the augmented inclusive as plural and the minimal inclusive as singular (Dogon, Luo, Makah, Kabardian) or as an unmarked form (Tuvan, Shor, Khakas, Altai, Turkmen, Yakut, Awa Pit). What counts in these languages is not the total number of referents, but the number of addressees (one vs. several). The best way to account for this typology is to distinguish between dual/plural and minimal/augmented inclusive imperative systems.
4.2.3. The basic inclusive imperative
What are the formal patterns of the basic inclusive imperative, that is, the inclusive imperative which does not distinguish the number of addressees? The basic inclusive imperative is the most common type of inclusive imperative in the languages of the world. There are languages which have the basic inclusive
204 Nina Dobrushina and Valentin Goussev
imperative only, thus having no grammatical possibility of expressing the number of the addressees. See the Aghul example above (21) and the Bagvalal (North-East Caucasian, Avar-Andic) example below: (48) Bagvalal (Dobrušina 2001: 331) čã s’a-rā-Ra tea drink-pot.inf-part ‘Let’s drink tea’ (you singular or you-plural and me) Other languages have both basic and minimal/augmented inclusive imperatives. All languages of this type that we are aware of express the basic inclusive imperative morphologically and the minimal/augmented inclusive imperative syntactically: (49) Balkar (Turkic) (personal fieldwork) a. üge bar-ajyq home go-imp.1pl ‘Let’s go home!’ (you-singular or you-plural and me) b. kel üge bar-ajyq part home go-imp.1pl ‘Let’s go home!’ (you-singular and me) c. kel-igiz üge bar-ajyq part-2pl home go-imp.1pl ‘Let’s go home!’ (you-plural and me) The basic inclusive imperative is often a dedicated morphological form with a portmanteau marker, which makes it impossible to speculate about its origin: (50) Buriat (Mongolian) (Sanžeev et al. (eds) 1962: 249) jaba-ja go-imp.1pl ‘Let’s go!’ (you-singular or you-plural and me) (51) Japanese (Alpatov 2001: 113) Kumaso no kuni kara kaet-ta otoko ni kampaish-iyoo Kumaso attr land from return-past man iobj drink-imp.1sg/pl ‘Let’s drink to a man who came back from the land of Kumaso!’ If there are no dedicated affixes for basic inclusive, the most common means to express this meaning is in the form of a first-person plural future indicative: (52) Udmurt (Finno-Ugric) (Andrej Šluinskij, p.c.) Myn-o-m sik-e. go-fut-1pl forest-ill ‘Let’s go to the forest!’
Inclusive imperative
(53) Hunzib (North-East Caucasian, Tsezic) (van den Berg 1995: 86, 241) m-eL’-a hpl-go-intent ‘Let’s go!’ What is important, among the forms of basic inclusive that we have observed, is that we found neither forms with a second-person plural marker (like an augmented imperative) nor forms with a singular marker (like a minimal inclusive). The exceptions are Finnish and Bagirmi (Central Sudanic), and the first is so only synchronically. Finnish has an obsolete form of the basic inclusive imperative (which is replaced by the passive indicative in contemporary Finnish). This obsolete inclusive imperative is “formed by appending the markers of the imperative and the second-person plural to the stem followed by the first-person plural ending” (Sulkala & Karjalainen 1995: 23). Cf. (54a) to (54b–d): (54) Finnish a. laula-kaa-mme! sing-2pl.imp-1pl ‘Let’s sing!’ (you-plural or you-singular and me) b. laula-Ø! sing-imp ‘Sing!’ c. laula-kaa! sing-2pl.imp ‘Sing!’ (you-plural) d. laula-mme sing-1pl ‘[we] sing’ At first, these forms appear to be morphologically identical to Luvale or Kanuri augmented inclusive imperatives, but the order of affixes is unusual: in augmented inclusives that we have analysed, the second-person marker follows the marker of the first-person plural, but not vice versa. Synchronically, the morphological analysis suggested by Sulkala & Karjalainen is perfectly correct, but the history of these forms shows another direction of development. According to Hakulinen (1953: 223–4), -k- was a marker of imperative forms of all persons and numbers. Having been lost in the second-person singular, it remains in other forms. Thus, -kaa- is not the marker of the second-person plural imperative but of the imperative independently of person. The diachronic analysis of the first-person plural imperative should be laula-kaa-mme ‘sing-imp-1pl’. That means that, diachronically, the Finnish first-person plural imperative form does not contain the second-person plural marker.
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Another example of the use of second-person plural in the marking of inclusive imperatives is found in Bagirmi (Central Sudanic). Bagirmi uses the bare stem for the second-person singular imperative and the marker -ki for the second-person plural; this is a common second-person plural marker in all Bagirmi verbal forms: (55) Bagirmi (Stevenson 1969: 85) a. sa ‘Eat!’ (you-singular) b. sa-ki eat-2pl ‘Eat!’ (you-plural) The Bagirmi first-person plural imperative is formed by combining the first-person plural pronoun with the second-person plural imperative form of the verb:
c. je sa-ki we eat-2pl ‘Let’s eat!’
Compare this with the first-person plural indicative form:
d. je sa 1pl eat ‘we ate’
Bagirmi is the only example of a language that uses the second-person marker in the basic inclusive imperative that we are aware of.
4.3. Counting the addressees: conclusions In Section 4, we observed formal patterns of inclusive imperatives. Three semantic types of inclusive imperatives were considered. The basic inclusive refers to the speaker, to the addressee(s), and, optionally, to non-locutor(s). The minimal inclusive refers to a group including the speaker and one hearer, while the augmented inclusive refers to a group including the speaker and the hearer(s) and/or non-locutor(s) with a total number of referents greater than two. The opposition of minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives was found to be very common in the languages of the world. We analysed the formal structures of basic, minimal, and augmented inclusives, and we show that different formal means are typical for these categories. Basic and minimal inclusives are similar in that both of them use a portmanteau marker or a first-person plural marker. This commonality seems to be a natural consequence of the fact that the minimal inclusive often develops from the basic inclusive. However, minimal inclusive marking can involve certain markers which are not found in the basic inclusive, such as the singular marker. The syntactic minimal inclusive is often a combination of a first-person plural form with the secondperson singular imperative of an auxiliary.
Inclusive imperative 207
The augmented inclusive is usually built as a form of a minimal inclusive provided with a (second person) plural marker. Notably, the common plural marker is used in those languages which have no dedicated marker for second-person plural (Tuvan, Shor, Khakas, Altai). Another way to build augmented inclusives is to combine the first-person plural imperative with the auxiliary in the second-person plural imperative form. The marker of plurality also appears in those augmented inclusive forms which are not derived from the minimal inclusive. The use of a singular or second-person singular marker in the minimal inclusive and a plural or second-person plural marker in the augmented inclusive shows that number marking in these forms indicates the number of addressees, not the total number of all referents. On the other hand, languages with dual number grammaticalise an appeal to the speaker plus one hearer as a dual, and an appeal to the speaker plus several hearers as a plural.
5. Conclusion It has been observed about pronominal marking in general that there are very few languages which have an inclusive but do not have an exclusive. This observation is, however, inapplicable to imperatives. As we show in Section 2, most languages are reported to have an inclusive first person imperative only, and some other ‘prefer’ an inclusive reading. Only a few have a specified means to express an exclusive imperative. We have argued that this follows from the nature of the imperative speech act. In an imperative situation, the addressee plays a central role in that he is supposed to carry out an intended action (for the second person imperative) or to act as a mediator to cause someone else to carry it out (for the third person imperative). The exclusive, on the other hand, refers to the speaker and the speaker’s group, so that an exclusive imperative would refer to an action to be carried out by the speaker and his group. In such a situation, the addressee cannot even serve as a mediator. Consequently, the exclusive (together with the first-person singular) is the least probable imperative meaning, so that exclusive categories formally homogeneous to the imperative paradigm are extremely rare. Moreover, even when an ‘exclusive imperative’ is present in a language, a thorough analysis shows that consideration of the addressee continues to play an important role in its interpretation. Typical usages of the exclusive imperative are asking for the addressee’s permission or expressing consent to the addressee’s demand, both of which introduce the addressee as a person on whom the intended action strongly depends. Considering the opposition of inclusive vs. exclusive in imperatives, we discovered that there are no languages that have an opposition of inclusive–exclusive in pronouns or non-imperative verbs but that do not distinguish clusivity in the imperative (Section 3). We suppose that the inclusive-exclusive distinction cannot be absent in the imperative but present elsewhere.
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There is another generalisation about person marking: “There can only be a split inclusive [=the distinction of minimal vs. augmented] when there is already a specialised exclusive” (Cysouw 2001: 92). Again, this is inapplicable to imperatives. Exclusive imperatives are very rare, while the opposition minimal/augmented in inclusive imperatives is found in many languages of the world (Section 4). The question is, then, why do languages strongly tend to grammaticalise the number of addressees in the first person imperative and to distinguish between minimal and augmented inclusive imperatives even when not displaying any interest in dual categories elsewhere? We argue for the following answer. The main aim of an imperative speech act is to cause an action to be carried out. The more directly the speaker influences the causee, the more likely he is going to succeed in his causation. The addressee, then, is the best possible causee. The augmented inclusive imperative, however, may also include non-locutors, decreasing the ‘directness’ of the causation. This is the most probable reason why the opposition of minimal vs. augmented inclusive is crucial in the imperative.
Abbreviations 1, 2, 3 acc all adj.loc caus cl cond conv cn dat du emph excl fut gen hpl ill imp incl inf
first, second, third person accusative allative locative adjective causative class marker conditional converb connegative dative dual emphatic exclusive future genitive human plural illative imperative inclusive infinitive
intent iobj ipf lat loc m mom neg nsg o part pl pot prs r refl s sg subj top
intentive indirect object imperfective lative locative masculine momentative negative nonsingular objective conjugation particle plural potential present reflexive conjugation reflexive subject conjugation singular subjunctive topic
Notes * We would like to express our deep gratitude to Barry Alpher who proofread this chapter and immensely improved its style. 1. See Section 5 for a discussion of dual forms in the imperative.
Inclusive imperative 209 2. -aŋar < -aŋ + -lar ‘Pl.’; morphologically, thus, this is the plural of the first-person inclusive form. Such a structure is a very frequent one; see Section 5. 3. The Khakas examples were collected during fieldwork in the summer 2002. We thank our colleagues from the Russian State University for Humanities for the possibility to join the expedition. 4. We are not able to provide statistics, as there are problems with the explicitness of the data. While in most grammars all examples of first-person plural imperative forms are clearly inclusive, it is almost never explicitly stated that they cannot be used exclusively. 5. Another possibility is to say hadd menjunk, with the particle hadd, literally ‘let.imp’. But this is not a dedicated 1Pl exclusive form, because hadd can be added to other person forms as well, with a meaning something like ‘permit me/him/us etc. to do something’. We thank Istvan Granicz for the information on Hungarian. 6. This example was elicited for us by Yulia Koloskova. 7. There exists the subjunctive mood in Hdi, which can express an exhortation for all persons; see Frajzyngier (2002: 279–85). 8. But Chuvash has dedicated inclusive imperative forms, too; see below, Section 5.2.1. 9. We assume that most of first-person plural imperatives which are discussed below are inclusives. However, because of gaps in the descriptive grammars (see the Section 2.2), we can be sure only about those forms which we have personally investigated. But taking into account that most first-person plural imperatives are inclusive (even though we have been unable to check it for all the languages we consider), we ignore the possibility that some of the forms which will be discussed in this section might have an exclusive usage along with the inclusive one. 10. This will provide an answer to the problem put forth in Xrakovskij (2002): why does Russian have obviously innovative forms of “dual” vs. “plural” in inclusive imperatives, while all dual forms were lost in Russian a long time ago? 11. That the number of the causees is crucial to imperative constructions is supported by other evidence. Many languages distinguish between second-person singular and secondperson plural in denoting the addressees of the imperative (cf. Dobrušina 2003). The crucial difference between one causee and several causees is that of exposure of the causees to the direct influence of the speaker. The second-person plural implies the inclusion of third persons; not being involved in the speech situation, the third persons cannot be directly influenced by the speaker (cf. Kibrik, Kodzasov & Muravjeva 2000: 111).
References Agbodjo, K. H. & Litvinov, V. P. 2001. Imperative sentences in Ewe. In V. S. Xrakovskij (ed.), 390–404. Alpatov, V. M. 2001. Imperative in modern Japanese. In V. s. Xrakovskij (ed.), 106–25. Anderson, G. D. s. 1998. Xakas. München: Lincom. Avrorin, V. A. 1959–61. Grammatika nanajskogo jazyka, Volumes I-II. Moskva, Leningrad: AN SSSR. Baskakov, N. A. (ed.) 1975. Grammatika xakasskogo jazyka. Moskva: Nauka. Bergelson, m. 2001. Imperative constructions in Bamana. In V. s. Xrakovskij (ed.), 485–98.
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Nina Dobrushina and Valentin Goussev Bybee, J., Perkins, r. & Pagliuca, W. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Chung, s. & Timberlake, A. 1985. Tense, aspect and mood. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, 202–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curnow, T. J. 1997. A grammar of Awa Pit (Cuaiquer): An indigenous language of South‑Western Colombia. Ph. D. dissertation, Australian National University. Cysouw, m.A. 2001. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Ph. D. dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen. Davies, H. J. 1981. Kobon. Amsterdam: North Holland [Lingua Descriptive Studies 3]. Dobrušina, N. 2001. Formy imperativnoj serii. In A. Kibrik (ed.), Bagvalinskij jazyk. Grammatika. Teksty. Slovari, 319–32. Moskva: Nasledie. Dobrušina, N. 2003. Imperative deictic reduction. In P. Suihkonen & B. Comrie (eds), International symposium on deictic systems and quantification in languages spoken in Europa and North and Central Asia. Izhevsk, May 21–4, 2001. Collection of papers, 66–83. Izhevsk: Udmurt State University and Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Fortescue, m. 1984. West Greenlandic. Dover, New Hampshire: Croom Helm [Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars]. Frajzyngier, Z. 2002. A grammar of Hdi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 21]. Goussev, V. 2002. Imperativ i smežnye značenija. Semiotika i informatika 37: 173–206. Hakulinen, L. 1953. Razvitie i struktura finskogo jazyka. (Transl. from Finnish). Moskva: Izdatel’stvo inostrannoj literatury. Horton, A. E. 1949. A grammar of Luvale. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Hutchison, J. P. 1976. Aspects of Kanuri syntax. Ph. D. dissertation, Indiana University. Kumaxov, m. A. 1971. Slovoizmenenie adygskix jazykov. Moskva: Nauka. Kibrik, A. E., Kodzasov, s. V. & Muravjeva, I. A. 2000. Jazyk i fol’klor aljutorcev. Moskva: Na sledie. Malchukov, A. L. 2001. Imperative constructions in Even. In V. s. Xrakovskij (ed.), 159–80. Malygina, L. 2001. Imperative sentences in modern Hebrew. In V. s. Xrakovskij (ed.), 268– 85. Menovščikov, G. A. & Vaxtin, N. B. 1990. Eskimosskij jazyk. Leningrad: Prosveščenie. Palmer, F. r. 1986. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plungian, V. 1995. Dogon. München: Lincom. Podlesskaya, V. 2005. ‘Give’-verbs as permissive auxiliaries in Russian. STUF 58: 124–38. Sanžeev, G. D. et al. (eds.). 1962. Grammatika burjatskogo jazyka: fonetika i morfologija. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo vostočnoj literatury. Schafer, E. Imperatives in Luo. http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ling215/Luo/imperatives.html. Sridhar, s. N. 1990. Kannada. London: Routledge [Routledge Descriptive Grammars]. Stevenson, r. C. 1969. Bagirmi grammar. Khartoum: University of Khartoum — Sudan Research Unit [Linguistic Monograph Series]. Sulkala, H. & Karjalainen, m. 1992. Finnish. London: Routledge [Routledge Descriptive Grammars]. Trenga, G. 1947. Le Bura-Madang du Ouadaï. Paris: Institut d’ethnologie. Tsintsius, V. I. 1997. Negidal’skij jazyk. In Jazyki mira: Mongol’skie jazyki. Tunguso-man’čžurskie jazyki. Japonskij jazyk. Korejskij jazyk, 188–201. Moskva: Indrik. Xrakovskij, V. s. (ed.). 2001. Typology of imperative constructions. München: Lincom.
Inclusive imperative Xrakovskij, V. s. 2002. Russkij jazyk v zerkale tipologii: novacii v imperativnoj paradigme. Russkij jazyk v naučnom osveščenii 2(4): 91–101. van Driem, G. 1987. A grammar of Limbu. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 4]. van den Berg, H. 1995. A grammar of Hunzib. München: Lincom. van der Auwera, J. & Ammann, A. 2002. Volitional convergence around the Mediterranean. In P. Ramat & T. Stolz (eds), Mediterranean languages. Papers from the MEDTYP Workshop, Tirrennia, June 2002, 1–12. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr N. Brockmeyer.
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Chapter 7
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity Michael Cysouw Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
In many languages, pronouns are used with special meanings in honorific contexts. The most widespread phenomenon cross-linguistically is the usage of a plural pronoun instead of a singular to mark respect. In this chapter, I will investigate the possibility of using clusivity in honorific contexts. This is a rare phenomenon, but a thorough investigation has resulted in a reasonably diverse set of examples, taken from languages all over the world. It turns out that there are many different honorific contexts in which an inclusive or exclusive pronoun can be used. The most commonly attested variant is the usage of an inclusive pronoun with a polite connotation, indicating social distance. Keywords: politeness, respect, syncretism, clusivity
1. Introduction In his study of the cross-linguistic variation of honorific reference, Head (1978: 178) claims that inclusive reference, when used honorifically, indicates less social distance. However, he claims this on the basis of only two cases. In this chapter, a survey will be presented of a large set of languages, in which an inclusive or exclusive marker is used in an honorific sense. It turns out that Head’s claim is not accurate. In contrast, it appears that inclusive marking is in many cases a sign of greater social distance, although the variability of the possible honorific usages is larger than might have been expected. There are also cases in which an inclusive is used in an impolite fashion or cases in which an exclusive is used in a polite fashion. Specifically, I will discuss the usage of inclusives with polite second person reference in Section 2. In Section 3, I will present examples of inclusives with humble first person reference. In Section 4, the slightly different usage of inclusives with bonding first person reference will be discussed. All these usages of inclusives can be characterised as having a polite connotation. In contrast, I will present some examples of inclusives with impolite first person reference in Section 5. Then there are also some languages in which the exclusive functions as a polite first person, as discussed in Section 6. Finally, all examples discussed are summarised and some generalisations are proposed in Section 7. Although all these usages are attested, they are not all attested equally frequently. However, inferences from frequency are only to be taken with great caution. The data that form the basis for this chapter are inherently skewed for various reasons.
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First, the present compilation of cases is the result of rather ad-hoc collecting. I started from some cases, which I encountered during a typological investigation of person marking (Cysouw 2003). Investigating the linguistic areas and genetic families of those cases has subsequently enlarged this set. The present collection is large and varied enough to pass as a cross-linguistic sample, yet the procedure that lead to this sample is not one of controlled sampling (cf. Rijkhoff & Bakker 1998). Second, it is rather difficult to find information on honorific usage in reference grammars and other published works on ‘exotic’ languages. Except for a few studies that are explicitly devoted to the subject of honorific reference, I had to work on a basis of short indications about possible honorific usages of clusivity markers as they were made in grammars and other descriptive works. Often no more than a comment in passing is given, saying for example only that the inclusive is used for honorific address. When and under which circumstances such honorific address is used remains often enigmatic from the source. Also, when a source does not give any information on possible honorific usages of a clusivity marker, this should by no means be regarded as absence of such usage. The social aspects of language use are often disregarded in language description. I will use the politeness framework of Brown & Levinson (1987) to analyse the linguistic variation attested. Specifically, the notions of positive and negative politeness are of central importance. Positive politeness “anoints the face of the addressee by indicating that in some respects, [the speaker] wants [the addressee’s] wants” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 70). In other words, being positively polite roughly amounts to share the addressee’s attitudes. Negative politeness “consists in assurances that the speaker recognizes and respects the addressee’s . . . wants and will not . . . interfere with the addressee’s freedom of action” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 70). In other words, being negatively polite roughly amounts to leave the addressee alone as much as possible. I will use these two purportedly universal forces in human interaction to bring order into the various kinds of honorific usage of clusivity. The main body of this chapter consists of a large collection of cases that show honorific use of clusivity.1 In the final section, I will propose some generalisations over the present collection of cases. With this survey, I hope to stimulate new descriptions of honorific reference in human language — possibly with the result that the present generalisations become null and void. If so, then I will consider my mission complete.
2. Inclusive as a polite second person (negative politeness) In the Western Malayo-Polynesian languages of central and southern Sulawesi (Indonesia), the use of the inclusive as a polite second person is particularly prominent. The pronominal elements themselves differ widely between the individual languages, which indicates that the shared usage of the inclusive as honorific originated
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity
after the languages had differentiated from the proto-language. It is probably a contact-induced loan translation that has spread throughout the region. In Muna, the inclusive pronoun intaida is used for second person honorific reference (van den Berg 1989: 81). The inflectional subject markers show a difference between do- for inclusive and to- for second person honorific. However “the do- forms can also be used for the second-person singular, in which case they have a rather formal connotation. Their use does not imply politeness but rather aloofness; the form is especially suitable for addressing foreigners” (van den Berg 1989: 51). In Konjo, the pronominal paradigm has been strongly reduced, leaving only four different pronouns: a first person nakke, a second person kau, a polite second person gitte and a third person ia. The first person has an exclusive connotation. Relating to the present topic, the polite second person can be used with an inclusive meaning: “the Konjo pronominal system differentiates only person, not number or gender. . . . The use of first person reflects the fact that the speaker excludes the hearer, while the use of the second person honorific reflects his inclusion” (Friberg 1996: 138, fn. 2). These pronouns are not very frequently used; the “free form pronouns occur mainly for emphasis in Konjo. . . . The person-marker clitics serve to clarify what the semantic subject (and object) of the verb are” (Friberg 1996: 138). These person-marking clitics, however, show exactly the same honorific usage as the free pronouns. Further, the inclusive pronoun is used for polite second person reference in the Sulawesi languages Bajau (Verheijen 1986: 15, 19), Wolio (Anceaux & Grimes 1995: 577) and in Sa’dan (mentioned by Blust 1977: 11). Additional evidence for this usage can be found in some languages in central and southern Sulawesi, in which the inclusive–exclusive opposition is vanishing or has already disappeared. The exclusive pronoun is disappearing and the formerly inclusive pronoun is used both for all first-person plural reference and for polite second person reference. For example, in Makassarese, the pronoun (i)katte is explained in the dictionary of Cense (1979: 312–13) as being basically a first-person plural inclusive, though nowadays often used instead of the vanishing exclusive pronoun (i)kambe. As a second referential possibility, (i)katte can also be used as a polite second person (Matthes 1858: 69–70). In Bugis, the pronoun (id)ikәŋ is a general firstperson plural, although it can have an exclusive connotation. Another first-person plural pronoun, idi’, without exclusive connotation, can be used as a second person honorific (Sirk 1979: 107–8; Matthes 1875: 197–8): ikәŋ and idikkәŋ in general express the notion of plurality (= ‘we’). . . . The pronoun idi’, for the first person, means, likewise, ‘we’, but it is also used as an honorific form, for the second person (= ‘you’). . . . The notions of inclusive/exclusive are practically unexpressed in the language of the traditional literature of Bugis. Among the pronouns of the first person, ikәŋ, idikkәŋ and ia’ [but not idi’, MC] can have an exclusive value. (Sirk 1979: 107–8, my translation)2
Likewise in Banggai, the pronoun ikita is used for the first-person plural. There is no mention of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the grammar of van den Bergh
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(1953: 44), although historically this pronoun is clearly related to the inclusive pronoun *(k)ita from proto-Austronesian. In Banggai, this pronoun is also used for polite second person reference. Van den Bergh claims that this honorific function is a loan translation from Bugis. He also recorded a native explanation for this use: As an explanation why the first-person plural was used as a honorific plural, we were told thus: ‘if we address a person higher in rank with ikita and we accidentally say something unpleasant, then he cannot become angry that easily, because we have also included ourselves in the unpleasantness. (van den Bergh 1953: 44, fn. 1, my translation)3
In Tukang Besi, spoken on a small island within range of Sulawesi, the pronoun ikita, also clearly a reflex of the proto-Austronesian inclusive *(k)ita, is the normal first-person plural. It is also used for honorific reference: “respect may be paid to a group of people addressed, or a greater degree of respect paid to an individual by the use of the first-person plural forms” (Donohue 1999: 114). The original exclusive pronoun kami is used with a paucal connotation, although paucal reference is also often made by use of ikita (Donohue 1999: 113–14). Outside Sulawesi, yet within the same area (and also within the Austronesian stock), honorific usage of the inclusive is also found in the Timorese language Tetun. The inclusive pronoun ita “is also used as polite pronoun for second-person singular . . . [yet] in practice ita is used rather little as a second-person pronoun” (van Klinken 1999: 113; cf. Williams-van Klinken et al. 2002: 26). The same is attested in North Maluku Malay (Donohue & Smith 1998: 70–1). Other examples are attested in Toba Batak, Duri, Palu and in Sulawesi Malay. These cases are discussed extensively in the next section, because the inclusive is used both for the second and first person in an honorific sense. Finally, distantly related to these cases within the Austronesian stock, a comparable use of the inclusive is found in Malagasy (Brown & Levinson 1987: 203, citing E. O. Keenan, p.c.) and in Hawaiian: “in greetings in Hawaiian, the inclusive first-person dual is considered a polite form of address” (Head 1978: 178, citing Kahananui & Anthony 1970: 7). A discussion of many of these cases from a slightly different perspective is presented by Lichtenberk (this volume, Section 2.3). Blust (1977: 11) presents additional evidence for the usage of an inclusive for polite address. He mentions the Austronesian languages Old Javanese, Coastal Saluan (Loinan) and Bimanese as examples in which the formerly inclusive kita has become the regular second-person singular, without honorific connotation. Blust rightfully argues that such cases represent the endpoint of a ‘politeness shift’, in which an erstwhile form for polite address becomes the default second person reference — alike to the other politeness shifts that he has proposes for the history of Austronesian (Blust 1977: 8–12). Completely independently from these cases in the Austronesian stock, the use of the inclusive as a second person honorific is also found in the Ainu language in Japan: “the inclusive forms of the first-person plural are used as second-person
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity
onorific forms” (Shibatani 1990: 28). The same usage of the inclusive is also ath tested in Limbu, a Kiranti (Tibeto-Burman) language from Nepal: It is a common speech habit when talking to people with whom one is unacquainted or vis-à-vis whom one must retain a demeanour of respect to use the inclusive rather than second-person forms. The apparent psychological reasoning behind the polite inclusive is that one implicates and, if such be the case, incriminates oneself in the verbal scenario. It is also polite by virtue of being less direct than the second person. (van Driem 1987: 221)
Another case of this honorific usage is found in the Cuzco variant of Quechua, spoken in Peru. The suffix -nchis “forms an inclusive for which there are two pragmatically governed interpretations, first-person inclusive plural and second person polite” (Mannheim 1982a: 147; 1982b: 457). In a detailed study of plural reference in Cuzco Quechua, Lefebvre (1975; 1979) describes in more detail in which situations the inclusive is used as a polite second person: first-person plural inclusive may also be used instead of second-person singular in order to indicate deference or respect. This form is found in my data for addressing a stranger, a person from a different social status, or for addressing a person in a formal context. (Lefebvre 1975: 28)
Finally, Brown & Levinson (1987: 201–3) describe the same phenomenon for the Dravidian language Tamil, spoken on Sri Lanka, where the inclusive naam is used as a ‘super-honorific’ form of address. This is a particularly interesting case, as the same pronoun is also used for high-ranked self-reference (cf. Section 4). Brown & Levinson explain the honorific address with the inclusive pronoun naam as a reaction to the high-ranked self-referential use of this same pronoun: In village usage [naam] is the pronoun used by lower-status persons to higher-caste persons, especially in FTAs [Face Threatening Acts]. . . . In such a dyad, the higherstatus person is likely to refer to himself with the ‘royal “we” ’ ‑ that is, with naam. So the use of the same pronoun to refer to the same referent by a different (lowerrank) speaker could be seen as a dramatic point of view operation in which the inferior adopts the superior’s point of view. (Brown & Levinson 1987: 202)
The last few cases show that the usage of an inclusive for polite second person reference can be found dispersed throughout the world’s languages, and is not restricted to the Austronesian stock, among which it is nonetheless particularly prominent. Not all sources give information on the situations in which the inclusive can be used as a polite form of address. Yet, if there is an elucidation on the circumstance of usage, then the inclusive seems to be preferred in formal situations in which it is necessary to give deference to the addressee. Of course, the usage of an inclusive as a form of address is a kind of negative politeness, because it is a less direct way to refer to the addressee than a second-person pronoun. However, this does not yet explain why the inclusive can be used to express a difference in rank/status. Brown & Levinson (1987) also note this problem and they have to resort to quite exotic pro-
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posals to explain the existence of this usage of the inclusive, explanations like the one for Tamil naam discussed above or like the following metaphor of ownership: [A] possible source is the idiom of ownership: the master owns his servants, and they ‘possess’ him as their master. So to address him as ‘you and I’ is to convey the absorption of the inferior in the superior’s domain. (Brown & Levinson 1987: 202).
These explanations seem somewhat far-fetched. What is missing in Brown & Levinson’s work is the inherent asymmetry between speaker and addressee. The speaker, simply by the fact of being speaker, exercises control over the speech situation. The action of speaking itself is inherently threatening the negative face of the addressee. By using an inclusive form, the speaker offers to disregard this inherent supremacy. The speaker implicitly abases himself by including himself in the reference. The difference between speaker and addressee is softened by explicitly including both participants together in the reference. Interpreted this way, using an inclusive instead of a second-person form is a way to give deference ‑ one of the many ways to be negatively polite (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987: 178–86).
3. Inclusive as a humble first person (negative politeness) A related kind of honorific usage of the inclusive is found in Sawu, a Central MalayoPolynesian language spoken on the island Sawu, to the west of Timor (Indonesia), as described by Walker (1982). He says to “have textual evidence that dii, normally first-person plural (inclusive), is also used as a ‘polite’ form for first-person singular” (Walker 1982: 11). Probably, a polite first-person singular is supposed to mean a deferential form of self-reference. If so, this boils down to the same social effect as a polite form for the second person as discussed in the previous section. Both usages of the inclusive are ways of expressing the same social setting, in which the speaker is lowering himself relative to the addressee. The idea that polite first and second person reference are related is nicely illustrated by Toba Batak, a Sundic language from Sumatra (Indonesia). The inclusive pronoun hita “is also used in place of ho [second-person singular] and au [first-person singular] when the speaker wishes expressly to be polite or when the kinship relationship is not known” (van der Tuuk 1971: 218). To express politeness in Toba Batak, both first and second person reference can be replaced by the inclusive pronoun. The same situation is apparently attested in the Sulawesi languages Duri (Valkama 1995: 49–50) and Palu (Donohue & Smith 1998: 73, citing P. Quick, p.c.), and in the Malay variety spoken in South and Southeast Sulawesi (Donohue & Smith 1998: 71–2). Some more examples are discussed by Lichtenberk (this volume, section 2.2). Additional evidence for this deferential usage of the inclusive is found in a few Polynesian languages, in which the erstwhile inclusive has lost its clusivity completely and has become a special kind of first-person singular. In the Polynesian lan-
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity
guages, the proto-Austronesian inclusive *(k)ita has been extended with number markers, leaving the bare form available for exaptation. In Samoan, for example, the inclusive plural is ‘itātou and the inclusive dual is ‘itā‘ua, both consisting of the formerly inclusive marker ‘ita and a number suffix -tou for plural and -‘ua for dual. The bare inclusive marker ‘ita has become a special form of the first-person singular expressing humility: “the emotional first-person singular forms ‘ita and ta’ita frequently indicate self-abasement, humility, or an appeal for help, but they are above all an indication of affect showing that the speaker is emotionally involved in the situation” (Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992: 121). Likewise in Tongan, where the pronouns kita and its variant te are used for first-person singular reference “in the language of humility” (Churchward 1953: 127). The same phenomenon is also found in the Outlier Polynesian languages Mae and Nukuoro (Krupa 1982: 69–72) and Niuafo’ou (Early 2002: 850). Finally, Besnier (2000), in the description of the Polynesian language of Tuvalu, is particularly keen to disentangle the cultural context of speech-acts. Here, it becomes clear that the pronoun kita can serve both for second person and for first person reference, comparably to the case of Toba Batak that was discussed above: [kita] serves as a strongly affective index, connoting feelings of affection and empathy (alofa) when it refers to a second-person entity or to one’s home island. Alternatively, when it refers to the first person, it connotes feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, and self-abasement (fakaalofa, i.e. feelings that bring about feelings of alofa in others). (Besnier 2000: 388)
The explanation for this humble usage of the inclusive is identical to the explanation for the usage of the inclusive for polite address in the previous section. The inherent asymmetry of the speech situation is an important factor. By way of speaking, the speaker has power over the speech situation. The usage of an inclusive instead of direct self-reference is a kind of negative politeness, in which the speaker abases himself by giving up his powerful position.
4. Inclusive as a bonding first person (positive politeness) Requests are situations in which politeness is particularly important. In Tzeltal, a Mayan language from Mexico, the “inclusive is often used to soften requests, as if pretending that [the addressee] wants the object or action requested as well. And equally to soften offers, pretending that [the speaker] is as eager as [the addressee] to have the action performed” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 127). The speaker invokes nearness between speaker and addressee by using an inclusive in such speech situations — a strategy to show positive politeness. The usage of the inclusive in a request is exemplified in (1a). An example in an offer is presented in (1b). In both cases, the inclusive is used with first-person singular reference.
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(1) Tzeltal (Mayan, Brown & Levinson 1987: 127) a. hmahantik ʔaʔk’uʔ ‘[Can] we (inclusive) borrow your blouse.’ (i.e. ‘can I ?’) b. ya hp’is-tik ta lok’el ‘We (inclusive) will go fetch it.’ (i.e. ‘I will’)
In Tamil, the inclusive is most appropriately used as a form of self-reference in situations that require positive politeness. “One speaks as if everything were shared between members. Thus for instance between equals a speaker may refer to his wife as namma sarasu (‘our (inclusive) Sarasu’)” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 203, cf. 119– 20). In the West Papuan language Galela, spoken on Halmahera (Indonesia), the inclusive pronoun can be used in requests with self-reference. An example of this use is presented in (2). Formally, the second prefix na- is an inclusive marker. However, in this example the addressee is not included in the reference; the inclusive form is used here with exclusive reference.
(2) Galela (West Papuan, Shelden 1991: 166)4 pipi na-na-hike money 2pl.subj-inc.obj-give ‘Please give us some money’
As an explanation, Shelden (1991) argues that this use is a way to relieve embarrassment on behalf of the speaker: [This sentence] might be spoken in a situation where a man asks members of another family to give money to his own family. . . . His own family is referred to by na[inclusive], which is interpreted to mean ‘exclusive polite’. Sociolinguistically, what happens is that by including the addressee grammatically, the man relieves his embarrassment for having to ask for money. (Shelden 1991: 166)
This explanation is reminiscent of the clarification that was presented for the polite use of the inclusive in Bugis (see Section 2). In both cases, mention is made of avoidance of unpleasantness. In Bugis, including yourself when addressing someone — using the inclusive instead of a second-person form — can relieve the force of any unpleasantness for the addressee because it is shared. In the present case of Galela, including the addressee when referring to yourself — using the inclusive instead of a first person — causes any unpleasantness on your own side to be likewise shared and thereby lessened. By using an inclusive, both speaker and addressee are depicted as being equally involved in the situation. In some of the examples presented in this section, this apparent equality is used to redress the threat to the positive face of the speaker (e.g. Galela). In other cases, the expressed equality is used to express a bond between speaker and addressee. The addressee is formally part of the reference of an inclusive, so using an inclusive is a potential threat to the negative face of the addressee — even more so in inherently face threatening acts like questions. Yet,
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity
the speaker evades this potential threat by including himself into the address. The speaker thereby shows that any threat to the addressee’s face applies to himself as well. This is a clear strategy invoking positive politeness to redress a face-threatening act (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987: 127–8).
5. Inclusive as an impolite first person A rather different use of the inclusive is found in Santali, a Munda language of India. In this language, the inclusive can be used with first-person singular reference in an impolite context: There is a special use of the pronoun for first-person inclusive dual alaŋ: It is used instead of first-person singular iɲ in threatening language. It does not mean two persons, but it seems that the speaker considers himself connected with the addressee while threatening him. (Neukom 2001: 37)
What this means exactly is nicely illustrated by the example presented in (3), in which a person is threatening an old woman. This person is referring to himself by use of an inclusive.
(3) Santali (Munda, Austro-Asiatic, Neukom 2001: 38–9) ma bodhi, daka dɔhɔe-me, ar ba-m dɔhɔe-khan-dɔ mod old woman rice put-2sg.sub and neg-2sg.subj put-if-top nãhãk’-laŋ gɛr-gitic’-gɔt’-me-a ar boge-te-laŋ just-inc.subj bite-lie-mdf-2sg.obj-ind and good-inst-inc.subj thәyә-me-a kick-2sg.obj-ind ‘Old woman, put the rice down, and if you don’t put it down, I shall just bite you that you will lie (there), and I shall give you a good kicking.’
A comparable usage of the inclusive is described by Chandrasekhar (1970) for Malayalam, a Dravidian language spoken in India. The inclusive pronoun nammal in Malayalam can be used as first person reference in the following situations (Chandrasekhar 1970: 246): • in a friendly chat; • in a spirit which implies some contempt for the listener; • in an aggressive spirit. The first situation — a friendly situation — might seem of a rather different matter as the other two situations, which are more aggressive contexts. However, a friendly situation may allow the use of an otherwise rude expression, as a sort-of conspiratorial act, which presumes that both know better than to interpret the linguistic expression as humiliation. Interpreted this way, the various usages of the inclusive pronoun in Malayalam can be unified as being basically an impolite way of selfreference, possibly extended to jocular language when speaking with friends.
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The aggressive use of the inclusive as found in these languages can be explained by the fact that including reference to the addressee is a violation of the addressee’s negative face. Such a face-threatening expression can, of course, be used if it is the objective of the speaker to be rude or aggressive. Or it can be used to re-establish a difference in rank, as is the case with the (older) inclusive pronoun nam in the Dravidian language Malayalam, which is used for self-reference by royalty and aristocratic people when talking to person of lower status (Chandrasekhar 1970: 246; 1977: 88). For Tamil — also a Dravidian language — a comparable use of the inclusive naam for self-reference by high-status persons is observed by Brown & Levinson (1987: 201– 3). The same pronoun naam can also be used as polite address (cf. Section 2), leading to the possible situation that both participants in the speech act refer to the same participant with the same pronoun. Such a usage of the inclusive is also claimed for the Vietnamese pronoun ta (Thompson 1987; Nguyen 1996; Dình-hoà 1997). Nguyen (1996: 9) explains “that ta ‘we (incl.)’ in many instances refers to an ‘I superior’ is a common phenomenon: think for example of the use of kingly we and nous in English and French respectively”. The superior self-referential usage of the inclusive is compared here with the well-known pluralis majestatis usage of a first-person plural pronoun in European languages. However, in cases like the English we, there is no formal differentiation between an inclusive and an exclusive pronoun. The English we is probably best interpreted as basically an exclusive pronoun (see Daniel, this volume), so the pluralis majestatis in English can be analysed as pretending to include the addressee, but actually excluding the addressee, thereby expressing distance to the addressee (contrary to the analysis by Head 1978: 178; see also the next section). The existence of an impolite usage of the inclusive indicates that the inclusive need not have polite connotations, as discussed in the previous sections. When selfreference is intended, but the addressee is also included by use of an inclusive form, this threatens the negative face of the addressee. The ‘impolite’ usages of the inclusive, as discussed in this section, are examples of non-redressed acts against the negative face of the addressee.
6. Exclusive as a polite first person (negative politeness) All examples that have been presented until now exhibit some kind of honorific use of the inclusive. However, it is also possible for the exclusive to have polite usage. For example, in Minangkabau, a Sundic language from Sumatra (Indonesia), the exclusive pronoun kami is used as a form of polite self-reference: “kami . . . is also used for polite first person reference: it softens the too strong self-assertive character of I” (Moussay 1981: 153, my translation).5 For Malay, Donohue & Smith (1998: 71, n. 2) note that the exclusive pronoun kami can be used as a “highly stylized use of a ‘royal’ first-person singular pronoun, in certain speech styles.” A third case among the Austronesian languages of a polite usage of the exclusive is described for Malagasy (Brown & Levinson 1987: 203, citing E. O. Keenan, p.c.).
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity
The polite use of the exclusive appears to be widespread in the Munda family. In Kharia, as in Munda in general (with a few possible exceptions), the exclusive dual is simultaneously the honorific form. When speaking about oneself to a person deserving respect, the first-person dual exclusive is used (J. Peterson, p.c.). However, it is difficult to find published accounts of this phenomenon. Osada (1992: 67) mentions in passing that “in the Ho language, which is closely related to Mundari, aliŋ [dual exclusive] is used for the honorific first-person singular”.6 Among the Dravidian languages, Brown & Levinson (1987) describe the possibility of using plural forms for expressing respect in Tamil. For self reference expressing respect, the exclusive is used. Tamil . . . provides clear cases of . . . respectful plurality deriving from the treatment of the individual as a member of a corporate group. Nouns which refer to groups or to group property (including group members) seldom take singular pronouns. Thus ‘my father’ is rendered enke appaa, meaning ‘our (exclusive) father’. (Brown & Levinson 1987: 199)
A comparable phenomenon — though apparently in the opposite diachronic direction — is observed in Vietnamese. Here, the exclusive pronoun chúng tôi (without an explicit polite connotation) is based on the pronoun tôi, which has respectful self-reference (chúng being a plurality marker from Chinese origin, Thompson 1987: 249).7 By using an exclusive instead of a first-person singular, the speaker conceals the self-reference and gives the impression that he is not alone responsible for the utterance. In general, an exclusive can be analysed as an associative plural of the firstperson singular. An associative plural indicates a set of the form ‘X and his/her associates’ (Corbett 2000: 101). Transferred to the domain of personal pronouns, the associative plural of ‘I’ is ‘I and my associates’. This is exactly what is normally seen as the meaning of the exclusive. The exclusive is thus the plural of I (cf. Daniel, this volume), and thereby can be used to conceal self-reference in face-threatening situations because the usage of plural forms instead of singular ones is as a form of negative politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987: 198 ff.).
7. Analysis and conclusions The possible origins of honorific reference are various and the developments often unexpected, intricately intertwined with the social structure of the community and the existing linguistic structures. Head’s (1978: 178) claim, that exclusive indicates greater social distance and inclusive less social distance, does not hold against the existing linguistic variation as summarised in Table 1 (see the appendix for a complete list of all examples discussed). Note that in Table 1, many languages are counted more than once, as they exhibit various honorific usages of clusivity (the last row of the table shows the frequencies with these multiple occurrences removed). Tamil is
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224 Michael Cysouw Table 1. Frequencies of attested usages of honorific clusivity Usage
Attested in No. of stocks
Inclusive as a polite second person Inclusive as a humble first person Inclusive as a bonding first person Inclusive as an impolite first person Exclusive as a polite first person
5 1 3 2 3
No. of families No. of languages 9 3 3 3 5
17 5 3 4 7
Total
14
23
36
(Multiple occurrences subtracted)
(8)
(14)
(26)
even mentioned four times. However, the frequent presence of Tamil is purely the result of the quality of description of honorific practice in Tamil as presented by Brown & Levinson (1987). This illustrates that more in-depth analyses will probably result in many more examples of honorific usages of clusivity. The present collection probably only scratches the surface of the real possibilities. The most commonly attested development seems to be that an inclusive pronoun is used with a polite connotation ‑ indicating social distance. The most commonly attested case is one in which inclusive is used for polite address (Section 2). Likewise, the inclusive can also be used for humble self-reference, although I have only found this among Austronesian languages (Section 3). In both these usages, the inclusive functions to express (or establish) distance between speaker and addressee, the speaker giving deference to the addressee. This usage of the inclusive for this goal is quite remarkable, because the inclusive ‑ taken literally ‑ implies a bond between speaker and addressee. I have proposed (see Section 2) that the distancing effect can be explained by reference to the inherent asymmetry between speaker and addressee. The speaker, simply by being speaker, has more control over the speechact than the addressee. Using an inclusive diminishes this inherent power-position, in effect an abasement of the speaker. The inclusive can also be used to establish a bond between speaker and addressee (Section 4). This can be explained as a way to relieve embarrassment on the side of the speaker. By including both speaker and addressee in the reference, both are depicted as involved in the utterance, which alleviates the responsibility for the utterance from the speaker. However, including the addressee can also be interpreted as threatening the negative face of the addressee, leading to the possibility to use the inclusive for self-reference with an impolite connotation (Section 5). In some languages, the inclusive can be used both for such impolite self-reference and for polite address (as discussed in Section 2). This can result in a communicative setting in which the same inclusive pronoun is used to refer to one of the speech-act participants: one participant uses the inclusive for impolite self-reference and the other participant uses the same pronoun for polite address of that participant.
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity
Finally, a few cases are attested in which the exclusive is used as a (negative) polite kind of self-reference. This usage of the exclusive can quite straightforwardly be analysed similarly to the commonly attested polite usage of plural forms. An exclusive is a first person associative plural, which can get the meaning of a first-person singular polite (Section 6). The usage of clusivity for honorific functions is a typical phenomenon for Southeast Asian languages (see Table 2). However, this prominence could very well be a result of selective descriptive practice. It is known that honorific usage of language is particularly prominent in the structure of languages in South-east Asia in general. This might lead to a greater sensitivity towards honorific usages of clusivity as well and thus to more available descriptions of this phenomenon . The question now remains whether these honorific uses observed exhaust the possibilities of human language, or whether it is simply by chance that I did not (yet) find any other kinds of honorific use of clusivity. First, the use of clusivity as honorific third person reference has not been attested so far. I do not see any principle reason why it should not be possible, for example, to use an exclusive as a third person honorific by using positive politeness. However, I do not know of any such case. Second, the exclusive is only attested for polite self-reference, using a form of negative politeness (see Section 6). It is highly improbably that an exclusive will be used for other honorific usages. It will not be used for polite address, because the addressee is not part of the referential value of the exclusive. The only possibility would be an exclusive used for address with a strong kind of negative politeness, comparable to the usage of a third person for polite address (cf. Head 1978: 167–70). However, the exclusive includes (also) speaker reference, the usage of which is a face threatening act in itself (intending ‘you’ but saying ‘I’ is a highly imposing expression). Third, I have attested one usage of clusivity that expresses impoliteness (see Section 5). However, given the right context, every expression can probably be used to Table 2. Areal/genetic distribution of examples attested Area/Stock Southeast Asia/Pacific Austronesian Austro-Asiatic Dravidian West Papuan Others Tibeto-Burman Mayan Quechuan Isolates Total
No. of examples
No. of languages
21 5 5 1
15 4 2 1
1 1 1 1
1 1 1 1
37
27
225
226 Michael Cysouw Table 3. Logical possibilities and attested usages of polite inclusive Polite Inclusive used for First person reference with – Positive politeness – Negative politeness Second person reference with – Positive politeness – Negative politeness
Described in Section 4 Section 3 (not attested) Section 2
be impolite. For example, it seems to be perfectly possible that an exclusive would be used as an impolite address. Finally, there are three different polite usages of clusivity attested (see Table 3). The theoretically missing case could very well be imagined. The inclusive used for second person reference could eventually be used as a kind of positive politeness. Specifically strategy 7 as described by Brown & Levinson (1987: 119–220), “presuppose/raise/assert common ground”, argues that an inclusive should be able to function as positive polite address. By using an inclusive, both speaker and addressee are equally involved in the situation: “one speaks as if everything were shared between members” (Brown & Levinson 1987: 203). For example, if the speaker has a higher status than the addressee has, then the usage of an inclusive for address would be a strong example of positive politeness. The high status speaker lowers himself to assert a common ground with the addressee. This is in fact what happens in English (Quirk et al. 1985: 350–1) with the inclusive authorial we in serious writing (As we saw in Chapter 3,. . .) or with the doctor’s we (How are we feeling today?). Of course, English does not have a formal inclusive–exclusive opposition, but it still indicates that I might be possible to find a language in which the inclusive can be used as a kind of positively polite address. From these theoretical possibilities, it can be inferred that there is much more conceivable in human language than I have been able to find in existing descriptive work. The real possibilities of honorific reference of clusivity are probably even more manifold than I have been able to sketch here.
Acknowledgements The basic work on this chapter has been conducted while I was at the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschft (ZAS) in Berlin. I thank Mixail Daniel, Laura Downing, Elena Filimonova, Frank Lichtenberk and Horst Simon and for tips and general comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Further, I thank John Peterson for help with the Munda data and Ruben van der Stoel for help with the Sulawesi data. Of course, the present content of this chapter remains completely my own responsibility.
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity
Notes 1. The examples presented in this article show a strong overlap with the examples discussed by Lichtenberg (this volume). In particular, the Sections 2 and 3 in this chapter should be compared with Lichtenberk’s Sections 2.3 and 2.2, respectively. He mentions more examples of the kind as discussed in this chapter, though only from Austronesian languages. Both our collections of examples had been collected separately. 2. “ikәŋ et idikkәŋ expriment généralement la notion de pluriel, (= ‘nous’). . . . Le pronom idi’, à la première personne, signifie, semble-t-il, ‘nous’, mais il est également employé en tant que forme de politesse, à la 2ème personne (= ‘vous’). . . . Les notions d’exclusion-inclusion ne sont pratiquement pas exprimeés par la langue de la littérature Bugis traditionelle. Parmi les pronoms de première personne, ikәŋ, idikkәŋ et ia’ peuvent avoir une valeur exclusive.” 3. “Als verklaring waarom men de eerste persoon meervoud voor beleefdheidspluralis gebruikt, zei men ons het volgende: ‘Wanneer we een meerdere met ikita aanspreken en we zeggen per ongeluk iets onaangenaams, dan kan hij niet zò gemakkelijk kwaad worden, omdat we ons zelf dan ook onder dat onaangenaams betrekken’.” 4. The following abbreviations are used in the interlinear glosses: sg - singular, pl - plural, subj - subject, obj - object, inc - inclusive, inst - instrumental, neg - negation, mod - modal, mdf - modifier, top - topic, ind - indicative. 5. “kami . . . est encore utilisé pour se désigner poliment à la première personne: il estompe l’affirmation trop tranchée du je.” 6. Deeney (1975: 5) only mentions that in Ho all dual forms can be used honorifically. He does not specify possible honorific usages of the dual exclusive. 7. Head (1978: 178) presents Auca (also known as Waorani), a yet unclassified language spoken in Ecuador, as an example of this kind. However, he misinterprets the rather difficult to interpret source. The source he used (Peeke 1973: 41) says “honorific includes dual or plural exclusive in the first person”. Now, there appears to be a typo in this phrase. Instead of ‘exclusive’ it should read ‘inclusive’ (cf. Peeke 1973: 40 for some more discussion on this topic). From a different work by the same author (Peeke 1979: 52) it becomes clear that there is an inclusive (apparently without any honorific connotation) that is grouped together with some honorific forms in one paradigm because all pronouns have the same suffix, not because they are all honorific forms: ‘para conservar la simetría, se incluye [el inclusivo] en la columna previamente dedicade al honorífico maternal (to retain the symmetry, the [inclusive] is included in the column previously dedicated to mother-honorifics)’ (Peeke 1979: 52).
Appendix: Survey of examples discussed Within the lists of the various kind of honorific usages, the languages are grouped by genetic family relationship. Different families that belong to the same overarching stock are counted separately (e.g. various families within Austronesian). Some languages exhibit various kinds honorific usages of clusivity (i.e. they appear multiple times in different sections, e.g. Tamil). Such languages are counted more than once. Inclusive as a polite second person (see Section 2) Attested in 9 families, 17 languages: Muna, Konjo, Bajau, Wolio, Sa’dan, Duri, Palu (all Sula
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Michael Cysouw wesi, Austronesian); Toba Batak, North Maluku Malay, Sulawesi Malay (all Sundic, Austronesian); Tetun (Timor, Austronesian); Malagasy (Borneo, Austronesian); Hawaiian (Polynesian, Austronesian); Ainu (Isolate); Limbu (Kiranti, Tibeto-Burman); Cuzco Quechua (Quechuan); Tamil (Dravidian). Additional evidence attested in: Makassarese, Banggai, Tukang Besi, Coastal Saluan (all Sula wesi, Austronesian); Old Javanese (Sundic, Austronesian); Bimanese (Bima-Sumba, Austronesian). Inclusive as a humble first person (see Section 3) Attested in 3 families, 5 languages: Sawu (Bima-Sumba, Austronesian); Toba Batak, Sulawesi Malay (both Sundic, Austronesian); Duri, Palu (both Sulawesi, Austronesian). Additional evidence attested in: Samoan, Tongan, Mae, Niuafo’ou, Nukuoro, Tuvaluan (all Polynesian, Austronesian). Inclusive as a bonding first person (Section 4) Attested in 3 families, 3 languages: Galela (West Papuan); Tzeltal (Mayan); Tamil (Dravidian). Inclusive as an impolite first person (see Section 5) Attested in 3 families, 4 languages: Santali (Munda, Austro-Asiatic); Vietnamese (Mon Khmer, Austro-Asiatic); Malayalam, Tamil (both Dravidian). Exclusive as a polite first person (see Section 6) Attested in 5 families, 7 languages: Minangkabau, Malay (both Sundic, Austronesian); Mala gasy (Borneo, Austronesian); Kharia, Ho (both Munda, Austro-Asiatic); Vietnamese (Mon Khmer, Austro-Asiatic); Tamil (Dravidian).
References Anceaux, J. C. & Grimes, C. E. 1995. Wolio. In D. T. Tryon (ed.), Comparative Austronesian dictionary, 573–84. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Trends in linguistics. Documentation 10]. Besnier, N. 2000. Tuvaluan: A Polynesian language of the Central Pacific. London: Routledge [Routledge Descriptive Grammars]. Blust, R. A. 1977. The proto-Austronesian pronouns and Austronesian subgrouping: a preliminary report. University of Hawai’i working papers in linguistics 9(2): 1–15. Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4]. Cense, A. A. 1979. Makassaars-Nederlands Woordenboek. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff. Chandrasekhar, A. 1970. Personal pronouns and pronominal forms in Malayalam. Anthropological Linguistics 12(7): 246–55. Chandrasekhar, A. 1977. Degrees of politeness in Malayalam. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics 6(1): 85–96. Churchward, C. M. 1953. Tongan grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corbett, G. G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics]. Cysouw, M. 2003. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press [Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory]. Daniel, M. This volume. Understanding inclusives. Deeney, J. 1975. Ho grammar and vocabulary. Chaibasa: St. Xavier’s High School [Xavier Ho Publications 1].
A typology of honorific uses of clusivity 229 Dình-hoà, N. 1997. Vietnamese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins [London Oriental and African Language Library 9]. Donohue, M. 1999. A grammar of Tukang Besi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 20]. Donohue, M. & Smith, J. C. 1998. What’s happened to us? Some developments in the Malay pronoun system. Oceanic Linguistics 37(1): 65–84. Early, R. 2002. Niuafo’ou. In J. D. Lynch, M.D Ross & T. Crowley (eds), The Oceanic languages, 848–64. London: Curzon [Curzon Language Family Series 1]. Friberg, B. 1996. Konjo’s peripatetic person markers. In H. Steinhauer (ed.), Papers in Austronesian linguistics 3, 137–71. Canberra: The Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics A 84]. Head, B. F. 1978. Respect degrees in pronominal reference. In J. H.Greenberg (ed.), Universals of human language, Volume 3: Word Structure,151–212. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kahananui, D. M. & Anthony, A. P. 1970. Let’s speak Hawaiian. Honolulu: University of Hawaii. Krupa, V. 1982. The Polynesian languages: A guide. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul [Languages of Asia and Africa 4]. Lefebvre, C. 1975. Plural agreement in Cuzco Quechua: some aspects of variation. Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Lefebvre, C. 1979. Quechua’s loss, Spanish’s gain. Language in Society 8(3): 395–407. Lichtenberk, F. This volume. Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian: An opposition of unequals. Mannheim, B. 1982a. Person, number and inclusivity in two Andean languages. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 17(2): 139–56. Mannheim, B. 1982b. A note on ‘inclusive/exclusive’ in sixteenth-century Peru. International Journal of American Linguistics 48(4): 450–89. Matthes, B. F. 1858. Makassaarsche spraakkunst. Amsterdam: Muller. Matthes, B. F. 1875. Boeginesche spraakkunst. The Hague: Nijhoff. Mosel, U. & Hovdhaugen, E. 1992. Samoan reference grammar. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Moussay, G. 1981. La Langue Minangkabou. Paris: Association Archipel [Cahier d’Archipel 14]. Neukom, L. 2001. Santali. München: Lincom Europa [Languages of the World/Materials 323]. Nguyen, P. P. 1996. Personal pronouns and pluralization in Vietnamese. Mon-Khmer Studies 25: 7–14. Osada, T. 1992. A reference grammar of Mundari. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Peeke, M. C. 1973. Preliminary grammar of Auca. Norman: University of Oklahoma [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 39]. Peeke, M. C. 1979. El Idioma Huao: Gramática Pedagógica. Quito: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Cuadernos Etnolingüísticos 3]. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Rijkhoff, J. & Bakker, D. 1998. Language sampling. Linguistic Typology 2(3): 263–314. Shelden, H. 1991. Galela pronominal verb prefixes. In T. E. Dutton (ed.), Papers in Papuan linguistics, 161–75. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics A 73].
230 Michael Cysouw Shibatani, M. 1990. The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sirk, U. H. 1979. La Langue Bugis. Paris: Association Archipel [Cahier d’Archipel 10]. Thompson, L. C. 1987. A Vietnamese reference grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press [Mon Khmer Studies 13–14]. Valkama, K. 1995. Person marking in Duri. In R. van den Berg (ed.), Studies in Sulawesi linguistics, 47–95. Jakarta: Universitas Atma Jaya [NUSA 37]. Verheijen, J. A.J. 1986. The Sama/Bajau language in the Lesser Sunda islands. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics D 70]. van Driem, G. 1987. A grammar of Limbu. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 4]. van Klinken, C. L. 1999. A grammar of the Fehan dialect of Tetun: An Austronesian language of West Timor. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 155]. van den Berg, R. 1989. A grammar of the Muna language. Dordrecht: Foris [Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeling Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks 139]. van den Bergh, J. D. 1953. Spraakkunst van het Banggais. The Hague: Nijhoff. van der Tuuk, H. N. 1971. A grammar of Toba Batak. The Hague: Nijhoff. Walker, A. T. 1982. A grammar of Sawu. Jakarta: Universitas Atma Jaya [NUSA 13]. Williams-van Klinken, C., Hajek, J. & Nordlinger, R. 2002. Tetun Dili: A grammar of an East Timorese language. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics 528].
Chapter 8
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language Kearsy Cormier Centre for Deaf Studies, University of Bristol
This chapter examines the distribution of inclusive/exclusive marking among spoken and signed languages, particularly American Sign Language (ASL). Pronominal systems of signed languages are often taken to be fully indexic — that is, signed pronouns ‘point to’ their referents. The results of this study show distinct exclusive marking in ASL. An exclusive pronoun need not be indexic as other ASL pronouns are. Furthermore, results also show the context-dependent nature of exclusion in ASL compared to spoken languages. While most spoken languages with this distinction can include/exclude only the addressee, ASL can use one exclusive marking to exclude any salient discourse participant. This chapter highlights the importance of including signed languages in language typologies, to ensure accurate generalizations about the world’s languages. Keywords: sign language, ASL, modality, exclusive, indexic, person
1. Introduction In the last few decades, considerable progress has been made in establishing American Sign Language (ASL) and other signed languages as linguistic systems comparable to any spoken language. However, in attempting to prove that signed languages are indeed languages, it seems that, until recently, linguists may have overstepped the bounds in claiming that signed languages are structured exactly the same way as spoken languages are. Signed and spoken languages are produced in two very different modalities: the first in the visual/gestural modality, the second in the auditory/oral modality. Surely we should expect some differences between signed and spoken languages due to modality. Researchers have shown that there are obvious modality effects at the phonetic/ phonological levels (Brentari 1998, Liddell & Johnson 1989, Sandler 1993). Likewise, other research has suggested that there are minimal modality effects at the level of syntax (Lillo-Martin 2002; Neidle et al. 2000; Petronio 1993). Modality effects at the morphological level are not so clear. We know that signed languages mark many of the same types of morphological categories that occur in spoken languages. For example, signed languages have rich aspectual marking and number marking; many spoken languages mark these categories as well. But how similar are these morphological categories across modalities?
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In this chapter I focus on the distribution of one particular morphological feature — inclusive/exclusive marking — in spoken versus signed languages. This is one feature that has not been mentioned frequently in the literature on signed languages. I present the results of a study that identifies several pronominal forms in ASL that are used to indicate first-person plurals. The results of this study also show a distinct exclusive form for one type of pronoun in ASL. Section 2 is an overview of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in spoken languages, and includes information on the distribution of this feature and related markedness patterns. Section 3 includes an overview of the ASL pronominal system and first-person pronouns in ASL, followed by a detailed description of exclusive pronouns in ASL and related markedness patterns. In Section 4, I discuss the possibility that inclusive–exclusive distinctions may exist in other signed languages. Section 5 includes further discussion of inclusive/exclusive marking in ASL and of the differences between inclusive/exclusive marking in speech versus sign.
2. Inclusive/exclusive pronouns in spoken languages Before we look more closely at inclusive/exclusive pronouns, we need to look at the category of first-person plural, since the inclusive–exclusive distinction in spoken languages is traditionally considered within this category.1
2.1. First-person plural pronouns in spoken languages The first-person plural category is somewhat anomalous. The English first-person plural pronoun ‘we’, for example, is not plural in the same sense as an English plural noun. ‘I’ refers to the speaker, but ‘we’ does not generally mean ‘more than one speaker’. Benveniste (1971: 202) notes: “ ‘We’ is not a multiplication of identical objects but a junction between ‘I’ and the ‘non-I’, no matter what the content of this ‘non-I’ may be.” This is not only true of English, but of other languages as well.2 Because first-person plurals indicate the speaker plus other non-specified participants, the reference of a first-person plural is often quite vague. This potential ambiguity may be one reason why some languages encode information within the first person other than just the inclusion of the speaker - e.g. information about whether the addressee is included. This is generally what has happened in spoken languages that have separate categories for inclusive and exclusive pronouns. Languages that have an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the first person have separate first-person plural forms that indicate whether the addressee is included (‘we including you’) or excluded (‘we excluding you’). Many languages, such as English, do not have this distinction. Thus, English has only one first-person plural form: ‘we’3 which is not specified for inclusive or exclusive. In contrast, Tagalog (Austronesian) has a first-person plural inclusive form kamí meaning ‘we including you,’ and a first-person plural exclusive form tayo meaning ‘we excluding you.’
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language
Forchheimer (1953) surveys the person systems of 71 languages, classifying them according to person, number, complexity of morphological marking and inclusive/exclusiveness. Of those 71 languages, 45 have a distinction between inclusive and exclusive. This introduces the question: what determines whether or not a language has an inclusive–exclusive distinction?
2.2. Distribution of inclusive/exclusive across spoken languages According to Nichols (1992), there is a strong correlation between the inclusive– exclusive opposition and geography. That is, the frequency of languages that have the inclusive–exclusive distinction varies greatly across continents, with the greatest frequencies in the languages of the Pacific. There is also a strong genetic correlation; the inclusive–exclusive distinction tends to occur within entire language families. Despite the strong genetic correlation, as Nichols points out, the inclusive– exclusive distinction can be spread outside a language family within a particular area. Therefore, the main correlation here is areal rather than genetic. Other hierarchies arise when breaking down the inclusive–exclusive distinction by grammatical number rather than geography. Combining the number and inclusive–exclusive data from Forchheimer (1953) and Ingram (1978) results in the hierarchical pattern shown in Table 1. Inspection of Table 1 reveals that, in general, if a language marks the inclusive–exclusive distinction in the dual, it will also mark inclusive and/or exclusive in the plural (cf. Types 6, 7 and 8). Language universal 1490 from the Universals Archive (Filimonova & Plank 1996–2002; Sokolovskaya 1980) states the same generalization.4 Likewise, if a language marks the inclusive–exclusive distinction in the trial, it will also mark inclusive and/or exclusive in the plural (cf. Types 9 and 10). Thus we may propose the following hierarchy for number in languages with the inclusive–exclusive distinction: Plural < Dual, Trial. This same hierarchy follows from language universals 1489 and 1490 from the Universals Archive (Filimonova & Plank 1996–2002; Sokolovskaya 1980).
2.3. Markedness Hierarchical patterns often bring up questions regarding markedness. Which value is more marked among spoken languages, inclusive or exclusive? Here I adopt Croft’s (1990) notion of markedness which is based on the notion of grammatical assymetry across languages. Croft refers to several different criteria for markedness which were based on the work of Greenberg (1966). One is a structural criterion for markedness, in which “the marked value of a grammatical category will be expressed by at least as many morphemes as is the unmarked value of that category” (Croft 1990: 73). Another is the distribution criterion, which states that “if the marked value occurs in a certain number of distinct language types . . . then the unmarked value will occur in at least the language types that the marked value occurs in” (Croft 1990: 83). A third is the neutralization criterion, in which neutralization of an opposition
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Table 1. Distribution of the inclusive–exclusive distinction among spoken languages Type Sg
Pl
Du
Tr
Languages
1
I
we
Ø
Ø
Indo-European: English, Latin; Sino-Tibetan: Chinese (Pekinese); Japanese; Sumerian; Afro-Asiatic: Shilh; Na-Dene: Tlingit
2
I
we-incl we-excl
Ø
Ø
Austronesian: Malay, Tagalog; Niger-Congo: Ful, Nkosi; Dravidian: Tamil, Telegu; Altaic: Ordos Mongol, Tungus; Algic: Algonquian; Afro-Asiatic: Somali; Sino-Tibetan: Garo, Purik, Balti, Chitkuli; Melanesian Pidgin English (Tok Pisin)
3
I
we-incl-ltd Ø we-incl-gen we-excl
Ø
Mixe-Zoque: Sierra Popoluca
4
I
we
we-2
Ø
Indo-Iranian: Sanskrit; Na-Dene: Carrier; Penutian: Maidu; Eskimo-Aleut: West Greenlandic, Eskimo; Uralic: Ostyak
5
I
we
we-2-incl we-2-excl
Ø
Sino-Tibetan: Lower Kanauri; Penutian: Coos; Niger-Congo: Ewe
6
I
we-incl we-excl
we-2-incl
Ø
Uto-Aztecan: Southern Paiute Siouan: Lakota, Winnebago
7
I
we-incl we-excl
we-2-incl we-2-excl
Ø
Sino-Tibetan: Kanauri; Austronesian: Hawaiian; Uto-Aztecan: Shoshone; Penutian: Chinook, Siuslawan, Yokuts; Iroquoian: Mohawk; Austro-Asiatic: Mundari; OtoManguean: Otomi; Australian: Dyirringan, Kamilaroi, Saibalgal; Trans-New Guinea: Bongu, Kunimaipa; Kiowa Tanoan: Kiowa
8
I-incl we-incl I-excl we-excl
we-2-incl we-2-excl
Ø
Austronesian: Rotumana
9
I
we we-incl-ltd we-excl
we-2-incl we-2-excl
we-3-incl- Niger-Congo: Kele gen
10
I
we-incl we-excl
we-2-incl we-2-excl
we-3-incl Austronesian: Nogogu; Australian: Worora we-3-excl
Note: Referring to Churchward (1978[1940]), Forchheimer (1953) mentions one language with the inclusive– exclusive distinction in the singular: Polynesian Rotuman (Type 8). According to Churchward (1978), the form he calls “inclusive singular” may have an interpretation similar to a third-person indefinite, meaning some‑ thing like “someone” or “one”. Churchward also notes that this form may be used in the same context where an English speaker would use the first-person singular. “But even in this case it carries with it an ‘inclusive’ impli‑ cation, such as ‘and so would you (or anyone else) if placed in the same position’” (Churchward 1978: 145). Notation: incl = inclusive; excl = exclusive; Ø indicates that the language(s) in question lack the number cat‑ egory/categories denoted by the column heading.
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language
results in the unmarked category. I will look at each of these criteria in turn. Jacobsen (1980: 211) notes that, in Tübatulabal (Uto-Aztecan) and Yokuts (Penutian), the “inclusive formation contains fewer morphemes than does the exclusive”. Also, many Australian languages have a simple form ŋali for first-person dual inclusive and an augmented form of this pronoun for first-person dual exclusive (Dixon & Blake 1983). Thus for these languages, the exclusive form is more morphologically complex than the inclusive form; this satisfies Croft’s (1990) structural criterion for markedness.5 Universal 1484 from the Universals Archive states that if a language has a special form meaning ‘we-exclusive,’ then it also has a special form meaning ‘we-inclusive’ (Filimonova & Plank 1996–2002). This tendency holds for the data in Table 1, which show that languages that have either inclusive or exclusive categories (but not both) invariably express inclusive, not exclusive (cf. Types 6 and 9). That is, no language among Forchheimer’s (1953) 45 languages marks exclusive without also marking inclusive. Thus the exclusive category also satisfies Croft’s crosslinguistic distribution criterion for markedness described above. Finally, Jacobsen (1980: 222 referring to Anderson 1975, 1977) notes that “if a language loses this [inclusive–exclusive] distinction, it will be the inclusive form that remains to take over the combined first-person plural reference”. Again this supports exclusive as the marked category since this is consistent with Croft’s (1990) neutralization criterion, i.e. neutralization of an opposition results in the unmarked (inclusive) category. Together, these observations suggest that inclusive is unmarked while exclusive is marked in terms of crosslinguistic distribution.6 To summarize, the distribution of the inclusive–exclusive distinction among the world’s spoken languages is largely areal. Some number categories are more likely to show the distinction than others — specifically, the plural category is more likely to show the distinction than the dual or trial categories. Finally, in terms of markedness, inclusive is generally crosslinguistically unmarked while exclusive is marked.
3. Inclusive/exclusive pronouns in ASL So far we have focused on the inclusive–exclusive distinction in spoken languages. However, in order to determine if the marking of this distinction is influenced by language modality, it is also important to examine this distinction in signed languages. In fact, inclusive–exclusive distinctions do exist in signed languages, although there is very little discussion of this in the sign literature, as was noted earlier. In this section I will examine the pronominal system and exclusive marking in ASL.
3.1. The ASL pronominal system A personal pronoun in ASL normally takes the form of a pointing sign (index finger extended and other fingers closed) directed toward a distinct location or loca-
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Kearsy Cormier Figure (1a)
YOU-PL Figure 1a. YOU-PL
Figure (1b)
THEY Figure 1b. THEY
Figure tions in space. By using a pointing sign, the (2) signer associates the pronoun with this distinct location; the association between signs and locations in space is referred to as indexing. Subsequent signs that point to this previously established location are interpreted as being coreferential. If the referent is physically present (e.g. the addressee or a non-addressed individual), the signer points to the location of that referent. In the case of self-reference (i.e. the pronoun ME7), the signer points to his/ her chest. If a referent is not physically present, the signer simply chooses a location in neutral space for that referent.8 This same principle of indexing applies to plural pronouns that refer to addressees or non-addressed individuals. To refer to more than one addressee, the signer uses a pointing sign with a sweeping motion that refers to all the addressees, as shown in Figure 1a. Likewise, to refer to more than one non-addressed person, the TWO-OF-US signer uses a pointing sign with a sweeping motion that refers to all the non-addressed individuals, as in Figure 1b. Figure (3)
3.1.1. First-person plural pronouns in ASL
Before identifying the forms of first-person plurals in ASL, it may be helpful to look at what form they take in spoken languages. According to Forchheimer (1953), some languages morphologically modify the first-person singular pronoun for the plural (e.g. Chinese uo ‘I’ vs. uomen ‘we’). Other languages use an entirely separate lexical item for the plural (e.g. Korean na ‘I’ vs. uri ‘we’). Still other languages have what Forchheimer refers to as ‘composite plurals’, that is “pluralic forms that are composed of two or more simple elements” (1953: 40). He cites as an example Melanesian Pidgin English (Tok Pisin), which has the composite plural form jumi ‘you plus me’. Similar forms for indicating more than one referent exist in ASL. ASL allows all THREE-OF-US three types of plural formation mentioned above: lexical, morphological and composite. For example, previous ASL literature (e.g., Baker-Shenk & Cokely 1981) has identified separate lexical signs for first-person plurals, similar to the Korean example above, such as the dual TWO-OF-US, and the number-incorporated signs
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language
(THREE-OF-US, FOUR-OF-US, etc.). The dual form TWO-OF-US indexes the loYOU-PL THEY cations of two individuals (i.e. the signer and one other person); see Figure 2. The number-incorporated pronouns (e.g. THREE-OF-US, FOUR-OF-US, and FIVEFigure (2) of referents (Baker-Shenk & Cokely 1981); see Figure (1a) OF-US) indicate a specific number Figure (1b) Figure 3.9 ASL also has a general first-person plural form WE (and its possessive equivalent OUR); see Figures 4 and 5. The citation form (dictionary form) for the sign WE is a pointing sign that begins with contact on one side of the signer’s chest and ends with contact on the other side of the signer’s chest. This pronoun is produced at the center of the signer’s chest, so that the two points of contact are equidistant from the signer’s midline (i.e. the imaginary line that runs down the center of the body from head to toe). The signs WE and OUR do not specify the number or locations of their referents in any direct way. Meier (1990) notes that these forms are idiosyncratic since in both signs the hand contacts the chest twice. Thus, he claims, the form of these signs cannot be predicted based solely on what might be called a TWO-OF-US YOU-PL THEYis, the sweeping horizontal “plural marker” in other signs — that movement across (4)The sweeping the signing space (e.g. YOU vs. YOU-PL; HE/SHE/IT vs. Figure THEY). Figure (2)
Figure (3)
WE TWO-OF-US Figure 2. TWO-OF-US Figure (4)
THREE-OF-US Figure 3. THREE-OF-US Figure (5)
Figure (3)
Figure 4. WE
WE
OUR Figure 5. OUR
THREE-OF-US Figure (5)
Figure (6). WE-COMP
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OUR
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Kearsy Cormier
Figure (6). WE-COMP
Figure 6. WE-COMP
Figure (7). ALL-OF-US
Figure 7. ALL-OF-US
Figure (8).toExample of displaced lexical movement in these plurals could be considered be morphemic, resulting in plural plural forms that are morphologically derived from singulars (i.e. singular pronoun + sweeping movement) similar to plural formation noted for Chinese above. However, with its idiosyncratic form, it is not clear that ASL WE is in fact morphologically derived from the singular first-person pronoun ME. In addition, there are alternate ways of expressing plurality. For instance, a signer may point individually to each of the included referents (Baker-Shenk & Cokely 1981). I call this form WE-COMP, because it is similar to the composite forms that Forchheimer (1953) describes (recall Melanesian Pidgin English yumi ‘you plus me’).10 Also, reference to all members of some specific set can be expressed by the sign ALL-OF-US, a fingerspelled loan sign (Baker-Shenk & Cokely 1981).11 This sign can be used to mean ‘all of us’. These signs are shown in Figures 6 and 7. All of these signs are among those that the informants in the current study produced. More thorough descriptions of the phonetic forms of these signs are given WE -DISPLACED below in Section 3.2.
3.1.2. Two-person system for ASL
As described above, Meier (1990) notes that the first-person plural form WE is idioFigure (9). Variants of WE-CENTRAL syncratic and does not point to its referents in the way that other pronouns do. Although the first-person singular form ME does follow the general pattern of a point to the referent (specifically, a point to the signer’s chest), Meier also notes that this sign does not invariably refer to the signer. In the discourse strategy known as role shift, which can function as a method of direct quotation, a point to the self refers to the person whose role the signer is assuming (i.e., the person being quoted), not the signer him/herself. Thus, a point to the self does not always indicate the signer. Meier therefore proposes a two-person system: first person and non-first person. According to this analysis, there is no grammatical distinction between second and third person.12 Although on the surface this may seem quite different from pronominal systems of spoken languages, this two-person analysis for signed languages actually follows
a) WE (non-arcing)
b) WE (arcing)
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language
the claim set forth by Lyons (1968: 278) about spoken languages that “the primary distinction [within pronominal systems] is between ‘first’ (+ego: ‘plus ego’) and ‘not first’ (-ego: ‘minus ego’) and that the distinction of second and third is secondary.”13 Thus a two-person system alone is not enough to argue for modality differences.
3.2. Description of inclusive–exclusive pronouns in ASL In order to determine whether any first-person plural forms in ASL have inclusive or exclusive forms, I designed a study using videotaped data elicited from four deaf informants. All informants were native signers raised in signing households. A questionnaire was devised to elicit different forms of first-person pronouns. The informants were asked to translate English sentences — each with a specific context — into ASL. The sentences all used the English pronouns we, us, or our; since English does not have an inclusive–exclusive distinction, the informants had to rely on the context to determine the appropriate form of the ASL pronoun (see Appendix for excerpts from questionnaire). In the context given with each sentence, the number of referents was manipulated so as to elicit the following forms: dual inclusive, dual exclusive, trial inclusive, trial exclusive, plural inclusive, and plural exclusive. The inclusive contexts included the addressee; the exclusive contexts excluded the addressee. For the dual and trial forms, the context specified two and three referents, respectively. For the plural forms, the context specified either ‘ten or more’ or an indefinite ‘many’ referents. Furthermore, since the physical location of discourse participants is so crucial to how indices are set up in the signing space, a set of props was used to help the informants imagine real-world discourse situations. These props were placed in front of the participants to represent where the referents were located with respect to the signer. The props were occasionally moved from right to left and vice-versa to see what effect the location of the referents had on the location of the pronoun.14 Each data collection session was videotaped with an 8mm video camera. I coded the data from each session by recording the following information for every pronoun produced by each participant: a gloss for the pronoun, the location of the pronoun (right of the signer’s midline, left of the midline, or at the midline), whether the context was inclusive or exclusive, and the location of the props (right of the signer’s midline, left of the midline, or at the midline). Further details were also coded, such as the handshape of the pronoun and any nonmanual behaviors (such as body leans and eye gaze) that may have co-occurred with the pronoun.
3.2.1. Classifying the pronouns
Results from the study revealed six different forms of the first-person plural pronoun in ASL, including one possessive form (see Tables 2 and 3). Of these six forms, four of them were often produced at or near the center of the signer’s chest. Each of these forms had a variant that could be displaced to the signer’s left or right side, near the shoulder, as in Figure 8. I will refer to these forms as lexical plurals because
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240 Kearsy Cormier
Figure (8). Example of displaced lexical plural
Figure 8. Example of displaced lexical plural WE-DISPLACED WE -DISPLACED Table 2. Lexical plural pronouns coded Type of first-person plural
Variants
Phonetic Description
Figure (9). Variants of WE-CENTRAL
First-person plural (WE): Signer’s WE-CENTRAL hand moves from one point on chest to another, both in same horizontal plane. WE-DISPLACED
Produced at or near the center of the signer’s chest; the signer’s midline is the axis of the arc
Number-incorporated firstperson plurals (THREE/FOUR/ FIVE-OF-US): Signs made with 3, 4 or 5 handshape (palm up) with small circular motion
3/4/5-OF-USCENTRAL
Produced at or near the center of the signer’s chest
3/4/5-OF-USDISPLACED
Produced on either the signer’s left or right side
First-person plural possessive OUR-CENTRAL a) WE (non-arcing) (OUR): Signs made with bent-B handshape, starting with thumbside of hand near or contacting chest with arcing forearm rotation OURso that pinky-side of hand ends DISPLACED near or contacting the chest Universally quantified firstperson plurals (ALL-OF-US): Signs made with A‑handshape moving outward, opening to Lhandshape Not to be confused with ALL, produced with flat hand.
Produced slightly left or slightly right of the signer’s midline on the chest; typically involves rotation of the forearm
Like WE-CENTRAL, produced at b) WE (arcing) or near center of the signer’s chest such that signer’s midline is axis of arc Like WE-DISPLACED, produced slightly left or slightly right of signer’s midline
ALL-OF-US CENTRAL
Produced at or near center of signer’s chest; signer’s midline is axis of arc.
ALL-OF-USDISPLACED
Produced slightly to left or slightly right on the signer’s midline.
WE -DISPLACED
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language
Figure (9). Variants of WE-CENTRAL a.
b.
Figure 9. Variants of WE-CENTRAL. a. WE (non-arcing) b. WE (arcing)
a) WE (non-arcing)
b) WE (arcing)
they do not index (i.e. point to) the locations of individual referents; thus, these signs are lexicalized with respect to location. The lexical plurals are described in Table 2. The central variant of the first-person plural pronoun WE may or may not have a large arcing motion; if not, the signer merely touches with her index finger two points in the same horizontal plane at the center of her chest. Baker-Shenk & Cokely (1981) claim that the variant with large arcing motion is used when the referents are present, while the variant without this arcing motion is used when the referents are not present. However, some of my participants claimed there is no difference between these forms; therefore for some signers these variants may be in free variation. Figure 9 shows these two variants of WE-CENTRAL. There were two other pronominal forms that do not seem to be lexicalized vis-àvis location in the way that lexical plurals are. I refer to these pronouns as ostensive pronouns, because in general they transparently point to the location of each referent. Table 3 shows descriptions of these two forms. WE-COMP is a sign consisting of several pointing signs that refer exhaustively to each member of some set (cf. composite pronouns from Forchheimer 1953). This form differs from a simple concatenation of pointing signs in that the pointing Table 3. Ostensive plural pronouns coded Type of first-person plural
Phonetic Description
Composite first-person plural (WE-COMP): Series of pointing signs that point to each member of some set
Varies depending on which referents are being indexed
Dual (TWO-OF-US): Signs made with K handshape where arm or wrist moves between locations associated with signer and some other referent.
Varies depending on which referents are being indexed
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242 Kearsy Cormier
signs of WE-COMP are produced in quick succession, with dampened movement (i.e. each path movement is shorter than the one before it) and sometimes with alternating hands (e.g. right hand, then left, then right, etc.). For dual forms, the sign TWO-OF-US is used. This sign is classified as an ostensive pronoun because the hand moves between the locations associated between the two referents and thus clearly indexes both referents. However, unlike the pointing handshape of WE-COMP, the dual form has a K-handshape. To produce the K-handshape, the index and middle fingers are extended, and the thumb contacts near the base of the middle finger. The use of this handshape here is idiosyncratic; one might expect either an index handshape pointing to each of the two referents, as with WE-COMP, or possibly a 2-handshape, given the handshapes of the other number-incorporated signs. For instance, other signs that incorporate the number two (e.g. TWO-MONTHS) use a 2-handshape rather than a K-handshape. In addition to the manual features of ASL signs, facial expression and body position are also important elements of ASL; these elements are referred to collectively in the literature as nonmanual signals (NMS). NMS are important for grammatical as well as affective marking. Some of the more prevalent NMS that the signers produced were: cheek-to-shoulder (CS), body shift, body lean and eyegaze. All of these signals may act as grammatical markers; some may additionally indicate affect. Each of these NMS and their use with exclusive pronouns are described in the Appendix. While these NMS and others (e.g. raised eyebrows, furrowed eyebrows, head nods and head shakes) were used extensively by the informants in this study, none were used reliably to mark inclusive or exclusive.15 This may be due to the fact that these NMS are used quite frequently for other grammatical and affective reasons (e.g. topic marking, affect for doubt, affirmative marking, and negation); they were used in this study for these purposes.
3.2.2. Spatial displacement of pronouns
In order to determine if the displacement occurring with the lexical plural pronouns was due to inclusive–exclusive marking, I examined the distribution of each pronoun location (at the center, displaced to the right, or displaced to the left) in terms of whether the context was inclusive (i.e. including the addressee) or exclusive (i.e. excluding the addressee). In inclusive contexts, lexical pronouns tended to be central, while in exclusive contexts these pronouns tended to be displaced (to the right or left side). In order to determine if these tendencies were due to a grammatical inclusive–exclusive distinction, I elicited further grammaticality judgments for each of the lexical plurals mentioned. Participants were shown sentences like examples (1) and (2) and were then asked if these sentences could be used in an inclusive context, an exclusive context, or either. A summary of the results based on these grammaticality judgments is shown in Table 4.
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language Table 4. Grammaticality judgments for lexical plurals in inclusive and exclusive contexts (√ indicates grammaticality; * indicates ungrammaticality) Lexical Plurals
Inclusive context
Exclusive context
WE-CENTRAL WE-DISPLACED 3/4/5-OF-US-CENTRAL 3/4/5-OF-US-DISPLACED ALL-OF-US-CENTRAL ALL-OF-US-DISPLACED OUR-CENTRAL OUR-DISPLACED
√ * √ * √ * √ *
√ √ √ √ √ √ √ √
(1) NEXT-WEEK WE-CENTRAL GO-OUT MOVIE ‘Next week we’ll go out to see a movie.’
(2) NEXT-WEEK WE-DISPLACED GO-OUT MOVIE ‘Next week we’ll go out to see a movie.’
According to Table 4, the central forms are grammatical in inclusive and exclusive contexts. The displaced forms are grammatical in exclusive contexts only. Since there is no form that is grammatical for inclusive but ungrammatical for exclusive, we cannot posit a distinct inclusive category for lexical plurals. However, the fact that the displaced forms of the lexical plurals are grammatical in the exclusive context and ungrammatical in the inclusive context shows that there is a distinct exclusive category for lexical plurals. For the ostensive plurals WE-COMP and TWO-OF-US, it seems inappropriate to posit any sort of inclusive–exclusive distinction. These forms include all and only the referents that they point to, as described in Table 5. Other referents are ‘excluded’ only in the sense that they happen to be not included. The results so far indicate that the displaced forms are exclusive in the same sense that spoken languages with an inclusive–exclusive distinction have exclusive forms. Table 5. Semantic description of ostensive pronouns coded Type of first-person plural Semantic Description Composite plural Dual
Includes all and only referents that are pointed to. If point to self is included, then this is a first-person plural (WE‑COMP: ‘me, him, her, and him’). Includes both and only the two referents that are pointed to. If point to self is included, then this is a first-person dual (TWOOF-US).
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244 Kearsy Cormier
However, this is not exactly true. Wilbur & Patschke (1998) noted that body leans in ASL indicate inclusive–exclusive on a broader basis. According to Wilbur & Patschke, a lean forward indicates inclusion, while a lean backward indicates exclusion.16 These leans can be used with any noun (not just first-person pronouns) to indicate inclusion or exclusion of whatever referent is salient in the discourse. Thus a lean forward can include the addressee, or it can include the signer or a non-addressed third participant.17 The study described in this chapter was initially designed to elicit forms that included or excluded only the addressee, since the addressee is typically the referent that is included or excluded in spoken languages that have an inclusive–exclusive distinction. However, following Wilbur & Patschke’s (1998) finding that forward and backward leans can indicate inclusion or exclusion of participants other than just the addressee, it became clear that it was necessary to check to see if the forms identified as exclusive could be used to include or exclude discourse participants other than the addressee as well. Consultations with my native signer participants about other possible meanings of the displaced pronouns revealed that these exclusive forms can indeed exclude any salient referent in the discourse, not just the addressee.18 This salient referent can be someone who has not been explicitly named in the discourse (i.e. a referent who is understood in context); furthermore, the excluded referent can be someone not present. Thus, in example (3), assuming a discourse situation with three present participants (i.e. the signer, X and Y as shown in Figure 10) and also another non-present referent Z, the form THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED can exclude X, Y or Z, as shown in Table 6.19 However, Table 6 also reveals that if there is no salient referent other than the signer, X, Y, or Z, THREE-OF-USDISPLACED is ungrammatical, because this form must exclude someone.20
(3) NEXT-WEEK THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED GO-OUT MOVIE ‘Next week the three of us will go out to see a movie.’
Figure (10). view of discourse situation forinexample The of the Based on Bird’s-eye the grammaticality judgments shown Tables (3). 4 and 6, location a semantic depronoun THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED is marked by “*”. scription of the lexical plural variants is shown in Table 7. This table indicates that Y
X
*
SIGNER
Figure 10. Bird’s-eye view of discourse situation for example (3). The location of the pronoun THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED is marked by “*”.
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language Table 6. Grammaticality judgements of example (3), based on discouse situation shown in Figure 10 Referents (with Z introduced as non-present participant)
Grammatical?
Signer + X + Y (excluding Z) Signer + X + Z (excluding Y) Signer + Y + Z (excluding X)
√ √ √
Referents (no other salient referent in discourse)
Grammatical?
Signer + X + Y
*
the exclusive forms can exclude any salient referent, not just the addressee. Any form that is specifically marked [−SR] (i.e. any displaced form) is exclusive in that it excludes some salient referent. All other forms are neither specifically inclusive nor exclusive. In this section we have seen that ASL lexical pronouns like WE can be displaced to the signer’s right or left side; these displaced forms are exclusive forms. Furthermore, unlike spoken languages that have inclusive–exclusive marking, the excluded Table 7. Semantic description of lexical pronouns coded ([±X]*=one or more referent of type X, non1P=non-first person referent, SR=any salient referent) Type of first-person plural
Neutral/exclusive variants
Semantic description
First-person plural (WE)
WE-CENTRAL
Same semantics as English ‘we’: [+speaker] and [+non1P]*
WE-DISPLACED
[+speaker] and [−SR]* and [+non1P]*
Number-incorporated first-person plurals (3/4/5-OF-US)
3/4/5-OF-USCENTRAL
[+speaker] and [+non1P]*
3/4/5-OF-USDISPLACED
[+speaker] and [−SR]* and [+non1P]*
First-person plural possessive (OUR)
OUR-CENTRAL
same semantics as English ‘our’: [+speaker] and [+non1P]*
OUR-DISPLACED
[+speaker] and [−SR]* and [+non1P]*
Universally quantified ALL-OF-USfirst-person plurals (ALL- CENTRAL OF-US) ALL-OF-USDISPLACED
All of a given set such that [+speaker] and [+non1P]* All of a given set such that [−SR]* and [+non1P]*
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246 Kearsy Cormier
Figure THREE-OF-US (Location 2 in Figure 13) ure (11). THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED (Location 1 in(12). Figure 13)
Figure 11. THREE-OF-US-DIS-
Figure 12. THREE-OF-US (Location 2
Figure Bird’s-eye view PLACED (Location 1 in Fig.(13). 13) in Fig. 13) of discourse situation for Figures (11) an Figure (12). THREE-OF-US (Location 2 in Figure 13) Y
referent for these forms can be not only the addressee, but any referent that is salient in the discourse. X Z
3.2.3. Discussion
So far I have defined lexical plurals as plural forms that do not point to the locations of their individual referents. Lexical plural pronouns (WE, 3/4/5-OF-US, OUR, and ALL-OF-US) do not point to each referent. However, in a non-exclusive context these forms can index the general location of the referents as a group. For example, the number-incorporated forms can be used indexically to distinguish be2 1 tween a group of three on the signer’s left versus a group of three on the signer’s 13). Bird’s-eyeright, viewasofshown discourse for Figures (11) andof(12). by thesituation juxtaposition of the two forms THREE-OF-US in Figures 11 and 12. Baker-Shenk & Cokely (1981) claim that regardless of person, the locaY tion of the referents determines the location of the pronouns, such that in Figure SIGNER 13, the pronoun THREE-OF-US at Location 1 (shown in Figure 11) would include (signer + Y + Z), and the same form at Location 2 shown in Figure 12 would include X Z (signer + X + Y). I agree with Baker-Shenk & Cokely (1981) that the pronoun THREE-OF-US produced on the signer’s right or left side can indeed index a group of referents. If articulated at Location 1 in Figure 13, for example, this pronoun refers to the signer + Y + Z because Y is directly in front of the signer and Z is to the signer’s right; taken together the group is basically on the signer’s right side. My data included several instances of lexical pronouns that were indexic of a general location in this way, as 2 1 in example (4) below. In example (4), the referents of the pronoun THREE-OF-US (i.e. the props) were generally to the right of the signer (signer + X + Y), as shown in Figure 14. The signer produced a pronoun that was also on her right side.
SIGNER (4) THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED LIKE CAT ‘The three of us like cats.’
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language 247 Figure (13). Bird’s-eye view of discourse situation for Figures (11) and (12). Y
X
Z
2
1
SIGNER
Figure 13. Bird’s-eye view of discourse situation for Figures 11 and 12
However, THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED can also be exclusive, in which case it need not refer to the location of the referents. For instance, the pronoun at Location 1 in Figure 13 could include (signer + X + Y), in which case Z or some non-present referent must be excluded. In this situation, the pronoun is not at all indexic because the pronoun is being produced on the signer’s right side while the referents are directly in front of her and to her left. In this case, context would determine whether the indexic or exclusive interpretation would be most likely. The following example from my data illustrates exactly this point. In example (5), the referents of the pronoun THREE-OF-US (i.e. the props) are to the signer’s right (signer + Y + Z), as shown in Figure 15. A pronoun matching the location of the referents in this instance would be on the signer’s right side (as in Figure 14). One of the participants of this study, however, produced a pronoun not only on her left side (represented in Figure 15 by “*”), but also with her left hand (despite the fact that she is normally right-handed). Specifically, the participant produced the sign THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED with her left hand, then holding her left hand in Figure (14).the Bird’s-eye of discourse(FOND-OF situation during production X place produced rest ofview the sentence CAT) with of herexample (4). right hand. and Y are referents; X represents the addressee. The location of the pronoun THREEOF-US-DISPLACED is marked by “*”. X
Y
*
SIGNER
Figure 14. Bird’s-eye view of discourse situation during production of example (4). X and Y are referents; X represents the addressee. The location of the pronoun THREE-OF-US-DISFigure (15). Bird’s-eye PLACED is marked by “*” view of discourse situation during production of example (5). X, Y, and Z are referents; X represents the addressee. The location of the pronoun THREEOF-US-DISPLACED is marked by “*”. X
Y
Z
*
SIGNER
Figure (15). Bird’s-eye view of discourse situation during production of example (5). X, 248 Kearsy Cormier
Y, and Z are referents; X represents the addressee. The location of the pronoun THREEOF-US-DISPLACED is marked by “*”. X
Y
Z
*
SIGNER
Figure 15. Bird’s-eye view of discourse situation during production of example (5). X, Y, and Z are referents; X represents the addressee. The location of the pronoun THREE-OFUS-DISPLACED is marked by “*”
(5) Left hand: THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED……………… Right hand: FOND-OF CAT ‘The three of us (excl) love cats.’
Examples like this show that an exclusive context requires displacement of the pronoun and that the pronoun’s location does not have to match the location of the referents. In a context which is neither specifically inclusive or exclusive, the pronouns WE, 3/4/5-OF-US, OUR and ALL-OF-US can either be produced in the neutral (i.e., central) form, which is not indexic, or they may index the general location of their referents. However, modulations for exclusive interfere with any default indexic properties that these pronouns may have, resulting in examples like (5). The fact that it is possible to produce non-indexic forms in both neutral and exclusive contexts is compelling evidence for the lexical rather than ostensive status of these pronouns. The neutral and exclusive forms together provide evidence for the lexical status of these pronouns, whether particular tokens are indexic or not.21
3.3. Markedness In one set of pronouns in ASL (i.e. WE, OUR, 3/4/5-OF-US), there is a distinct form for exclusive but no form specifically for inclusive. For another set of pronouns (i.e. TWO-OF-US, WE-COMP) there are no forms specifically for inclusive or exclusive. Thus, inclusive is never morphologically distinct from regular first-person plurals in ASL. Exclusive marking, however, is possible with all lexical plurals. Based on this observation, ASL does not follow the same pattern of markedness for inclusive–exclusive that spoken languages do; recall from Table 1 that many spoken languages have only inclusive in a given number category, but no spoken languages have only exclusive in a given number category. Recall that according to Greenberg’s (1966) crosslinguistic distribution criterion, this suggests that inclusive is the unmarked category for spoken language.
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language 249
ASL, on the other hand, does not have inclusive but has a neutral form and exclusive form for lexical plurals. This exclusive form is grammatically distinct from the neutral form but morphologically may best be thought of as a combination of two elements: first-person plural (e.g., WE) and exclusive (displacement). Under this analysis, exclusive marking in ASL is similar to exclusive marking in spoken French. French has a neutral first-person plural nous ‘we’ that can be used with both inclusive and exclusive reference, but it also has nous autres ‘we excluding you’ as a way of specifically marking exclusivity. Thus the morphological marking of exclusivity in ASL may be similar to exclusive marking found in some spoken languages, although it is not clear how common this is crosslinguistically — ASL and French may be somewhat exceptional in this regard. The set of referents that can be excluded (i.e. any salient referent rather than just the addressee) may be what is most unusual about exclusivity in ASL (although see Section 5 for examples of possible correlates to context-dependent inclusivity/exclusivity in spoken languages).22
4. Inclusive/exclusive in other signed languages Unfortunately, not much information is available on inclusive–exclusive pronouns in any signed language, ASL or otherwise. One problem may be that researchers of signed languages tend to consider all personal pronouns in signed languages to be indexic (Engberg-Pedersen 1995; Liddell 2000; Lillo-Martin & Klima 1990). For example, Baker-Shenk & Cokely (1981: 50) claim that pronouns with an index handshape (including WE) are indexic. “Pronominal reference generally involves ‘pointing’ to a person or persons with a particular handshape. The handshape that is used indicates the type of reference . . . the pronouns [with an index handshape] are indexic (meaning ‘we’), whereas the ones [with a closed fist handshape] are reflexive/emphatic (meaning ‘ourselves’)”. Baker-Shenk & Cokely’s assumption that the sign WE is indexic goes against the claim made here that the sign WE is not indexic. One possible reason for this discrepancy may be their use of the term ‘indexic’. They loosely define ‘indexic’ as “pointing to”, but my argument here is that the pronoun WE (as discussed in Meier 1990) and the number-incorporated pronouns do not point to their referents in the same way that some of the other pronouns do (like singular pronouns and ostensive pronouns such as TWO-OF-US). Also, the numberincorporated signs are considered by most researchers to be indexic for the reasons outlined above - i.e. in contexts not specified for inclusive–exclusive, the number-incorporated pronouns are indexic in that they index the location of the group. However, as I explained earlier, I have classified these number-incorporated pronouns as lexical rather than indexic because in inclusive–exclusive contexts, the indexic nature of these signs may be suppressed. Thus, there is no clear consensus about the indexicality of pronouns in ASL; this may be one reason why the inclusive–exclusive distinction remains largely unstudied for signed languages in general.
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Through personal communication with informants contacted through the Sign Language Linguistics listserve (SLLING-L) in 1998, reports suggest that the following signed languages may have a distinction between inclusive and exclusive: Polish Sign Language, Icelandic Sign Language, New Zealand Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, German Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, and Israeli Sign Language. British Sign Language also has been identified as having distinct forms for first-person inclusive and exclusive pronouns (Deuchar 1984). However, it is not clear if these languages that were identified as having an inclusive–exclusive distinction were identified as such based on indexic forms like ASL TWO-OF-US, or if there are true inclusive–exclusive forms that do not rely on indexation (like ASL WE). Much more research needs to be done in this area.23
5. Discussion: Modality effects? The fact that ASL has exclusive forms whose meanings are context-dependent represents an interesting divergence from the typical pattern in speech. First of all, it is rare for a spoken language to distinguish forms that include a third person from forms that do not include a third person. Forchheimer (1953) notes that the languages Sierra Popoluca (Mixe-Zoque) and Kele (Niger-Congo) (see Table 1, types 3 and 9) distinguish between limited inclusive (ltd) and general inclusive (gen); limited includes first and second (but not third) person, and general includes first, second, and third person.24 Essentially, the limited inclusive excludes the third person, while the general inclusive includes the third person. Presumably this could only occur in a language that already has an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the traditional sense - i.e. including/excluding the second person (Cysouw 2003). Also, it seems very rare in speech for a single inclusive form to be able to indicate, for example, inclusion of second person in one context and inclusion of a third person in a different context. However, these systems do exist, e.g. Gooniyandi, a language spoken in Australia (Filimonova & Plank 1996–2002).25 Gooniyandi has a first-person plural “unrestricted” pronoun yaadi that includes the speaker plus the hearer plus others. This form is inclusive in the traditional sense of including second person, but also includes at least one third-person referent as well. Furthermore, Gooniyandi has a separate first-person plural “restricted” pronoun ngidi that includes the speaker plus either the hearer or other(s) but not both (McGregor 1990). Similar pronouns have been identified in Yaoure (Niger-Congo) (Hopkins 1986) and Kunimaipa (Trans-New Guinea) (Pence 1968).26 The context-dependent exclusive forms in ASL seem to be more similar to these “restricted” pronouns than to inclusive–exclusive forms which include or exclude only second person referents. The exclusive pronouns identified here for ASL are consistent with Meier (1990), according to which ASL has no distinct second person but instead only marks first versus non-first person (see Section 3.1.2). The fact that these exclusive forms exclude any salient referent rather than just the addressee reinforces Meier’s argument
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language
that second person has no special grammatical status in ASL and also reinforces the special status that first person seems to have in all languages (Bühler 1982; Lyons 1968; Meier 1990).
6. Conclusion We have seen several differences between signed languages and spoken languages in terms of inclusive–exclusive marking. First of all, the inclusive–exclusive distinction in spoken languages is an areal and genetic phenomenon. We do not yet have enough data to determine if or how inclusive–exclusive marking is distributed across signed languages, but we have no reason to expect that the distribution would be based on geography. This does seem like a feature that would be subject to parametric variation in signed languages just as it is in speech. I leave this issue for further research. Another difference is in markedness relationships; inclusive is the unmarked category in spoken languages, whereas exclusive is the unmarked category in ASL. Perhaps the greatest difference is the context-dependent nature of exclusion in ASL. While the majority of spoken languages are limited to including/excluding the addressee, ASL can use one exclusive marking to exclude any salient discourse participant, thus supporting the two-person system for ASL proposed by Meier (1990). Again, research on other signed languages would help shed light on this issue. If other signed languages have first-person plural exclusive pronouns which behave like ASL, this would suggest that language modality itself could be a factor in determining inclusive–exclusive patterning such that the visual/gestural modality lends itself to allowing these context-dependent exclusive forms. If other signed languages have first-person plural exclusives which behave differently from ASL (e.g. they include/exclude particular referents rather than any referent salient in the discourse) this would suggest that signed languages behave like spoken languages in this regard and thus language modality does not greatly affect inclusive–exclusive patterning. Thus we have seen that inclusive–exclusive marking can pattern quite differently in spoken languages and ASL. One significance of these differences is that they highlight the importance of including signed languages in language typologies and studies of linguistic diversity. Any language typology that does not include signed languages may be making inaccurate generalizations about the world’s languages and about the possibilities of human languages in general.
Appendix Notation As mentioned in note 7, English glosses for ASL signs are given in all caps. Verbs are translated in present tense for clarity (ASL does mark aspect and can mark tense, but often tense is not marked if it is understood in context). Also, different genders are used in some of the
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Kearsy Cormier English glosses to distinguish between different locations, although ASL does not grammatically distinguish gender. SIGN SIGN–SIGN
English gloss for an ASL sign nglish gloss for ASL sign requiring more than one English word for E interpretation (pronoun)-COMP A composite form of a pronoun Nonmanual signals The following nonmanual signals were used by the signers in this study with exclusive pronouns in ASL: • Cheek-to-shoulder (CS) The signer brings one shoulder close to his/her cheek. This indicates nearness in proximity, either in time or space (Liddell 1980). This NMS is adverbial in nature, so that the sign CARCRASH with CS would indicate that the car crash just happened. Likewise, CS can be used with the sign FUTURE in FUTURE WEDNESDAY (lit. ‘next Wednesday’) to indicate ‘this coming Wednesday’, a construction that is awkward in English. CS can also be used to express nearness in terms of physical location, so that the sign BEHIND with CS would mean something like “right behind”. Interestingly, the signers in this study used CS more often in exclusive contexts than in inclusive contexts. One possible reason for this use of CS may be to accentuate the cohesiveness of those included and also to create opposition between those included (i.e. the signer and others) and the one excluded (i.e. the addressee). Thus CS used with exclusives may have the same effect as the English word “just”, as in “just the three of us”. • Body lean The signer leans to one side, without necessarily rotating the torso. This can be used for a variety of purposes, e.g. verb agreement (Bahan 1996) or contrast. In this study, body leans served a purpose similar to CS. That is, the signer would often lean to one side when using an exclusive pronoun. In particular, when the signer leaned to one side, it was always the same side on which the pronoun was produced. Wilbur & Patschke (1998) claim that forward and backward leans (rather than leans to the side) indicate inclusion and exclusion, respectively. However, my data showed no systematic use of forward or backward leans. • Body shift The signer's torso rotates so that the shoulders noticeably change orientation. Body shift can be used for several purposes, but it is primarily used as a grammatical marker of role shift, where the signer assumes a role of another discourse participant. This shift is used extensively with direct discourse (Engberg-Pedersen 1995). In this study, body shift was most often used in exclusive contexts. However, the direction of the body shift (left or right) did not always match the location of the pronoun, so it is not clear if the body shift is further marking of inclusive or exclusive. • Eyegaze Eyegaze is the direction or object towards which the signer’s eyes are directed. Eyegaze in general is difficult to determine because it can change so often and so quickly. Eyegaze in this study varied greatly, and was further problematic due to the method of data collection. The informants were instructed to sign to the camera as if the camera was the addressee, but the informants more often gazed at the questionnaire or the props. A more in-depth study on
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language eyegaze as a marker of inclusive–exclusive would therefore be very helpful; I leave this for future research. Signers might not use CS or body shift or body lean, but eyegaze is always a factor in sighted signers. Therefore, this NMS may need to be considered separately. Sample excerpts from questionnaire The following are actual excerpts from the questionnaire used in this study. Items in bold face are referents who were represented by visual aids, so that informants could visualize the position of the referents relative to each other. Informants were instructed to read each context and then translate the sentence in italics into ASL. Question 1 was designed to elicit a plural inclusive form, and Question 2 was designed to elicit a plural exclusive form. 1. You and ten others (including B & C & others) don’t have much in common. During a conversation, you realize that you are all cat lovers. B asks you: Do we all have anything in common? You answer B: Yes, we like cats. 2. Many people (including you & others) are having a discussion. Everyone except B is a cat lover; B likes dogs. B asks the group: I like dogs. Do all of you prefer dogs or cats? You answer B: We like cats.
Acknowledgements Special thanks to my native signer participants: A, B, G and K; without their intuitions this study would not have been possible. Thanks to Richard P. Meier for his invaluable input in this study. Thanks also to Tony Woodbury for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Thanks also to Claude Mauk for helping me videotape the participants. Thanks especially to Gene Mirus, for his help in every aspect of the initial pilot study and for help with designing the questionnaire and to Perry Connolly, the model for the illustrations. Finally I would like to thank Elena Filimonova, Michael Cysouw, and two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on later drafts of this chapter.
Notes 1. See Daniel (this volume) for evidence that inclusive forms in particular constitute their own person categories separate from first person. 2. According to Zwicky (1977: 731), “no language has been reported with multiple speaker morphemes distinct from speaker plus other morphemes.” He also mentions that situations do occasionally arise in which there are truly multiple speakers (Greek choruses, for example). In these cases, the first-person plural form is used, but in no known language is a distinct morpheme used for the multiple speaker reading.
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Kearsy Cormier 3. Obviously, there is also the objective form ‘us’; however, in this chapter I will focus on nominative forms. 4. There are counterexamples to this universal, including languages like Coos (Filimonova & Plank 1996–2002; Sokolovskaya 1980). This explains the apparent discrepancy of the Type 5 languages which do not seem to fit this pattern. 5. However, this does not hold for all languages. Among many Dravidian languages, the inclusive form is more morphologically complex than the exclusive form. In Kudukh, for example, the first-person plural exclusive form is e:m/em — whereas the inclusive form is na:m/nam (Bloch 1954). I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention. 6. However, these tendencies should not necessarily be considered to be universals among spoken languages. LaPolla (this volume) notes that among Tibeto-Burman languages, “except for in the Kiranti group, usually the exclusive is more basic (simply based on the 1sg form plus plural marking) and historically prior to the inclusive form.” This suggests that for this group of languages the inclusive category is more marked than the exclusive category, which is the opposite of the pattern noted for all the other spoken languages described here. 7. As is conventional in ASL literature, English glosses for ASL signs are given in all caps. 8. Other researchers have claimed that there are factors that determine where a locus is established in signing space (e.g. discourse factors, semantic affinity with another referent, conventional location, etc.). Thus, the establishment of loci is rarely arbitrary (Engberg-Pedersen 1993). 9. Number incorporation for pronouns can only occur for up to five referents, and for some signers only four (Baker-Shenk & Cokely 1981). For more than five referents, signers use other pronouns, such as WE or WE-COMP. 10. Interestingly, while there is a composite form of WE (WE-COMP), there is no composite form of the possessive pronoun OUR (i.e. there is no OUR-COMP). Multiple tokens of the possessive OUR are only used with the possessed noun, to indicate distribution. 11. There is a set of signs in ASL referred to as fingerspelled loan signs. These signs are based on fingerspelled words, but have acquired lexical status in ASL because of their idiosyncratic characteristics not typically found in normally fingerspelled words (Battison 1978). 12. Although Meier’s (1990) two-person system may currently be the most widely accepted among sign linguists, other person systems have been proposed for ASL as well. Some have proposed a three-person system (Friedman 1975; Klima & Bellugi 1979; Padden 1983), while some have proposed many distinct person values, i.e. more than 3 values (Bahan et al. 2000; Neidle et al. 2000). Still others have proposed that ASL has no contrasts for person at all (Liddell 2000; Lillo-Martin & Klima 1990; McBurney 2002). Many sign language researchers currently follow Meier’s view about a two-person system in ASL, including Padden (1990), Lillo-Martin (1995), Emmorey (2002), Rathmann & Mathur (2002), and Liddell (2003). This two-person system has been attributed to other signed languages as well, including Danish Sign Language (Engberg-Pedersen 1993), Polish Sign Language (Farris 1994), and Taiwan Sign Language (Farris 1998). 13. There is evidence for this primary distinction between first and non-first person in languages of Papua New Guinea, for example, where in the future potential mode there are no person distinctions expressed (only number), and the forms that are used in that paradigm
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language are those of the first person (Foley 1986). I thank Michael Cysouw for bringing this to my attention. 14. The use of props in the data elicitation means that the forms elicited apply to physically present referents, since the informants used the props to imagine referents present in the discourse. It is possible that signers might use other forms to indicate non-present referents; I leave this issue for future research. 15. Out of 329 pronoun tokens produced by informants in this study, 147 (43%) included one or more of the following nonmanual signals: body lean, body shift, raised or furrowed eyebrows, head nod, headshake, and the discourse strategy known as cheek-to-shoulder (CS). See Appendix for descriptions of each of these nonmanual signals. 16. According to Wilbur & Patschke’s (1998) analysis, body leans in ASL mark much more than simply inclusive–exclusive. They claim that body leans can also mark involvement or non-involvement of a referent and can serve different focusing functions as well. For example, a body lean forward is often used with the sign SAME to mean ‘even’, as in this example from Wilbur & Patschke (1998: 285): “KNOW-THAT ALL BILL SAME pt [point] GET A ‘Everyone knows that even Bill got an A.’” A body lean backward, on the other hand, is used with the sign ONLY-ONE, as in this example from Wilbur & Patschke (1998: 285): “RECENTLY FIND-OUT ONLY-ONE KIM GET-A ‘I just found out that only Kim got an A.’ ” 17. Wilbur & Patschke (1998) give examples which they consider exclusive in which a) a lean back with the pronoun TWO-OF-US excludes a third-person referent ‘him’, and b) a lean back with the pronoun TWO-OF-THEM excludes the first-person ‘me.’ Likewise, they also give examples which they consider inclusive in which (a) a lean forward with the pronoun THREE-OF-US is inclusive of first-person ‘me’ and excludes no one, and b) a lean forward with the pronoun TWO-OF-THEM is inclusive of both referents and excludes no one. 18. Since I had found no systematic use of body leans in my data, I simply asked the participants about other possible meanings of the displaced exclusive pronouns produced without any particular use of body leans. 19. The location of THREE-OF-US-DISPLACED, shown on the signer’s ipsilateral side in Figure 10), could alternatively be on the contralateral side, in which case, the same grammaticality judgements in Table 6 would hold. 20. Of course, X + Y + Z (excluding Signer) would also be ungrammatical, since these are first-person forms. 21. See Cormier (2002) for further discussion of indexicality of plural pronouns and verbs in ASL. 22. Thanks to Michael Cysouw for pointing this out. 23. More recently, I have identified a set of exclusive pronouns in British Sign Language, similar to those described here for ASL (Cormier, in press). 24. As shown in Table 1, Kele does not distinguish between limited inclusive and general inclusive within a single number category. The trial form is general inclusive (i.e. includes first, second- and third-person referents) while the plural category (in addition to an exclusive form and a common form not specifically inclusive or exclusive) has a limited inclusive form, which includes first and second but not third-person referents. 25. I thank Elena Filimonova for brining this to my attention.
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References Anderson, L. B. 1975. Grammar-meaning universals and proto-language reconstruction; or, Proto-world NOW!. In R. E. Grossman, S. L. James, & T. J. Vance (eds), Papers from the 11th regional meeting. Chicago Linguistics Society, April 18–20, 1975, 15–36. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Anderson, L. B. 1977. Pronoun systems in Malayo-Polynesian and Uto-Aztecan: Towards a reconstruction and a family relationship. Ms. Bahan, B. 1996. Non-manual realization of agreement in American Sign Language. Doctoral dissertation, Boston University. Bahan, B., Kegl, J., Lee, R. G., MacLaughlin, D. & Neidle, C. 2000. The licensing of null arguments in American Sign Language. Linguistic Inquiry 31: 1–27. Baker-Shenk, C. & Cokely, D. 1981. American Sign Language: A student text (Units 10–18). Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press. Battison, R. 1978. Lexical borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring MD: Linstock. Benveniste, E. 1971. Problems in general linguistics. Coral Gables FL: University of Miami Press. Bloch, J. 1954. The grammatical structure of Dravidian languages: Poona: Deccan College. Brentari, D. 1998. A prosodic model of sign language phonology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Bühler, K. 1982. The deictic field of language and deictic words. In R. J. Jarvella & W. Klein (eds), Speech, place and action, 9–30. Chichester: Wiley. Churchward, C. M. 1940. Rotuman grammar and dictionary: Comprising Rotuman phonetics and grammar and a Rotuman-English dictionary. Sydney: Methodist Church of Australasia, Department of Overseas Missions [Reissued by AMS Press, New York, 1978]. Cormier, K. 2002. Grammaticization of indexic signs: How American Sign Language expresses numerosity. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas. Cormier, K. In press. Do all pronouns point? Indexicality of first person plural pronouns in BSL and ASL. In P. Perniss, R. Pfau & M. Steinbach (eds), Sign languages: A crosslinguistic perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Croft, W. 1990. Typology and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cysouw, M. 2003. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deuchar, M. 1984. British Sign Language. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Dixon, R. M.W. & Blake, B. J. (eds). 1983. Handbook of Australian languages, Volume 3. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Emmorey, K. 2002. Language, cognition, and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Emmorey, K. & Reilly, J. (eds). 1995. Language, gesture and space. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Engberg-Pedersen, E. 1993. Space in Danish Sign Language. Hamburg: Signum. Engberg-Pedersen, E. 1995. Point of view expressed through shifters. In K. Emmorey & J. Reilly (eds), 133–54.
Exclusive pronouns in American Sign Language Farris, M. A. 1994. Sign language research and Polish Sign Language. Lingua Posnaniensis 36: 13–36. Farris, M. A. 1998. Models of person in sign languages. Lingua Posnaniensis 40: 47–59. Filimonova, E. & Plank, F. 1996–2002. The Universals Archive. http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/ pages/proj/Sprachbau/introduction/. Fischer, S. D. & Siple, P. (eds). 1990. Theoretical issues in sign language research, Volume 1: Linguistics. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Foley, W. A. 1986. The Papuan languages of New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forchheimer, P. 1953. The category of person in language. Berlin: de Gruyter. Friedman, L. 1975. Space and time reference in American Sign Language. Language 51: 940– 61. Greenberg, J. H. 1966. Language universals, with special reference to feature hierarchies. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Hopkins, E. B. 1986. Pronouns and pronoun fusion in Yaouré. In U.Wiesemann (ed.), Pronominal systems, 191–203. Tübingen: Narr. Ingram, D. 1978. Typology and universals of personal pronouns. In J. H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of human language, Volume 3: Word Structure, 213–47. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1980. Inclusive–exclusive: A diffused pronominal category in native western North America. In J. Kreiman & A. E. Ojeda (eds), Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora. Chicago Linguistic Society, April 18–19, 1980, 326–406. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Klima, E & Bellugi, U. 1979. The signs of language. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Liddell, S. K. 1980. American Sign Language syntax. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Liddell, S. K. 2000. Indicating verbs and pronouns: Pointing away from agreement. In K. Emmorey & H. Lane (eds), The signs of language revisited: An anthology to honor Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima, 303–20. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Liddell, S. K. 2003. Grammar, gesture and meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liddell, S. K. & Johnson, R. E. 1989. American Sign Language: The phonological base. Sign Language Studies 64:197–278. Lillo-Martin, D. 1995. The point of view predicate in American Sign Language. In K. Emmorey & J. Reilly (eds), 155–70. Lillo-Martin, D. 2002. Where are all the modality effects? In R. P. Meier, K. Cormier & D. Quinto-Pozos (eds), 241–62. Lillo-Martin, D. & Klima, E. 1990. Pointing out differences: ASL pronouns in syntactic theory. In S.D. Fischer & P. Siple (eds), 191–210. Lyons, J. 1968. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McBurney, S. L. 2002. Pronominal reference in signed and spoken language: Are grammatical categories modality-dependent? In: R. P. Meier, K. Cormier & D. Quinto-Pozos (eds), 329–6. McGregor, W. 1990. A functional grammar of Gooniyandi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Meier, R. P. 1990. Person deixis in ASL. In S. D. Fischer & P. Siple (eds), 175–90. Meier, R. P., Cormier, K., & Quinto-Pozos, D. (eds). 2002. Modality and structure in signed and spoken languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Kearsy Cormier Neidle, C., Kegl, J., MacLaughlin, D., Bahan, B. & Lee, R. 2000. The syntax of American Sign Language. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Padden, C. A. 1983. Interaction of morphology and syntax in American Sign Language. Doctoral dissertation, University of California at San Diego. Padden, C. A. 1990. The relation between space and grammar in ASL verb morphology. In C. Lucas (ed.), Sign language research: Theoretical issues, 118–32. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press. Pence, A. R. 1968. An analysis of Kunimaipa pronouns. Kivung 1: 109–15. Petronio, K. 1993. Clause structure in American Sign Language. Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington. Rathmann, C. & Mathur, G. 2002. Is verb agreement the same cross-modally? In R. P. Meier, K. Cormier, & D. Quinto-Pozos (eds), 370–404. Sandler, W. 1993. Sign language and modularity. Lingua 89: 315–51. Sokolovskaya, N. K. 1980. Nekotorye semantičeskie universalii v sisteme ličnyx mestoimenij (Some semantic universals in systems of personal pronouns). In I. F. Vardul’ (ed.), (Teorija i tipologija mestoimenij). Theory and typology of pronouns, 84–102. Moskva: Nauka. Wilbur, R. B. & Patschke, C. 1998. Body leans and the marking of contrast in American Sign Language. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 275–303. Zwicky, A. M. 1977. Hierarchies of person. In W. A. Beach, S. E. Fox, & S. Philosoph (eds), Papers from the 13th regional meeting, 714–33. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Part 2
Areal and family portraits of the inclusive–exclusive distinction
Chapter 9
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian An opposition of unequals* Frantisek Lichtenberk University of Auckland
An inclusive–exclusive distinction is the norm in Austronesian and is reconstructible for Proto-Austronesian. It has been lost in a few languages. Of the two members of the opposition, the inclusive one enjoys a special status. In many languages it has additional functions besides referential inclusivity. It can be used to establish in-groupness, solidarity for the purposes at hand. And in a number of languages present or erstwhile inclusives function to express politeness, typically either as honorific addressee forms or as humble speaker forms. Such developments appear to be extremely rare or non-existent with exclusives. In those few languages that have lost the inclusive–exclusive distinction, it is normally the originally inclusive form that continues as the first-person non-singular pronominal. Keywords: Austronesian, in-groupness, politeness, referential range
1. Introduction There are upwards of 1,000 languages in the Austronesian family, and with very few exceptions they all exhibit the inclusive category. The inclusive category can be reconstructed for Proto-Austronesian. As a norm, the inclusive as well as the other person-number categories are manifested in several morphosyntactic areas, such as independent personal pronouns, possessive suffixes added to possessum nouns or possessive classifiers to index the possessor, and various affixal or clitic elements associated with verbs which index the subject or an object. Here the term “pronominals” will be used as a convenient cover term for all those morphosyntactic categories. In the discussion that follows, it will be the independent pronouns that will figure most prominently because it is in connection with the independent pronouns that the inclusive (and exclusive) notions are most often discussed in the language descriptions, but examples of some of the other categories will also be given. Table 1 gives the sets of the nominative and the genitive pronominals as reconstructed for Proto-Austronesian. The nominative forms correspond to what is usually considered to be independent personal pronouns in present-day languages. The i- and si- forms in the nominative set are personal articles; the i and ni forms in the genitive set are genitive prepositions. The inclusive and the exclusive forms are in bold.
262 Frantisek Lichtenberk Table 1. Proto-Austronesian nominative and genitive pronominals (Blust 1977)
1sg 2sg 3sg 1pl excl 1pl incl 2pl 3pl
Nominative
Genitive
i-aku i-Su, (i)kaSu (polite) si-ia i-kami i-kita i-kamu (later also iSu) si-iDa
i-ku/ni-ku i-Su/ni-Su (later also i-mu/ni-mu as polite forms) i-a/ni-a i-mi/ni-mi i-ta/ni-ta i-mu/ni-mu (later also iSu/niSu) i-Da/ni-Da
In addition to the singular-plural distinction, many Austronesian languages also have a dual number and some also have a trial or a paucal number. The dual, trial and paucal forms are usually based on the corresponding plural forms. As is the tradition in Austronesian linguistics, the Proto-Austronesian inclusive form is treated by Blust as a first-person plural form, in opposition to the exclusive form. In the same vein, the inclusive is treated as a first person category in the grammatical descriptions consulted for the present study. However, as has been argued by a number of scholars, the inclusive is best analyzed not as a subtype of the first person, but as a separate category; for latest discussion and further references see Daniel (this volume). And this is the analysis (and glossing conventions) adopted in the present study. The inclusive category has been retained in an overwhelming majority of the Austronesian languages but has been lost in a few. Those latter languages will also be of interest to us. The paradigmatic status of the inclusive is not among the central concerns of the present study; however, I will return to it briefly in later sections. Inclusive and exclusive pronominals are relational indexicals (Hanks 1992): they index the nature of the relation between the two types of interlocutor in a speech situation: the speaker (typically a sole speaker) and the addressee or addressees. In their basic use, inclusive pronominals function to express the fact that the speaker and the addressee(s) are objectively, truth-conditionally members of one group with respect to the situation being encoded; they are characterized by a relation of in-groupness. In contrast, exclusives in their basic use express the fact that the speaker on the one hand and the addressee(s) on the other are not members of the same group with respect to the situation being encoded. Needless to say, whether a speaker and one or more addressees are or are not in a relation of in-groupness varies from situation to situation. In sentence (1) from Toqabaqita (Solomon Islands) the dual inclusive independent pronoun and the dual inclusive future-tense subject marker jointly signify that both the speaker and the addressee will eat:1
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
(1) Qoo, ma si manga qeri koro koki fanga. oh and class time this du(incl) du(incl).fut eat ‘OK, and now you and I will eat.’
On the other hand, in (2), also from Toqabaqita, the dual exclusive independent pronoun and the dual exclusive future-tense subject marker jointly signify that only the speaker and one other person, but not the addressee, will go:
(2) Kamareqa meki lae kau. 1du(excl) 1du(excl).fut go andat ‘The two of us will be going now.’ (Said when leaving the addressee.)
On the face of it, the inclusive–exclusive contrast appears to be a straightforward opposition between the two categories, depending on whether the addressee is included or not.2 However, it turns out that, in Austronesian at least, the two members of the opposition are far from equal. The inclusive member of the pair enjoys a special position in the following respects. First, in many languages it has additional functions besides referential inclusivity. It can be used when, in objective, truthconditional terms, inclusivity does not hold. That is, even though the speaker and the addressee are not members of the same relevant grouping, the speaker may decide to present the situation as if she and the addressee were in the same group. Such inclusion may be strictly transient, ad hoc, for the speaker’s current purposes. Inclusives, or former inclusives, may be used when the intended reference is singular—to the speaker or to the addressee—even though in their basic use their reference is necessarily non‑singular. Such semantic/pragmatic developments appear to be nonexistent or extremely rare with the exclusive forms. The sources of data consulted do not normally mention any other functions of the exclusive forms. It will be argued that the differences in the behaviour of inclusives and exclusives are ultimately due to the differences in their referential ranges in their basic uses: inclusives have both the speaker and the addressee(s) in their referential range, and so the two are in an ingroupness relation with each other, whereas this is not the case with exclusives. The extended uses of inclusives are to be understood in the framework of Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, in particular their notion of positive politeness. There is another area where the inclusive and the exclusive members of the opposition are not equal. As pointed out earlier, the inclusive category has been lost in a few Austronesian languages. In such cases, if a member of the original inclusive–exclusive opposition takes on the function of a general first-person non-singular pronominal, with the other member dropping out, it is always the inclusive pronominal that assumes the new function, and it is always the exclusive one that disappears. There is one language where the inclusive–exclusive opposition has been lost and where both the inclusive and the exclusive pronominals continue, but the two forms now express a different kind of contrast. Both of these types of development also are motivated by the differences between the referential ranges of inclusives and exclusives in their basic functions.
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Inclusive pronominals are sometimes said to be used non‑referentially, impersonally, without reference to specific individuals. However, it is not clear that such use is unique to inclusives. There is no intrinsic reason why other pronouns, in particular other non-singular pronouns, could not be used non-referentially, as will be discussed in the relevant place. The structure of the chapter is as follows: in Section 2 we will consider the “integrative” function of inclusives. In Section 3 we will look at the so-called non‑referential, impersonal use of inclusives. In Section 4 our attention will be focused on those languages where the inclusive category has been lost. In Section 5 I will discuss briefly the exclusive forms in a few languages. And in the concluding section I will summarize the findings and offer some generalizations.
2. Integrative inclusives 2.1. Integration and politeness In their basic use, inclusive pronominals are used when the speaker and the addressee are in an in-groupness relation to each other with respect to the situation being encoded. They characterize the speaker and the addressee as having the same kind of involvement in the situation, or the same kind of relation to another entity involved in the situation. However, in a number of Austronesian languages the inclusive pronominals are sometimes used even though the speaker and the addressee are not, objectively, in an in-groupness relation to each other with respect to the relevant situation. Rather, inclusives are used as if the speaker and the addressee were in an in-groupness relation. I will refer to such uses of inclusive pronominals as integrative: the speaker integrates herself and the addressee into one and the same group, even though objectively they are not members of the same group. This is illustrated in example (3) from Toqabaqita. The speaker wants to find out whether the addressee has areca nuts in his (the addressee’s) personal basket, but rather than saying ‘your (sg) basket’ he says ‘our (incl.) basket:
(3) Nau kwai qasi-qaba fas-i laa waqi koro, wane nau. 1sg 1sg.fut fall-hand prec-at inside basket du(incl)3 man 1sg ‘I’ll first slip my hand into our (meaning: your) basket, my friend.’
Waqi, which are like handbags or dilly-bags, are strictly personal property, owned by a single person. The basket is the addressee’s, but the speaker speaks of it as if it were theirs jointly. Such integrative use of inclusive pronominals is indexical of solidarity, in‑groupness, personal closeness. A sentence like the one in (3) is normally appropriate only if the two people are close acquaintances or friends. The speaker can use the inclusive pronoun because he and the addressee are close, but at the same time, by virtue of using the inclusive pronoun he reinforces the solidarity.
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
Integrative use of inclusives is not uncommon in Austronesian languages, and it is usually characterized as having a politeness function. For example, van Klinken (1999: 112) says this about the inclusive pronoun in Fehan Tetun, spoken on Timor (east Indonesia): Since inclusiveness is a culturally valued characteristic, [the inclusive pronoun] ita may be used when strictly speaking the addressee is not included. This is illustrated by the following example [4], where women were by their choice of pronoun including me in the description of their way of life, even though the description clearly did not apply to me. When questioned on such uses, speakers recognised that this extension of the strict meaning of ita was a politeness phenomenon.
(4) Ita feto la’o ha’i. Ita iha uma karian. pl(incl) woman walk not pl(incl) loc house work ‘We women don’t go out. We are at the house working.’ (van Klinken 1999: 112)
As the Tetun example (4) and the Toqabaqita example (3) respectively demonstrate, integration of the speaker and the addressee may be achieved in one of two ways: either the speaker places the addressee in his/her own sphere, or he/she places himself/herself in the addressee’s sphere. In (4), the addressee is an outsider, but she is treated as if she were a member of the speaker’s group. In (3), the personal basket is the addressee’s, but the speaker speaks of it as if it were his as well. Integrative use of inclusives de‑emphasizes, blurs the distinction between speaker and addressee: they are treated as members of the same group when objectively they are not. It is this blurring of the distinction between the interlocutors that underlies the solidarity function of the integrative use of inclusives. However, the two integrative strategies, the addressee being included in the speaker’s sphere, and the speaker including herself in the addressee’s sphere, are not fully equivalent, as we shall see. In one language, Minangkabau, the inclusive personal pronoun is apparently used with first, second and third person reference (Moussay 1981). However, because the information available does not go beyond mentioning this use, and because this is the only language in the sample for which such use of an inclusive has been reported, it will not be further considered here (but see Section 5 for discussion of Minangkabau in a different context). Crucial to understanding the functions of the integrative use of inclusives is Brown & Levinson’s (1987) notion of positive politeness. Positive politeness is “approach-based” (p. 70); it attends to the addressee’s positive face, which is a person’s wish to have his or her wants considered desirable by others. One way of expressing positive politeness, the one that will be of special relevance here, is for the speaker to treat the addressee as “a member of an in-group, a friend” (ibid.), which may minimize a potentially face-threatening act. In fact, Brown & Levinson specifically discuss the use of inclusives as a positive politeness strategy. Although they speak of the speaker treating the addressee as being part of her (the speaker’s) in‑group, as we have seen above and as will be demonstrated in more detail
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later, it is also possible for the speaker to place herself in the addressee’s sphere. Descriptions of the functions of inclusives in Austronesian languages beyond their basic use, typically (though not without exception) mention politeness, inclusiveness, friendliness as factors. Thus, in an extended discussion of the use of the inclusive pronominals in Tuvaluan, a Polynesian language, Besnier (2000) says that they have “important affective connotations” (p. 380) and that “[t]he idiomatic uses of the first-person inclusive plural pronoun are indexical of the explicit emphasis on consensus, inclusion, and togetherness that permeates many aspects of Tuvaluan social life ….” (p. 382.) One of the examples Besnier gives is (5), which was “addressed to a Nukulaelae Islander who [had] just returned from Funafuti to Nukulaelae, and who [had] just told the speaker about the weather on Funafuti during the previous week” (p. 381):
(5) Ppau eiloo mo taatou! same indeed with pl(incl) ‘It was just the same here [lit.: with us].’ (Besnier 2000: 381)
As Besnier (ibid.) points out, “[c]learly, the pronoun cannot be given its literal meaning in this utterance, since it refers to a situation in which the interlocutor could not have taken part.” Inclusives may be used integratively in subtle ways to express, claim or profess inclusiveness, solidarity, in-groupness, sharing of wants. For example, Duranti (1981) mentions such skillful use of inclusives in Samoan speechmaking. A different example comes from Toqabaqita. In the Toqabaqita area there is a privately owned business (shops and vehicles) called Fanukia. The meaning of Fanukia is ‘our (incl.) land/area/place’, from fanu ‘land, area, place’ and kia, which is an archaic form for the plural inclusive independent pronoun.4 The business is owned privately, but its name suggests inclusiveness, as if the rest of the community benefited from it in the same way that its owner does. While the focus here is on inclusives in Austronesian languages, it is worth noting that the integrative use of inclusives is also found in at least one variety of Melanesian Pidgin. Meyerhoff (1998) discusses its existence in Bislama, a creole spoken in Vanuatu, although her focus on the integrative use is from the perspective of accommodation theory. We can now consider in some detail the integrative use of inclusives depending on whether the intended referent is the speaker/speaker’s group or the addressee/ addressee’s group, starting with the former. Note that this involves differences in intended reference, not a typology of languages, because in at least some of the languages the inclusives can be used either way. One more comment is called for here. Some of the sources consulted say that the inclusives may be used with singular reference, first person or second person. While this is true, what is of primary relevance is the fact that the intended reference of an inclusive may involve the speaker/speaker’s group and not the addressee/addressee’s group, or vice versa.
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
2.2. Speaker/speaker’s group as intended referent(s) When inclusives are used integratively in this way, the speaker is referring only to herself or to her group, but by using an inclusive pronominal treats the addressee/ addressee’s group as if they were part of her own group. An example of polite inclusion of the addressee in Tetun was given in the preceding section (example 4). By including the addressee, the speaker blurs the distinction between herself and the addressee: she suppresses her own individuality, deemphasizes herself as being distinct from the addressee. This is nicely illustrated by the following example from Kéo, spoken in south-central Flores, Indonesia, and by the accompanying commentary:
(6) A: Kamba ko’o sai? B: Kamba kita. buffalo poss who? buffalo pl(incl) A: ‘Whose water buffalo are these?’ B: ‘Our water buffalo.’ (Baird 2002)
Baird’s consultant explained this example in the following way: Both parties know that the water buffalo do not belong to the questioner, otherwise the questioner would not have asked such a question. However, the respondent uses the inclusive form of the pronoun in order not to appear arrogant for possessing something that the questioner does not. (Baird 2002)
According to Baird (ibid.), the inclusive form is often used instead of the corresponding exclusive form “so that the speaker appears community minded and generous, rather than appearing arrogant and selfish”. In Sawu, spoken in south-eastern Indonesia, also the addressee can be integrated with the speaker:
(7) ina dii ma, ta wәbe ri j’aa mother pl(incl) part nonpast hit.sg erg 1sg ‘My mother, I hit her.’ (Walker 1982: 11)
Walker specifically mentions the use of the plural inclusive as a polite pronoun for first-person singular reference but does not explain the exact nature of the politeness. Note that in (7) the verb ‘hit’ has the first-person singular pronoun referring to the agent, while the noun phrase ‘my mother’ in topic position has the inclusive pronoun as the possessor. Walker (1982: 11) emphasizes that the intended referent of the inclusive pronoun is the speaker himself: The context clearly indicates that the speaker is referring to his own mother and not that of the addressee. There is no reason to suggest that siblings are present, thus allowing an ‘our’ interpretation.
The inclusive pronoun may also be used integratively in Indonesian (Wolff 1971: 137):
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(8) Kita dengar di-kampung, bapak sudah punja perusahaan besar. pl(incl) hear in-home.town father perf have business big ‘We heard back home that your father has a large firm.’
Indonesian kita can be used integratively even if the intended reference is to the speaker alone. Macdonald & Darjowidjojo (1967: 120) characterize such use of kita as very occasional and as “more colloquial than formal” and say it is found especially in Jakarta. On the other hand, Sneddon (1996: 163) says that this use of kita is found in “some regional varieties” of Indonesian. In Karo Batak, spoken in Sumatra (west Indonesia), also the inclusive pronoun is used to express solidarity by including the addressee, as pointed out by Woollams (1996: 111): “When discussing Karo customs with outsiders, Karo speakers typically use the expression kita kalak Karo ‘we [incl.] Karo people’, thereby including the addressee who is not technically or even necessarily in that context regarded as a member of the group.” As we will see in the next section, the Karo Batak inclusive pronoun kita can also be used by the speaker to place herself in the addressee’s sphere. Toba Batak (spoken in Sumatra) is another language where the inclusive pronominals can be used with first-person singular reference, and also with secondperson singular reference (van der Tuuk 1971, Nababan 1981). According to van der Tuuk (1971: 218), the inclusive pronoun hita is used “in place of ho [2sg] and au [1sg] when the speaker wishes expressly to be polite or when the kinship relationship is not known”. The inclusive pronoun can also be used with first-person singular reference in Javanese (Horne 1963). (Javanese kita is also used with second person reference in the language of puppet plays.) Outside of the Indonesian area, inclusives may be used with first-person singular reference in Fijian. Schütz (1985: 252), citing personal communication from Paul Geraghty, says that “first-person dual inclusive can be used in a deferential way, when actually first-person singular exclusive is meant.” Similarly, Milner (1972: 53) says: This grammatical feature [the inclusive–exclusive distinction; F. L.] which is found in both tied and free pronouns, in verbal as well as nominal pronouns, [footnote omitted] is used to denote certain aspects of human relations which cannot be shown so readily in European languages. Thus, if a Fijian speaks of his house or of some other item of personal property, he usually refers to our house using the inclusive form. He thereby politely indicates that it is his own house but that the person he is speaking to is welcome to it.
In all the languages discussed thus far, the relevant forms function as inclusive pronominals, and in addition they can be used integratively, placing the addressee in the speaker’s sphere. In some such cases the intended reference of the pronominal is singular, solely to the speaker. A somewhat different situation obtains in at least some Polynesian languages. These languages have a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita, but the reflex is used only with singular reference, normally first person, but in at least one language also second person. It is not used
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian 269
as an inclusive pronoun; instead, there are innovative forms that fulfil that function. The innovative pronouns are based on the reflexes of *kita. In these languages, the reflexes of Proto-Austronesian *kita and the corresponding other pronominals also express politeness, typically with the speaker humbling herself. Tongan is one language where such self-humbling function of the reflex of *kita is found. Churchward (1953: 126) lists two sets of inclusive cardinal pronouns for Tongan, each set having three members: a “preposed” set and a “postposed” set. These occur before and after verbs, respectively. The pronouns in the preposed set are subject-indexing clitics; those in the postposed set are independent pronouns, which can have a variety of functions. The pronouns are given in Table 2. The hyphens have been added by me; the label “1 inclusive singular” is Churchward’s. The dual and the plural pronouns in the postposed set are derived from the singular form by means of the dual and the plural suffix, respectively. As we will see in Section 3, Churchward characterizes the primary function of the “singular inclusives” as indefinite, impersonal. What is relevant here is their function of speaker reference. They are used in this way “in the language of politeness or humility” (Churchward 1953: 127). Of te and kita in example (9) he says (ibid.) that they are “[l]ess harsh, less seemingly egotistic” than the respective exclusive first-person singular forms:
(9) ‘Okú te mā ‘aupito kita ‘i he’enau angafaí. pres 1sg.su be.ashamed very 1sg at their.pl conduct ‘I for my part am very ashamed of their conduct.’ (Churchward 1953: 127)
In Samoan also the reflex of the Proto-Austronesian plural inclusive pronoun *kita is used with singular, speaker reference. Mosel & Hovdhaugen (1992: 121) call the Samoan pronoun ‘ita and its colloquial variant ta’ita “emotional first-person singular forms” and characterize their use thus: “[they] frequently indicate self-abasement, humility, or an appeal for help, but they are above all an indication of affect showing that the speaker is emotionally involved in the situation”. Besides the emotional independent pronouns ‘ita and ta’ita, there is also a preverbal first-person singular emotional pronominal ta. ‘Ita and ta both occur in (10): (10) Ta te alu ‘ita ia Tigilau. 1sg.em genr go 1sg.em ld T. ‘I will go to Tigilau.’ (Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992: 121) Like Tongan, Samoan has innovative dual and plural inclusive pronominals. Table 2. Tongan inclusive pronominals
1 incl sg du pl
Preposed
Postposed
te ta tau
kita kita-ua kita-utolu
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A reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita is used with first-person singular reference also in Tuvaluan, where, according to Besnier (2000: 388), it “connotes feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, and self-abasement”: (11) A kita nei koo see too te moe i poo. cnt 1sg this inc neg fall the sleep at night ‘Poor old me cannot fall asleep at night.’ (Besnier 2000: 388) Tuvaluan kita can also be used with second-person singular reference (Section 2.3). When it refers to the speaker, it must be modified by the proximal demonstrative nei. Besnier considers Tuvaluan kita to be an “affective first- and second-person pronoun”. He does note, however, that it “has pronominal characteristics, although it does not always function as a pronoun in the ordinary sense of the term” (p. 388). An affective, appeal-for-sympathy/pity use of a first-person singular reflex of the Proto-Austronesian plural inclusive pronoun is also found in Tokelauan, another Polynesian language (Tokelau dictionary 1986). On the other hand, in Niuean (also Polynesian) the reflex of Proto-Austronesian *kita functions as “the emphatic, boastful or informal version” of the neutral first-person singular independent and possessive pronominals (Sperlich 1997: 157). Such emphatic or boastful use of (former) inclusive pronominals is certainly unusual, not just in Polynesian but also elsewhere in Austronesian. The use of the reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita with firstperson singular reference, but not with inclusive non-singular reference, is found in both primary subgroups of Polynesian (Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian) and has been reconstructed for Proto-Polynesian (Walsh & Biggs 1966). Those Polynesian languages that use a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita with first-person singular reference (and perhaps also with secondperson singular reference) have innovative non-singular inclusive pronoun forms. In Table 3 the relevant forms are given for the languages discussed above. A different situation obtains in Pukapukan, another Polynesian language. Pukapukan does not have a reflex of Proto-Austronesian *kita, but Salisbury (2002) reports that the dual form tāua is occasionally used with first-person singular reference, the addressee being included “out of politeness” (p. 201); see (12). Table 3. Singular reflexes of the Proto-Austronesian plural inclusive pronoun and innovative non-singular inclusive pronouns in some Polynesian languages
Tongan Samoan Tuvaluan Tokealauan Niuean
Reflex of PAN *kita as 1sg pronoun
Inclusive dual
Inclusive plural
kita ‘ita, ta’ita kita kita kita
kitaua ‘itā’ua, tā’ua taaua tāua taua
kitautolu ‘itātou, tātou taatou tātou tautolu
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
(12) Ēnei nā mō talatala nā aku kia koe here art few talk.red poss me goal.art 2sg nō lunga o tā tāua yanga tātā mako. poss on poss poss du(incl) work write k. o.chant ‘Here are a few words from me to you concerning how I have written the chants [which I enclose].’ (Lit.: ‘… concerning our (incl) work of writing chants.’) (Salisbury 2002: 201) It appears that in the history of Pukapukan cyclical renewal has taken place. Proto‑Polynesian *kita, which continued an earlier inclusive plural pronoun but which in Proto-Polynesian was used with first-person singular reference, was lost in Pukapukan, and the new dual inclusive form is now used integratively with the speaker as the intended referent. A similar use of an innovative cognate form is found in Tikopian, also a Polynesian language. The Tikopian plural inclusive pronoun tatou may be used in an integrative way in place of the exclusive pronoun for politeness: (13) Ke ka poi ki tatou paito? part fut go to pl(incl) house ‘Are you going to our house?’ (Implying, not literally, that visitor shares in rights to it.) (Firth 1985: 501) (The parenthetical comment is Firth’s.) Unlike Pukapukan, Tikopian does have a reflex of Proto-Austronesian *kita. Firth characterizes Tikopian kita as a first-person singular indefinite pronoun, equivalent to English one. From the examples he gives, it appears that kita is used for indirect reference to oneself, as opposed to the “regular” first-person singular pronoun. In (14) kita and the regular first-person singular pronoun kuou co-occur. (14) Ko kita nei, kuou. part 1sg here 1sg ‘One here, it is I.’ (Firth 1985: 188) (15) Kita maso-kita, kita poi tatāfau. 1sg alone-1sg 1sg go stroll.red ‘One on one’s own, one goes for a stroll.’ (Firth 1985: 188) As we have seen, in some languages the integration of the addressee is coupled with a humbling function with respect to the speaker: the speaker shows deference to the addressee by humbling herself. For discussion of the humbling function in the Austronesian languages mentioned above and in some others see Cysouw (this volume).
2.3. Addressee/addressee’s group as intended referent(s) Inclusives can then have the speaker or the speaker’s group as their intended referent(s). However, as we will see now, they can also have the addressee or, ap-
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parently less commonly, the addressee’s group as their intended referent(s). Most sources consulted specifically mention second-person singular, not non-singular, reference. This use of inclusives appears to be more common among Indonesian languages than anywhere else in the Austronesian family. Typically, though not without exception, inclusives used in this way serve a politeness purpose. By placing herself in the addressee’s sphere, the speaker blurs the distinction between the addressee and herself, which may serve to mitigate potentially face‑threatening acts. In some, but not all, languages where an inclusive is used with second person reference it is also used with first person reference. In Fehan Tetun, the form ita, a reflex of Proto-Austronesian *kita, functions as an inclusive and also as a “polite pronoun for second-person singular ‘you’”, which, according to consultants, “should be used for older people, including parents, and for other people in high positions, such as nobles and outsiders” (van Klinken 1999: 113), although it is not common in this function. (16) Ama Liu, ha’u k-mai k-amán ita . . . father Liu 1sg 1sg-come 1sg-accompany.(noble) pl(incl) ‘Father Liu, I have come to accompany you . . . (Said by a noble girl to a young nobleman.) (van Klinken 1999: 113) In Bajo (Lesser Sunda Islands), the inclusive pronominals are also used as honorifics for the second-person singular. (It is not clear from Verheijen’s (1986) brief discussion if those forms can also be used as second-person plural honorifics.) (17) Poré ja kita lagi saloh . . . go only pl(incl) again tomorrow ‘(Let us have patience, mother.) Just go (you) once again tomorrow . . .’ (Verheijen 1986: 19) In Karo Batak, according to Woollams (1996), the inclusive pronominals are used to express solidarity: … [the inclusive pronoun] kita is normally used by a speaker to include the addressee. This may often not be literally or factually correct, but nevertheless socially appropriate, in the interests of maintaning solidarity. For instance, when asking a child if his father is at home, one would normally ask [18 further below]. (Woollams 1996: 110–11)
As we saw in the preceding section, a Karo Batak inclusive pronominal can be used when it is the speaker who is the intended referent. But an inclusive pronominal can also be used with the addressee as the intended referent. In the quote above Woollams speaks of the speaker including the addressee, although in the present study we think of the speaker as placing herself in the addressee’s sphere when the intended referent is second person. Although Woollams specifically mentions the independent pronoun kita, the example he gives contains not kita but the inclusive possessive suffix:
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
(18) I rumah kang bapa-nta? at house part father-pl(incl).poss ‘Is (our) father at home?’ (Woollams 1996: 111) In Muna, spoken on several islands off the south-east coast of Sulawesi, the dual inclusive possessive suffix may be used with second-person singular reference, while the plural inclusive possessive suffix may be used with second-person non-singular reference. (Only the inclusive pronominals make a dual-plural distinction; see Section 2.4 for discussion.) Van den Berg (1989) characterizes this use of inclusive possessive suffixes in terms of politeness: (19) lambu-nto house-du(incl).poss a. ‘our (two) house’ b. ‘your (sg, polite) house’ (van den Berg 1989: 85) (20) wale-nto-omu hut-du(incl)-pl a. ‘our (more than two) hut’ b. ‘your (pl, polite) hut’ (van den Berg 1989: 85) The usual pattern in Indonesian languages is for inclusives to express politeness, deference when they are used with second person reference. A somewhat different situation may obtain in Acehnese (spoken in Sumatra), where the inclusive pronoun geutanyoe (which historically consists of a reflex of Proto-Austronesian *kita and nyoe ‘this’) can, according to Durie (1985: 121), be used patronizingly with second person reference “most typically in statements which affirm general principles of behaviour”: (21) Geutanyoe ka=chik, bek ta=peuranguy pl(incl) in-adult dont pl(incl)-act lagee=aneuk=manyak. way-child-infant ‘We’re grown up now; let’s not act like a child.’ (Durie 1985: 121) As we will see in Section 3, Acehnese geutanyoe is also used non-referentially, and it is conceivable that in (21) the second person interpretation derives purely from the context. And while Durie does not go into detail, it is possible that whether an instance of the inclusive pronoun is patronizing or not also depends on context rather than being part of the semantics/pragmatics of the pronoun itself in the way that the polite, deferential use of the inclusives in the other languages discussed above is. Inclusives are used with second-person singular reference also in Toba Batak “when the speaker wishes expressly to be polite or when the kinship relationship is not known” (van der Tuuk 1971: 218) and in Javanese, in puppet-play language (Horne 1963). In both languages the same inclusives can also be used with first person reference (Section 2.2).
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Elsewhere in Austronesian, one finds the use of a formerly inclusive pronominal (Section 2.2) with second-person singular reference in Tuvaluan, a Polynesian language. Tuvaluan has the form kita, which is a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun but does not have this function in Tuvaluan. It can be used with second-person singular reference, as an “affective” pronoun, although it is not common in everyday language. This use connotes “feelings of affection and empathy” (Besnier 2000: 388). Kita can also be used with first-person singular reference (Section 2.2). In both functions, according to Besnier (ibid.), “it is stylistically marked, in that it is mostly used in courting contexts, particularly love letters and love songs, or when talking or singing about one’s home island”. When the referent is second person, kita may be used by itself or in apposition to the regular second-person singular pronoun. This appositional use is illustrated in (22) with the regular secondperson singular pronoun koe: (22) E alofa au kiaa koe kita. nonpast feel.empathy 1sg to 2sg 2sg ‘I feel affection for dear little you.’ (Besnier 2000: 388) We also find inclusive pronominals used with second person reference to express intimacy in Toqabaqita. In (23) the intended referent of the dual inclusive pronoun koro is the addressee. Here this use of the inclusive pronoun is jocular rather than polite, jocularity being indexical of personal closeness: (23) = (3)
Nau kwai qasi-qaba fas-i laa waqi koro, wane nau. 1sg 1sg.fut fall-hand prec-at inside basket du(incl) man 1sg ‘I’ll first slip my hand into our (meaning: your) basket, my friend.’
The use of inclusives to integrate the speaker into the addressee’s sphere is also discussed by Cysouw (this volume). Referring to Blust (1977), Cysouw also mentions three languages, Old Javanese, Coastal Saluan (Loinan) and Bimanese, where the erstwhile inclusive has become “the regular second-person singular, without honorific connotation” (Cysouw, this volume, p. 214).5
2.4. Discussion As shown in the preceding two sections, in a number of languages pronominals that are or used to be inclusives are used integratively with first or second person intended reference. Let’s now consider the motivation for such use. Leaving aside the question of grammatical number for now (we will come back to it shortly), an inclusive pronominal in its basic function minimally refers to the two participants in a speech situation, the speaker and the addressee, the two types of participant either one of which may be the sole intended referent in the extended use of an inclusive pronominal. When an inclusive is used with first person reference, the addressee is brought into the speaker’s sphere. When an inclusive is used with second person reference, the speaker places herself in the addressee’s sphere. Since all the
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
languages in which inclusives can be used in either of these two ways have “regular” first and second person pronominals, the question to ask is, “What is the motivation for, the function of, using an inclusive pronominal rather than a first or second person pronominal?”. Although there are individual exceptions in both types of case, the integrative use of inclusives primarily expresses politeness, deference, either by the speaker humbling herself or honorifically with respect to the addressee. By using an inclusive pronominal when the intended referent is the speaker herself or her own group, she suppresses, downplays her own individuality, de-emphasizes herself. She is not a separate individual, separate from the addressee. By using an inclusive pronominal when the intended referent is the addressee or the addressee’s group, the speaker identifies herself with the addressee: the addressee’s desires, wants, and/or involvement in a situation are the speaker’s as well. Both strategies blur, submerge the distinction between speaker and addressee; the speaker does not present herself and the addressee as members of different groups. Such integrative strategies are one type of positive politeness, as discussed by Brown & Levinson (1987). By not mentioning herself directly (by means of the first-person pronoun), the speaker downplays her separateness, distance from the addressee. By not mentioning the addressee directly (by means of the second-person pronoun) and by placing herself in the addressee’s sphere, the speaker alleviates potentially face-threatening acts. Whatever threat there may be to the addressee’s face, the speaker presents the situation as if the threat applied equally to herself by virtue of her association with the addressee. In some languages, the integrative use of an inclusive pronominal involves factors other than (merely) politeness. In Toqabaqita, an inclusive pronominal can be used to express personal closeness. And in Tuvaluan, according to Besnier (2000), the formerly inclusive pronominals are used to express affection. Both of these are, of course, also kinds of positive politeness in Brown & Levinson’s (1987) sense. Inclusive pronominals can then be used with reference to the two diametrically opposed interlocutors: the speaker and the addressee(s). This, however, is not surprising, because inclusives combine both types of interlocutor in their referential range. They share reference to the speaker with (true) first person pronominals, and they share reference to the addressee(s) with second person pronominals. They are partly like first person pronominals and partly like second person pronominals, but are not fully either; rather they are a category of their own (see, for example, Greenberg 1988; Cysouw 2003; and Daniel, this volume). Either aspect of the referential range of inclusives can be seized upon in their non-basic use: referring to the speaker as if the addressee(s) were involved as well, or referring to the addressee as if the speaker were involved as well. In the history of the Polynesian languages, a reanalysis of the earlier inclusive independent pronoun has taken place. The reflexes of the inclusive plural pronoun are no longer used in that function. Rather, they are used with singular reference, mostly to the speaker, but in at least one language (Tuvaluan) also to the addressee.
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What used to be only covert reference of the pronoun when used integratively has become its real reference, with the integrative function disappearing as a consequence. New inclusive pronouns have developed, and in at least some languages they may now be used integratively, thus retracing some of the development of the original inclusive pronoun. On the other hand, in some languages of Indonesia the erstwhile inclusives have become true second-person pronouns. One can assume that here too the originally covert reference has become the pronominals’ true reference, in these cases to the addressee(s). The integrative use of inclusive pronominals is situation-creating (Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990: 200). It is not determined by objective, referential criteria; by definition, the speaker and the addressee do not form a group with respect to the situation being encoded. Rather, they are used to create in‑groupness, as if the speaker and the addressee were part of the same group with respect to that situation. This is done for whatever purposes the speaker has in mind. In the languages that have a dual number in addition to the plural (and possibly also trial or paucal), it is normally the dual pronominals that are used with first or second-person singular reference. This, of course, is well motivated because it is the dual forms whose reference is strictly to the two participants in a speech dyad. The personal dyad is the basic unit of linguistic interaction (see, for example, Brown & Levinson 1987 and Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990). This is reflected in one kind of historical development that has taken place in some Austronesian languages, whereby the Proto-Austronesian plural inclusive pronominals have become “dual” inclusive pronominals. (For the appropriateness of the term “dual” see further below.) This has happened in, for example, Muna. As discussed in Section 2.3, Muna has a dual inclusive possessive suffix ‑nto. ‑Nto is a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian plural inclusive possessive/genitive suffix ‑ta (Table 1, Section 1). To express the plural number, another suffix is added to the dual one; compare (24) and (25): (24) = (19)
lambu-nto house-du(incl).poss a. ‘our (two) house’ b. ‘your (sg, polite) house’ (van den Berg 1989: 85)
(25) = (20)
wale-nto-omu hut-du(incl)-pl a. ‘our (more than two) hut’ b. ‘your (pl, polite) hut’ (van den Berg 1989: 85)
It is only in the inclusive category that Muna has a dual-plural distinction. The original plural reference of the suffix has changed to dual, presumably because its most frequent reference was to a personal dyad. In a language with an inclusive–exclusive distinction, the inclusive category is the only one whose reference includes the two participants in an interactional dyad, which acts as motivation for the development of a dual number there rather than in any of the other categories.
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
A similar kind of development has taken place in Tagalog, where the form kita (kata in some dialects), which is a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian plural inclusive pronoun *kita, functions as a “dual” inclusive pronoun.6 In Tagalog also the “dual” number exists only in the inclusive category (Schachter & Otanes 1972; Ramos & Cena 1990). Such pronominal systems are found in other Philippine languages; see Greenberg (1988) for discussion and references. Such systems attest to the status of the personal dyad as the basic unit of linguistic interaction. This is also evidenced by the relatively common existence of paradigms where there is a dedicated inclusive form used strictly with reference to two individuals, the speaker and the addressee, even if the language does not have a dual-number category (Cysouw 2003). As various scholars have argued (for example, Greenberg 1988; Cysouw 2003; and Daniel, this volume), even though such inclusive forms refer to two individuals, they are not duals. They are to be analyzed on a par with pronominals that refer to single individuals, as forming a minimal-number set (as opposed to an augmented number set). Finally, it should be pointed out that while the integrative use of inclusives is typically a politeness strategy, it is, in principle at least, possible for it to be used in ways that do not express (positive or negative) politeness. Thus, it is conceivable that a person might say ‘We (incl) have done a good job’ and that the addressee might rightfully object to the speaker placing herself in her (the addressee’s) sphere, because, for example, in her view the speaker was not one of those who had done a good job. Similarly, it is conceivable that a person might say ‘We (incl.) have really messed things up’ and that the addressee might rightfully object to being grouped together with the speaker, because she (the addressee) does not consider herself responsible for things having been messed up. Such uses of inclusive pronominals would still be integrative, but they would not express politeness, positive or negative. Interestingly, none of the sources of data consulted mentions such uses of inclusive pronominals. This may be because such uses would most likely be interpreted as being misrepresentations of facts rather than as an established strategy for social interaction and thus intrinsically of less interest linguistically.
3. Impersonal, non-referential inclusives Pronominals are used impersonally when they do not have uniquely identified referents. Rather, their “reference” is to more or less vaguely identified sets, collectivities. They have a generalizing function; see, for example, the discussions of French on by Laberge & Sankoff (1979) and Freyne (1990). As such, they are typically, though not solely, used in encoding generic types of situation, rather than specific, individual situations. Impersonal uses of inclusive pronominals have been reported for several Austronesian languages, although sometimes it is not quite clear whether a particular instance of an inclusive pronominal is impersonal or integrative, or perhaps both at
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the same time. And secondly, it is not always clear whether the impersonal function is unique to inclusives. Before addressing the latter issue, we will look at some languages in which inclusives are said to be able to be used impersonally. In Acehnese, according to Durie (1985: 120), the inclusive pronominals are used as “indefinite pronoun[s]”, “particularly for stating general truths about human activity or behaviour”. (26) meunyo ka=lheueh ta=meukawên if in-finish pl(incl)-marry ureueng=inöng=geutanyoe=nyan êh sa=jan=geutanyoe person-woman-pl(incl)-that sleep one-time-pl(incl) ‘Once you are married your wife sleeps with you.’ (Said by one man to another.) (Durie 1985: 120–1) The implication is that this is not a statement about the speaker, the addressee and their respective wives, but about (Acehnese?) men in general. The agentless passive translation of the Acehnese sentence in (27) below captures the non-referential, impersonal use of the inclusive pronominal. The agents are non‑salient. (27) bruek ta=peugöt keu=aweuek coconut.shell pl(incl)-make to-ladle ‘Coconut shells are made into ladles.’ (Durie 1985: 120) Note that in both of the Acehnese examples, even though the inclusive pronominals are used impersonally, they can still be viewed as inclusive: the set of all men includes, at least potentially, both the speaker and the addressee; and in the same way, the set of people who make coconuts shells into ladles includes, at least potentially, both the speaker and the addressee. At any rate, there is no indication that the speaker and the addressee are not included in the sets. A somewhat different example of impersonal use of an inclusive pronominal is given by van Klinken for Fehan Tetun. It is taken from an explanation given to her “why men are fined for premarital sex if they subsequently refuse to marry the girl” (van Klinken 1999: 112). The speaker is an elderly man. (28) Ita loke ta feto ne’e ti’an tó. pl(incl) open already woman this already tag ‘We/you/one (the hypothetical man) had already taken this girl sexually (lit.: opened this girl.)’ (van Klinken 1999: 113) The addressee is an outsider, in fact a foreigner, and female, and so is clearly not objectively included in the intended collectivity of Tetun men. It may, however, be the case that the inclusive pronominal fulfills both an impersonal and an integrative function here: the addressee is included, out of politeness, as part of Tetun community and culture, about which a generic statement is being made. (As mentioned in Sections 2.1. and 2.3, the Tetun inclusive pronominal is also used integratively.)
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
Similar integrative-cum-impersonal uses of inclusive pronominals appear also to be found in Tamambo (Vanuatu), judging by the following statement by Jauncey (1997: 107): The first-person plural inclusive (hinda) is often used when describing how things are done, as for example, different socio-cultural procedures such as planting yams, cooking island food, participating in various customs and so on. Since such a description does not include the participation of the addressee, at least not at the time of speech, it appears to be a politeness gesture towards the speaker as being welcome and included in the group.
A somewhat different situation is found in Tongan. As mentioned in Section 2.2, the Tongan reflex of what was historically a plural inclusive pronoun, Proto-Austronesian *kita, has lost that meaning, with innovative plural and dual forms replacing it. Tongan kita, as well as its preverbal counterpart te, can be used integratively with first-person singular reference. However, Churchward (1953: 127) says that the primary, fundamental meaning of te and kita is “indefinite ‘one’ which means, in effect, I (or me) or you or anyone else”. The example he gives is: (29) ‘Oku ‘ikai totonu ke te tokanga pē kiate kita. pres neg be.proper subj impers pay.attention only to impers ‘It is not right that one should attend only to oneself.’ (Churchward 1953: 127) The impersonal pronominal can be viewed as having an inclusive interpretation: whatever the set of people referred to is, it involves, by implication, the speaker and the addressee. What makes the Tongan impersonal pronominals different from the ones discussed earlier is that in their inclusive sense they only function impersonally, non-referentially, there being new inclusive, referential pronominals (Section 2.2). Something similar appears to be the case in Rotuman, a fairly close relative of Tongan, although not a Polynesian language. Rotuman has a pronoun of the form ‘it(a), a reflex of Proto‑Austronesian *kita, which Churchward (1940) calls a “firstperson inclusive singular” pronoun. (He uses the same designation for Tonga kita; see Section 2.2.) According to Churchward (1940: 145), ‘it(a) “[f]undamentally, and usually” means ‘one’, ‘oneself ’, and its possessive counterpart ‘ot means ‘one’s’. (Like Tongan, Rotuman has innovative inclusive pronominals.) In context, the intended referent may be the speaker, but “even in this case [the pronominal] carries with it an ‘inclusive’ implication, such as ‘and so would you (or anyone else) if placed in the same position’” (ibid.). Churchward (ibid.) provides the following example (only the translation is given here): ‘Naturally I was overjoyed at seeing my two kiddies [again]’ and says that the sense ‘naturally’ is conveyed by the use of the “firstperson inclusive” forms ‘it, ‘ot and one other one. While the Rotuman forms can be used impersonally, they do, at the same time, carry the implication of inclusivity. While some descriptions specifically discuss an impersonal, non-referential use of inclusive pronominals, it is not always clear that such a function is unique to the
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inclusives. There is no intrinsic reason while other plural pronominals could not, under the appropriate circumstances, be used in this way. That this may be so is exemplified by Harrison’s (1976) discussion of Mokilese, a Micronesian language. Besides singular, dual and plural personal pronouns, Mokilese also has “remote plural pronouns”, which “refer to groups of people, usually large, and most of which are probably not directly present when being discussed” (Harrison 1976: 89). The remote plural pronouns are commonly used in “generic habitual sentences” (p. 90). Thus the inclusive remote pronoun kihs “is often used to refer to all the people of Mokil or to the whole human race” (ibid.): (30) Kihs joh kak mine pohn jampah ma joh joau. pl(incl).rem neg can live on earth if neg sun ‘We couldn’t live on the earth if there were no sun.’ (Harrison 1976: 90) But then Harrison goes on to give two examples of other remote plural pronouns used to make generic statements. Only the translations are given here, and the relevant pronouns are italicized. One of the examples contains the exclusive pronoun: ‘One kind of surfing we [excl.] do is body surfing’; and the other one contains the third-person plural pronoun: ‘The koaroa [reef herons] often gather on the sand. When they fly away, they separate into two’s and fly off a short distance in search of food.’ (p. 90). It is then quite likely that in other languages for which the inclusive pronominals are said to be used impersonally, they still have their inclusive meaning. Both the speaker and the addressee are, by implication, included in the collectivity about which a general statement is being made. The impersonal function may also be combined with the integrative function.
4. Loss of the inclusive category As pointed out at the outset, the existence of the inclusive category is characteristic of the Austronesian language family and the category is reconstructible for ProtoAustronesian. However, there are languages without inclusives, which can, then, be assumed to have been lost there. Although the number of such languages appears to be quite small, a pattern is observable in the languages for which data are available. In almost all of the languages in which the inclusive–exclusive distinction has been lost, it is the inclusive, not the exclusive, member of the original opposition that takes on the function of the “general” first-person non-singular pronominal. The remaining language is only partially different from the others, and is interesting and revealing in its own way. We will consider the former languages first. Although the data come from only a small number of languages, some of them belong in different relatively high subgroups within Austronesian, and so the loss of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in them can only be the result of parallel independent developments. One of the languages is Malayu Ambong, spoken in the
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian Table 4. Malayu Ambong personal pronouns (van Minde 1997) 1sg 2sg 3sg 1pl 2pl 3pl
beta ose dia, ontua (polite), antua (deference), akang (neuter) kat’ong dorang dorang
central Moluccas, eastern Indonesia. The basic set of the Malayu Ambong pronouns is given in Table 4. (Many of the pronouns have variant forms, which are not listed here.) According to van Minde (1997), the first-person plural pronoun kat’ong derives historically from earlier *kita, which was a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun, and orang ‘man, people’. (Orang is also found in the second- and thirdperson plural pronouns, both of which have the form dorang.) The Proto-Austronesian exclusive pronoun *kami does not survive in Malayu Ambong, and neither does the inclusive–exclusive distinction. Another language is Kiribatese, spoken in Micronesia. Kiribatese has a set of “emphatic” pronouns and a set of possessive pronouns, both of which are given in Table 5. The first-person plural possessive pronoun ara continues the Proto-Austronesian inclusive genitive pronominal *ta, added to the possessive base a-. Although there are some phonological irregularities, the emphatic pronoun ngaira almost certainly continues, with accretion of the initial nga, the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita. In Kiribatese also it is the exclusive pronominals that are lost. (Kiribatese also has a set of subject-indexing pronominals, which too do not make an inclusive–exclusive distinction.) The inclusive–exclusive contrast has also been lost in a number of languages spoken in the north New Guinea area, and in all of them it is the erstwhile inclusive “disjunctive” pronoun that continues as the general first-person plural pronoun (Ross 1988). The languages are Ulau-Suain, Ali, Tumleo, Sissano and Serak. These languages form a low-level subgroup within the North New Guinea Cluster, which Table 5. Kiribatese emphatic and possessive pronouns (Groves et al. 1985) Independent
Possessive
1sg 2sg 3sg
ngngai ngkoe ngaia
au am ana
1pl 2pl 3pl
ngaira ngkamii ngaiia
ara amii aia
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suggests that the loss of the distinction took place only once, in the proto-language ancestral to them. Finally, Cysouw (this volume), citing van der Bergh (1953), mentions that Banggai (spoken in Sulawesi) has a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive *kita that functions as a general first-person plural pronoun. The factor that underlies the continuance of the inclusive pronominals in the new function of general first-person plural pronominals and the elimination of the exclusive pronominals when the inclusive–exclusive distinction is lost has to do with the difference in the referential ranges of inclusives and exclusives. The referential range of exclusives includes the speaker and one or more non-addressees, while the referential range of inclusives includes the speaker, the addressee(s) as well as, potentially, one or more non-addressees. That is, all other things being equal, the referential range of inclusives is broader than that of exclusives. In fact, all other things being equal, the former includes the latter. If a former exclusive pronominal should become a general first-person plural pronominal, its referential range would have to change to include the addressee(s) as well. On the other hand, no change in the referential range is required when an originally inclusive pronominal becomes a general first-person plural pronominal, because its referential range included not only the speaker and the non-addressee(s) but, by definition, also the addressee(s). An originally exclusive pronominal would have to undergo a change in its referential range, while an originally inclusive pronominal does not. And while it is not impossible for the referential range of an exclusive pronominal to change in this way, as will be discussed presently, employing an element that does not require a change in a novel function is better motivated than employing one that does. When the exclusive pronominals of a language are lost, the inclusive–exclusive contrast is lost as a consequence, but the referential properties of the erstwhile inclusives remain intact. The referential range of inclusive includes, minimally, the speaker and the addressee(s). The fact that in the Austronesian languages just discussed the former inclusives have become general first-person non-singular pronominals is evidence that the speaker aspect of their referential range was dominant over the addressee aspect. After all, reference to the addressee(s) is not a defining feature of general first-person non-singular pronominals. The inclusive–exclusive distinction has also been lost in Tukang Besi, spoken in an area east of Buton Island, Southeast Sulawesi province, Indonesia. However, unlike in the languages just discussed, in Tukang Besi both the erstwhile inclusive and the erstwhile exclusive forms have been retained, but the inclusive–exclusive contrast has been reinterpreted as a number contrast. The Tukang Besi pronominals are set out in Table 6. Particularly relevant here are the free and the possessive forms, for which there are Proto-Austronesian reconstructions (Table 1). Tukang Besi does not have an inclusive‑exclusive distinction, but it does have a plural-dual/paucal distinction, although only in the first person. The plural and the dual/paucal numbers are only
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian Table 6. Tukang Besi pronominals (Donohue 1999)
1sg 2sg 3sg 1du/pa 1pl 2pl 3pl
Irrealis subject
Realis subject
Free forms Possessive
Object
Dative object
kukona-/akatakina-/a-
ku‘u-/nuno-/okotoino-/o-
iaku iko’o ia ikami ikita ikomiu amai
-aku -ko -‘e -kami -kita -komiu -‘e
-naku -nso -ne -nsami -nggita -ngkomiu (amai)
-su -‘u -no -mami -nto -miu -no
“rather loosely distinguished”, and there is “considerable overlap in usage between the two” (Donohue 1999: 113). The plural free and possessive forms continue the Proto‑Austronesian inclusive forms, and the dual/paucal forms continue the exclusive forms. It is then possible for an originally exclusive pronominal to become a general first-person non-singular pronominal (see the discussion above), but this kind of development must be placed in broader context. It is not an accident that the originally exclusive pronominals became duals/paucals rather than plurals and that the originally inclusive pronominals became plurals rather than duals/paucals. All other things being equal, the referential range of inclusives is broader than that of exclusives: speaker, addressee(s) and other(s) vs. speaker and non-addressee(s); that is, inclusives refer to more individuals than exclusives do. Although there is no direct evidence, the loss of the inclusive–exclusive contrast and the emergence of the plural-dual/paucal contrast in Tukang Besi most likely took place more or less simultaneously. The loss of the inclusive– exclusive contrast led the way, but before one of the terms in the opposition was lost, it was utilized to participate in a new opposition, plural vs. dual/paucal. The new number contrast emerged only in the first person, where there was a pre-existing pair of terms which could be employed to express it. It did not develop in the second and the third persons, where there were no pre-existing pairs of terms. Of the two terms in the original inclusive–exclusive opposition it was the one that, in principle, referred to a larger number of individuals than the other that became the plural marker, while the other one, which, in principle, referred to a smaller number of individuals, became the dual/paucal marker. The re-interpretation of the inclusive pronominal as a plural form and the re-interpretation of the exclusive pronominal as a dual/paucal form is motivated, while re-interpretation of the inclusive as dual/paucal and of the exclusive as plural would not have been. The defining feature shared by inclusives and exclusives is reference to the speaker. The fact that the original inclusive–exclusive contrast has been reinterpreted as a number contrast without an inclusive–exclusive distinction is evidence that it was the speaker aspect of the referential range of the erstwhile inclusives that was dominant.
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5. Exclusives There is little that can be said about exclusive pronominals in Austronesian. They do not appear to be subject to semantic/pragmatic developments to the same extent that inclusives are. In fact, I am aware of only a few languages where an exclusive pronominal is used with reference other than jointly to the speaker and one or more participants other than the addressee(s), and all of them are spoken in the same general geographical area. One of these is Minangkabau, spoken primarily in Sumatra. (I am grateful to Michael Cysouw (this volume) for bringing the Minangkabau data to my attention.) Minangkabau has an inclusive–exclusive distinction: the inclusive pronoun is kito, which is a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita, and the exclusive pronoun is kami, which is a reflex of the Proto‑Austronesian exclusive pronoun *kami (Table 1). The information on the use of the two pronouns comes from Moussay (1981), but, unfortunately, it is sketchy. According to Moussay, the exclusive pronoun kami can be used to refer only to the speaker, in a polite, humble way. The use of kami in Minangkabau with speaker reference has been confirmed by David Gil (pers. comm., March 2002), who also says that the same is true of at least some varieties of Malay and Indonesian spoken in the neighbouring Riau province. There too the relevant forms are kami. It is not known whether these are independent developments, and so it is not possible to make any generalizations, but it is worth pointing out the following. As we saw earlier, inclusive pronominals can have solely the speaker or the addressee as the intended referent; in its basic function an inclusive pronominal refers to both. It is not an accident that in Minangkabau and the relevant varieties of Malay and Indonesian the exclusive pronoun can have the speaker, but not the addressee, as the sole intended referent, because in its basic function an exclusive pronominal does not have the addressee in its referential range. (Recall from Section 2.1 that the Minangkabau inclusive pronoun can refer to the speaker, or the addressee, or a third person. All of these are among the possible referents of inclusives in their basic function.) Before leaving the topic of exclusives, I want to briefly mention information from two other languages. The first one is Taba, spoken on Makian island, off Halmahera in east Indonesia. Bowden (2001) mentions two archaic first-person singular independent pronouns, joumonam, used by men, and joumapinam, used by women. The pronouns were used “when speaking to others of higher status” (Bowden 2001: 189). Both pronouns are historically polymorphemic: the masculine form joumonam comes from jou-mon-am ‘Lord-man-1pl(excl)’, and the feminine form joumapinam comes from jou-mapin-am ‘Lord-woman-1pl(excl)’. Am functions in present-day Taba as the first-person exclusive possessive particle. The two pronouns are grammaticalizations of exclusive possessive noun phrases. The other language is Malayu Ambong. Malayu Ambong was discussed in the preceding section as one of the two languages in which the inclusive–exclusive constrast has disappeared. However, van Minde (1997: 68, n. 6) briefly mentions a “dia
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
lectal form” bat’ong, which “denotes the first-person plural but excluding the addressee”. According to van Minde, bat’ong comes historically from the first-person singular pronoun beta and orang ‘man, people’. Recall that the general first-person plural pronoun kat’ong derives historically from a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita and orang.
6. Conclusion Several patterns have emerged from the present study, and some generalizations can be made. When not used in their basic function, Austronesian inclusives perform primarily an integrative function: the speaker places herself and the addressee(s) in the same group, even though objectively they do not belong in the same group with respect to the situation at hand. This can be done by the speaker placing herself in the addressee’s sphere. The speaker aligns herself with the addresee, as if the addressee’s wants, desires were her own as well. This is a classical example of positive politeness in Brown & Levinson’s (1987) sense. This function is typically honorific, deferential; it is the addressee that matters. Alternatively, the speaker may bring the addressee(s) into her own sphere. By doing this, the speaker suppresses, de-emphasizes her own identity. What she does, what she is involved in, is presented as if the addressee(s) were involved as well. By backgrounding herself, the addresee humbles herself, thus indirectly honouring the addressee, which is another aspect of positive politeness. Both strategies involve blurring, de-emphasizing the distinction between the speaker/speaker’s group and the addressee(s)/addressee’s group. While in their basic use inclusives necessarily have non-singular reference, they can be used with singular intended reference, paradoxically through their integrative function: the speaker is referring to herself while including the addressee, or the speaker is referring to the addressee while including herself. The normal referential properties of inclusives do not apply here. It is through the suspension of those referential properties that additional, social meanings are expressed, namely politeness (Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990). Many Austronesian languages have not just a singular–plural distinction, but a singular-dual-plural or even a singular–dual–trial/paucal–plural distinction. In some languages, the dual — as the number of referents — exists only in the inclusive category. Such languages can be said to have a minimal-augmented number contrast (for example, Cysouw 2003; and Daniel, this volume). This kind of development has happened through the reinterpretation of the erstwhile plural inclusives, with innovating forms having augmented (plural) reference. That is, the concept of dual reference may develop in the inclusive category before it develops in any other (exclusive, second person, third person). This, not doubt, reflects the status of the personal dyad as the basic interactional unit. The integrative use of inclusives with first person or second person reference is another reflection of this. In the Polynesian languages further development has taken place whereby the originally covert
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reference to the speaker by means of a plural inclusive pronoun has developed into overt first-person singular reference. In contrast, in a few languages in Indonesia what originally was probably covert reference to the addressee has developed into overt second person reference. Exclusives, because they foreground the distinction between the speaker and the addressee in their basic use, are ill equipped to serve an integrative function, and so, not surprisingly, are not used in that way. In principle, given their basic function, exclusives could be used in an extended way counter-integratively, to emphasize the speaker’s and the addressee’s distinctness or even to create dissociation between them, treating them as if they were not in an in-group relation with respect to the situation at hand when in fact objectively they are. However, since in human affairs the premium is on solidarity, inclusiveness, co-operation, such an extension of exclusives is much less likely than the integrative use of inclusives. In the few languages in which the earlier inclusive–exclusive distinction has been lost and only one of the members of the original pair continues as the general firstperson non-singular pronominal, it is always the inclusive one. This is motivated by its original referential range, which includes all three types of participant: speaker, addressee(s) and other(s), which is also the referential range of general first-person non-singulars. Daniel (this volume) argues that in languages without an inclusive–exclusive distinction, the referential focus of a first-person plural pronoun is the speaker, not the addressee: Speaker > Addressee. In languages with an inclusive–exclusive distinction, both the speaker and the addressee are the referential foci: Speaker = Addressee. While the latter is true in principle, it is possible in historical developments for one member of the referential range to be treated as dominant over the other one. In most of the Austronesian languages for which relevant data are available, it is the speaker that was treated as dominant over the addressee in erstwhile inclusives. In Polynesian, the erstwhile inclusive has become a first-person singular pronoun. And in those languages where the inclusive–exclusive contrast has been lost and one of the members of the original opposition continues as the new general first-person plural pronominal, it is always the inclusive one, reference to the speaker being what unites inclusives and general first-person plural pronominals. There is, however, at least one language where it was the hearer that was accorded dominance in a historical development affecting the inclusive: in Banggai the erstwhile inclusive has become strictly a second person pronominal. While in their basic use inclusives have both the speaker and the addressee as their referential foci, it is possible for one of them to become dominant over the other. In Austronesian it has more often been the speaker rather than the addressee. While the examples concerning the integrative function of inclusives given here come exclusively from Austronesian languages, such developments are not claimed to be unique to Austronesian. The reader is referred to Cysouw (this volume) and to Brown & Levinson (1987) for examples from outside Austronesian.
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian
Notes * I am grateful to Elena Filimonova and to two anonymous readers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1. The glossing conventions are those of the sources, except that the inclusive forms are not glossed as being first person, and in some cases other adjustments have been made in the glosses for the sake of uniformity. In examples (8), (9), (13), (14), (15), (17), (18), (29) and (30) the morphemic/lexemic glosses have been added by me. The Toqabaqita data come from my own field notes. 2. For convenience, I will speak of singular addressees, unless there are reasons for not doing so. 3. To highlight the fact that the pronominal in question is inclusive in its basic use, the glosses ‘pl(incl)’ or ‘du(incl)’ will be used even if the intended reference is not inclusive and may even be singular. However, in those languages where the etymon in question no longer has an inclusive function, the appropriate glosses will be used depending on the reference of the pronominal. 4. In not-too-distant past kia was used as a pronoun in women’s speech, but it is ultimately a reflex of the Proto-Austronesian inclusive pronoun *kita (Table 1). In present-day Toqabaqita, kia is used both by men and by women in a few expressions. 5. I have not been able to consult original data on these languages. 6. I am grateful to Robert Blust (pers. comm., March 2002) for bringing the development of *kita in Tagalog to my attention. Blust also mentions this kind of development in Kelabit (spoken in Borneo), but I have not been able to consult any source of data.
Abbreviations 1 2 3 andat art class cnt dont du em erg excl fut genr goal impers in inc
first person second person third person andative article classifier contrastive-absolutive prohibitive dual emotional ergative exclusive future general tense-aspect-mood goal impersonal inchoative inceptive
incl ld loc neg nonpast pa part perf pl poss prec pres red rem sg su subj tag
inclusive locative-directional locative negative non-past paucal particle perfect plural possessive precedentive present reduplication remote singular subject subjunctive tag
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References Baird, L. 2002. A grammar of Kéo: An Austronesian language of East Nusantara. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Australian National University. Besnier, N. 2000. Tuvaluan: A Polynesian language of the Central Pacific. London: Routledge. Blust, R. A. 1977. The Proto-Austronesian pronouns and Austronesian subgrouping: A preliminary report. Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Hawaii 9(2): 1–15. Bowden, J. 2001. Taba: Description of a South Halmahera language. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics 521]. Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Churchward, C. M. 1940. Rotuman grammar and dictionary. Sydney: Methodist Church of Australasia, Department of Overseas Missions. Churchward, C. M. 1953. Tongan grammar. Tonga: Vava’u Press. Cysouw, M. 2003. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cysouw, M. This volume. A typology of honorific uses of clusivity. Daniel, M. This volume. Understanding inclusives. Donohue, M. 1999. A grammar of Tukang Besi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Duranti, A. 1981. Speechmaking and the organisation of discourse in a Samoan fono. Journal of the Polynesian Society 90: 357–400. Durie, M. 1985. A grammar of Acehnese, on the basis of a dialect of North Aceh. Dordrecht: Foris. Firth, R. (with special assistance from I. Tuki, P. Rangiaco). 1985. Tikopia-English dictionary. Taranga fakatikopia ma taranga fakainglisi. Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press. Freyne, M. J. 1990. The strange case of on. In P. Mühlhäusler & R. Harré (eds), Pronouns and people: The linguistic construction of social and personal identity, 178–92. Oxford: Blackwell. Greenberg, J. H. 1988. The first-person inclusive dual as an ambiguous category. Studies in Language 12: 1–18. Groves, T. R., Groves, G. W. & Jacobs, R. 1985. Kiribatese: An outline description. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics D 64]. Hanks, W. F. 1992. The indexical ground of deictic reference. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (eds), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 43–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, S. P. (with the assistance of S. Y. Albert). 1976. Mokilese reference grammar. Honolulu HI: University Press of Hawaii. Horne, E. C. (with the assistance of Kustiani and Koentjaraningrat). 1963. Intermediate Javanese. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jauncey, D. 1997. A grammar of Tamambo, the language of western Malo, Vanuatu. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Australian National University. Laberge, S. & Sankoff, G. 1979. Anything you can do. In T. Givón (ed.), Syntax and semantics, Volume 12: Discourse and syntax, 419–40. New York: Academic Press. Macdonald, R. R. & Dardjowidjojo, S. 1967. A student’s reference grammar of modern formal Indonesian. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Meyerhoff, M. 1998. Accommodating your data: The use and misuse of accommodation theory in sociolinguistics. Language and Communication 18: 205–25.
Inclusive–exclusive in Austronesian 289 Milner, G. B. 1972. Fijian grammar. Suva, Fiji: Government Press. Mosel, U. & Hovdhaugen, E. 1992. Samoan reference grammar. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Moussay, G. 1981. La langue Minangkabau. Paris: Association Archipel [Cahier d’Archipel 14]. Mühlhäusler, P. & Harré, R. (with the assistance of A. Holiday and M. Freyne). 1990. Pronouns and people: The linguistic construction of social and personal identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Nababan, P. W. J. 1981. A grammar of Toba Batak. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics D 37]. Ramos, T. V. & Cena, R. M. 1990. Modern Tagalog: Grammatical explanations and exercises for non-native speakers. Honolulu HI: University of Hawaii Press. Ross, M. D. 1988. Proto Oceanic and the Austronesian languages of western Melanesia. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 98]. Salisbury, M. 2002. A grammar of Pukapukan. Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Auckland. Schachter, P. & Otanes, F. T. 1972. Tagalog reference grammar. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Schütz, A. J. 1985. The Fijian language. Honolulu HI: University of Hawaii Press. Sneddon, J. N. 1996. Indonesian reference grammar. St Leonards, N. S.W.: Allen & Unwin. Sperlich, W. B. (ed.). 1997. Tohi vagahau Niue. Niue English dictionary. Honolulu HI: Government of Niue in association with the Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai´i. Tokelau dictionary. 1986. Apia, Western Samoa: Office of Tokelau Affairs. van Klinken, C. L. 1999. A grammar of the Fehan dialect of Tetun, an Austronesian language of West Timor. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 155]. van Minde, D. 1997. Malayu Ambong: Phonology, morphology, syntax. Leiden: CNWS. van den Berg, R. 1989. A grammar of the Muna language. Dordrecht: Foris. van den Bergh, J. D. 1953. Spraakkunst van het Banggais. The Hague: Nijhoff. van der Tuuk, H. N. 1971. A grammar of Toba Batak. The Hague: Nijhoff. Verheijen, J. A.J. 1986. The Sama/Bajau language in the Lesser Sunda Islands. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics D 70]. Walker, A. T. 1982. Grammar of Sawu. Jakarta: Badan Penyelenggara Seri NUSA, Universitas Atma Jaya. Walsh, D. S. & Biggs, B. 1966. Proto-Polynesian word list I. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand. Wolff, J. U. 1971. Beginning Indonesian, Part Two. Ithaca NY: Cornell University. Woollams, G. 1996. A grammar of Karo Batak, Sumatra. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 130].
Chapter 10
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages Randy J. LaPolla La Trobe University
A survey of 170 Tibeto-Burman languages showed 69 with a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns, 18 of which also show inclusive–exclusive in 1dual. Only the Kiranti languages and some Chin languages have inclusive–exclusive in the person marking. Of the forms of the pronouns involved in the inclusive–exclusive opposition, usually the exclusive form is less marked and historically prior to the inclusive form, and we find the distinction cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Tibeto-Burman or to mid level groupings. Only the Kiranti group has marking of the distinction that can be reconstructed to the proto level, and this is also reflected in the person-marking system. Keywords: Tibeto-Burman, pronouns, person marking, Sino-Tibetan, comparative linguistics
0. Overview Tibeto-Burman is one of the two branches of the Sino-Tibetan stock, the other being the Sinitic languages (the Chinese dialects). The Tibeto-Burman languages are found as far east as Hunan Province in central China, as far west as Kashmir, as far north as Qinghai Province in China (north of Tibet), and as far south as southern Burma. From a survey of data from 170 Tibeto-Burman languages and dialects for which there is reliable data on pronoun systems, it is found that sixty-nine of the languages and dialects in the database show a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns. The languages that have such a distinction are scattered throughout most of the branches of Tibeto-Burman except for the Karen branch and certain branches in contiguous parts of Northeastern India, Northern Burma, and Southwestern China: Bodo, Idu-Taraon, Kaman, Jinghpaw, and Tani.1 In looking at the forms of the pronouns involved in the inclusive–exclusive opposition in those languages that have it, we find that except for in the Kiranti group, usually the exclusive form is more basic (simply based on the 1sg form plus plural marking) and historically prior to the inclusive form, and also find that the distinction cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Tibeto-Burman or even to mid level groupings; the only pronouns that can be reconstructed to Proto-Tibeto-Burman are 1sg *ŋa and 2sg *na(ŋ) (Benedict 1972).2 There are not even plural forms that reconstruct to the earliest proto-language.3 The inclusive–exclusive distinction is then an
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innovation in each of the groups that shows it, and often within one group there are multiple innovations. Of the languages with the inclusive–exclusive distinction in 1pl, thirty-nine also have dual marking, and of these, eighteen languages show an inclusive–exclusive distinction in 1dl as well. Forty-one of the languages that have a 1pl inclusive–exclusive distinction also have pronominal marking on the verb, but only the Kiranti languages and some Chin languages show an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the person marking. Among languages with pronominal prefixes on nouns to show possession, while some make a dual and plural distinction, only a few show an inclusive–exclusive distinction (e.g. Belhare, Tiddim Chin, Caodeng rGyalrong), and a number distinction is rare. We will take a look at the forms found in those languages that exhibit the inclusive–exclusive distinction group by group to see what generalizations we might be able to draw.
1. Qiangic and rGyalrong Within the Qiangic branch, a group of languages in western Sichuan Province and Northern Yunnan Province of China, Daofu, Lyusu (both from Dai et al. 1991), Prinmi (Ding 2003), and Northern Qiang (LaPolla 2003b) do not have the inclusive–exclusive opposition, and in Taoping Qiang (a Southern dialect; H. Sun 1981) the 1de and 1pe forms are based on a form of the 1sg pronoun (which derives from the Proto-Tibeto-Burman 1sg pronoun (*ŋa)) plus the usual dual or plural marker for that language, whereas the 1di and 1pi forms are based on an innovative form of unknown provenience (-ŋ in the dual forms is said to derive from ɲi55 ‘two’; Liu 1987). The same is true for Guiqiong, Ersu (both from H. Sun 1985a), Tuanjie Zhaba (Lu 1985), Namuzi, Shixing, Queyu, and Muya (all four from Dai et al. 1991) as well. In Tangut (Gong 2003) there is a set of 1pl pronouns that makes the inclusive–exclusive distinction (given below), but also an alternative form, ŋa2njiĩ2, that does not make the distinction (i.e. can be used for inclusive or exclusive). In Queyu the form of the dual is not based on a form of the word for ‘two’ (ɲi55), as in Guiqiong and Muya, but seems to be a form very similar to the rGyalrong form of the dual (see below).4 In Zatuo Zhaba (Dai et al. 1991) the inclusive–exclusive distinction is marked in the plural by a difference in the vowel and tone of the pronoun. The dual, which has the vowel of the inclusive plural pronoun but the tone of the exclusive plural pronoun, plus the number ‘two’, does not make the inclusive–exclusive distinction. The forms are given in Table 1.5 It can be seen from the forms in Table 1 that the innovative forms do not represent a single innovation, but represent several independent innovations within the Qiangic branch. The dual and plural markers also represent several innovations within the group (but see n. 4).
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages Tabl e 1. Qiangic 1sg Taoping Qiang Namuzia Shixing Guiqiong Ersu Tuanjie Zhaba Muya Queyu Tangut Zatuo Zhaba
55
ŋɑ ŋa55 ŋ55 ŋɔ35 ɑ55 ŋa35 ŋә53 ŋa13 ŋa2 ŋa13
1dl-incl. 13
1dl-excl. 13
13
1pl-incl. 33
tsuŋ -tʃ qɑŋ -tʃ a33-ku31 ŋa55-ku31 ɦõ33-ts55 ŋɑ55-ts55 dʐu55-ɲi33-pi53 ŋɔ35-ɲi33-pi53 jo55-dzi55 ɑ55-dzi55 35 53 ɦә˜ -tse ŋa35-tse53 jɐ33-ni53-nә33 ŋә33-ni53-nә33 55 a -ndze ŋa13-(ɲa55)-ndze 2 nja – ɲε55-nε33 –
31
1pl-excl. 55
tsuә -thjɑ a33-χuo31 ɦõ33-ɹε˜55 dʐu55-zi55 jo55-r55 ɦә˜35-ɲe55 jɐ33-nә53 a55-nә gja2-mji2 ɲε13
qɑ31-thjɑ55 ŋa55-χuo31 ŋa55-ɹε˜55 ŋɔ33-zi55 ɑ55-r55 ŋa35-ɲe55 ŋә33-nә53 ŋa13-(ɲa55)-nә gjɨ2-mji2 ɲe55
a All of the dual forms in Namuzi can optionally take ɳɳi 55-ku31 [two-classifier]. It seems the form ku31 in the dual forms is the default noun classifier, or is at least homophonous with that classifier.
In rGyalrong, a group of related dialects just northwest of the Qiangic languages, the situation is a bit different. Unlike the Qiangic languages, Cogtse rGyalrong uses different forms for plural marking, and uses the unmarked plural form for the inclusive rather than the exclusive (the opposite of what we will generally see when we look at other language groups below). In Caodeng rGyalrong (J. Sun 1998), listed in Table 2, the inclusive forms take an extra morpheme to mark them as inclusive. These additional suffixes are not specific to the 1di and 1pi forms; they are used for all dual and plural forms (except the 1de and 1pe forms). The languages in Qiangic and rGyalrong have person-marking systems (affixes on the verb that index participants) and many also have possessive prefixes on nouns, both of which derive from the free pronouns, and some maintain the dual and plural marking in the person marking, but the inclusive–exclusive distinction is not maintained (e.g. Cogtse rGyalrong (Nagano 2003) verb suffixes: 1dl-tʃh, 1pl‑j; noun prefixes: dual (of all numbers) Ndʒә-, 1pl jә-). Caodeng rGyalrong (J. Sun 1998) also has possessive pronouns derived from the free pronouns, and with these the distinction is maintained: 1di tsә-gjәnu, 1de tsә-gju, 1pi jә-gjәro, 1pe jә-gju. Table 2. rGyalrong
Cogtse rGyalrong Maerkang rGyalrong Caodeng rGyalrong
1sg
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl.
ŋa ŋa ɐ-gjiʔ
tʃhi-gyo ji-Ndʒo ndʒo ŋә-ndʒe tse-gjә-niʔ tsә-gjә
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
ji-gjo jo jә-gjә-rɐʔ
ji-ɲo ~ joa ŋә-ɲe jә-gjә
a The form jo for the 1pi in rGyalrong is used only by older people (Nagano 2003). Nagano also notes that a new form, nә-ŋa [2sg-1sg] is sometimes used for the 1dl exclusive.
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2. Lolo-Burmese Within Lolo-Burmese, a large group of languages spread throughout Southwestern China, Northern Thailand, and Burma, there are two large groups, Loloish and Burmish, and within those groups there are identifiable subgroups, Northern and Southern Burmish, and Northern, Central, and Southern Loloish. Among the Northern Burmish languages, Achang (Dai 1985) and Leqi (Dai et al. 1991) do not show an inclusive–exclusive opposition (and no dual pronouns), though in Bola, Langsu (both from Dai et al. 1991), and Zaiwa (Xu & Xu 1984) we find paired sets of dual and plural inclusive and exclusive pronouns, as presented in Table 3. In Bola and Langsu the exclusive pronouns are based on the 1sg pronoun plus a dual or plural marker, while the inclusive forms involve an innovative pronoun. In Bola the dual marker nʚ̱ k is used only for the 1dl inclusive form; 1dl exclusive, 2dl and 3dl all take the dual marker nε̱ 55. The 1pl inclusive in Bola also does not take the usual plural marker maʔ 31. In Langsu and Zaiwa cognates of Bola na̱ k are used for duals in all persons, and in Langsu the same plural marker (nʚ̱ uŋ55) is used in both inclusive and exclusive forms. In Zaiwa the cognate of Bola maʔ31 (the exclusive plural) is also used for the exclusive plural (as well as second- and third-person plurals), and the cognate of Langsu nʚ̱ uŋ55 is used for the inclusive plural. In Southern Burmish, represented by Rangoon Burmese (Wheatley 2003), there are many different forms for the 1sg pronoun depending on the sex and status of the speaker, but no obligatory dual or plural marking. (There is an optional marker ‑tó which can be used as a in-group and plural marker.) A majority of the Loloish languages, except for Gazhuo (Dai, Liu & Fu 1987), Bisu, Gong, Phunoi (all in Bradley 1993), and Nuosu Yi (Chen & Wu 1998) among others, show the inclusive–exclusive opposition. See Table 4. Akha (Hansson 2003), Nusu (Sun & Liu 1986), Xide Yi (Chen, Bian & Li 1985), and Rouruo (Sun 1985b; Sun, Huang & Zhou 2002) show the opposition in the dual. In the Rouruo dual forms, -pe55 is the plural marker, nε̱ 53 is the word for ‘two’, and -ia53 is the noun classifier for humans. In Xide Yi the inclusive forms are the same as the exclusive forms except that the 2sg pronoun ni55 is added before the form. In Nasu (Gao 1958) and Sani Yi (Ma 1951) the three relevant forms are simply different pronouns, with no isolatable plural marker. In Akha, Nusu, Rouruo, and a Black Lahu dialect of China described by Chang (1986) the marking of the opposition takes the form of different base pronouns with the same dual or plural marker, again with the exclusive Table 3. Northern Burmish 1sg Bola Langsu Zaiwa
55
ŋa ŋɔ31 ŋo51
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl.
31
55/31
nja -na̱ k ŋj̱32-na̱k55 i55-ni̱k55
1pl-incl. 55
ŋaˇ -nε̱ ŋɔ˘31-na̱ k55 ŋa55-ni̱k55
35
ŋi̱ ŋj̱35-na̱ uŋ55 i55-nu̱ ŋ55/ŋa55-nu̱ ŋ55
1pl-excl. ŋaˇ55/31-maʔ31/55 ŋɔ˘31-na̱ uŋ55 ŋa55-moʔ
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages
form being the descendent of Proto-Tibeto-Burman *ŋa. Red Lahu, Lahu Shehleh and Yellow Lahu also have inclusive forms based on a cognate of ni31- in the Black Lahu described by Chang 1986 (see Bradley 1979, 1993), but in the Black Lahu dialect of Thailand described by Matisoff (1973, 2003) the opposition is marked by the addition of the 2sg pronoun to the normal 1pl form, i.e. ŋà-n-hɨ [1sg-2sg-pl]. Lisu (Mu & Duan 1983) and Lipo (Bradley 1993) also have an extension of the 1sg form as the exclusive form, but the plural marker in the Lisu exclusive form only appears in the 1pl exclusive form; 2pl and 3pl have -ua31. According to Bradley (1993: 182), the inclusive form in Lisu can take the noun plural marker bu33. Bradley argues that this is evidence of a nominal origin for the inclusive form. The inclusive pronoun in Lipo might be related to that of Lahu. Among three different dialects of Hani (Li & Wang 1986) we see differences in how the distinction is marked. In Haya Hani the distinction is marked by a difference in the plural marker; in Biyue Hani and closely related Akha6 the distinction is marked by a difference in pronoun, with the pronoun used in the exclusive forms being the same as that for 1sg in Akha, and in Haobai Hani the distinction is marked by a difference in both pronoun and plural marker. Again we see a variety of plural markers used in the forms. In the Haya Hani and Haobai Hani forms the plural marker used is the same as that used for 2pl. Table 4. Loloish 1sg
1dl-incl.
Xide Yi Nasu Yi Sani Yi Lampang Akha Nusu Rouruo
ŋa33 ŋu31 ŋa33 ŋá ~ ŋà(q) ŋɑ35 ŋu55/ŋo55
ni55-ŋa21-ɳi55 – – àdy-njàq ʔɑ-ku31 ʔa31-pe55-nε̱53-ia53
Lahu (Chang)
ŋa31
Lahu (Matisoff) Lisu Lipo Haya Hani Biyue Hani Haoni Hani Sangkong Jinuo
ŋà ŋwa33 ŋɔ33 ŋa55 ŋa55 ŋɔ55 ŋa55/ŋa33 ŋɔ42
1dl-excl.
ŋa21-ɳi55 – – ŋá-njàq ŋɑ35-ku31 ŋo55-pe55nε̱53-ia53 31 33 31 31 ni -xɯ -nε a ŋa -xɯ33nε31 ŋà-h´-ma/ŋà-h´-nε` – –b – – – – – – – – – a55-ɲi̱31 – ɑ33-n˚̩ 55 –
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
ni55-ŋo21 a31-sε55 a11s z55 àdy-màq ʔɑ-dɯ31 ʔa31-pe55
ŋo21-γo44 ŋε55 ŋa11 ŋá-màq ŋɑ35-dɯ31 ŋo55-pe55
ni31-xɯ33
ŋa31-xɯ33
ŋà-n-hɨ ʐo21 ʔɑ21-ni55 ŋa55-du33 a55-v̩ 33 ɔ33-tɯ33 ho33-ɲaŋ31 ŋu55vu33
ŋà-hɨ ŋwa33-nu21 ŋɔ33-vε33 ŋa55-ja33 ŋɔ31-v̩ 33 ŋɔ33-thi55 a55-ɲaŋ31 ŋɑ55vu33
a An additional suffix, -ma33, can be added to both the dual forms. b David Bradley (1993: 181) points out that duals can be formed in Lisu and Lipo by adding the word for ‘two’ plus the classifier for humans after the singular or plural forms. He also reports (personal communication, November 2002) that in the Lisu song language there is an inclusive dual marker, a33nu21, containing the same second syllable as in the exclusive form (different from 2nd person nu33), and argues that this suggests the distinction is likely to have arisen recently.
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In Biyue Hani, Sangkong (Li 1992), and Jinuo the plural markers are the same for both inclusive and exclusive while the pronouns differ, but the pronoun used in the exclusive form is not exactly the same as the 1sg form. In Rouruo (Sun, Huang & Zhou 2002: 71–2), aside from singular, dual, and plural, there is a set of ‘collective’ pronouns, where the collective referred to is the family, and these also show an inclusive–exclusive contrast in the first person: first person collective inclusive ʔa31-(pe55)-iε55, first person collective exclusive ŋo55-(pe55)-iε55. In these forms the syllable -iε55 derives from iε33, which as a noun means ‘home, family’ and is also a noun classifier for families. The plural marker -pe55 is optional in the dual and collective forms. Within this one group then we see four of the five main ways of marking the distinction found in Tibeto-Burman: having the same dual/plural marker but different pronouns, having the same pronoun but different dual/plural markers, having completely different forms, having a form which is a coalescence of the first person and second-person forms. The fifth type, which we will see is the main type in the Kiranti languages (below), is adding a special marker to the dual/plural form for inclusive or exclusive. We can see that while a large number of the Lolo-Burmese languages have the inclusive–exclusive distinction, it cannot be reconstructed to ProtoLolo-Burmese. In fact Bradley (1993: 197) reconstructs only general person forms without reference to number or inclusiveness. The position of the Naxi language (He & Jiang 1985) has not been clearly established, but one opinion that is widely held is that it is a link language between the Qiangic languages and the Lolo-Burmese languages (e.g. H. Sun 2001). It may not be a coincidence, then, that Western Naxi follows a pattern similar to that found in both the Qiangic and the Loloish languages, that is, having different pronoun forms with the same plural marker, though in Western Naxi the only difference between the two pronouns is the tone.7 See Table 5. The position of Bai (Xu & Zhao 1984, Wang 2001, Wiersma 2003) is also controversial, though I personally feel it is a LoloBurmese language (like Naxi, possibly not within Loloish, but closely related). In Xishan Bai (Wang 2001: 74) we find no dual, and no separate plural marker, simply different forms for the inclusive and exclusive, but again, the exclusive form seems historically prior, particularly as the exclusive form fits the pattern of the overall paradigm (singular forms end in -ɯ, plural forms have the same initial but end in Table 5. Naxi and Bai 1sg Western Naxi Xishan Bai Jianchuan Bai Dali Bai Bijiang Bai
31
1pl-incl. 13
ŋә /ŋɑ ŋɯ31 ŋo31 ŋo31 ŋo̱ 42
55
1pl-excl. 31
ŋә -ŋgɯ ɲia55 jã55 ɲɑ55 ɲo̱ 21-ŋo̱ 21
ŋә33-ŋgɯ31 ŋɑ55 ŋɑ55 ŋɑ55 ŋɑ55-γo55
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages
‑a: 2sg nɯ31, 3sg pɯ31; 2pl na55, 3pl pa55), whereas the inclusive form does not. Jianchuan and Dali Bai (Xu & Zhao 1984: 175) follow a similar pattern, but with -o for the singular pronouns, -ɑ for the plural pronouns, and a marked initial for the inclusive form, whereas Bijiang Bai (Xu & Zhao 1984: 175) has three different forms for the relevant pronouns, with the plural used for the exclusive form being the unmarked one (it is also used in the second- and third-person forms simply added to the 2sg and 3sg pronouns). The Tujia language (Tian & He 1986), which we may include with the Loloish languages, does not show the inclusive–exclusive distinction (see Tian & He 1986: 49).8
3. Bodish The Bodish languages, which include the Tibetan dialects, the Monpa dialects, and the Tamangic languages, are spread throughout Western China (particularly Tibet), Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim. Of these languages, only Lhasa Tibetan (Jin 1983, DeLancey 2003) and Baima (Sun 1985a), presented in Table 6, show a dual, ŋa12ɲiʔ 54 and ŋe35ɲi341 respectively (the latter transparently derived from the number ‘two’), but neither shows the inclusive–exclusive distinction in the dual. The pronoun used for the dual in Baima is the same form as that used in the plural exclusive form. In Lhasa Tibetan, the inclusive is formed by adding the word raŋ14 ‘self ’ between the 1sg pronoun and the plural marker. In Balti (Rangan 1979), Ladakhi (Koshal 1979), and nTsho sNa Monpa (Sun et al. 1980)9 the inclusive–exclusive distinction is not marked by the pronoun, but by the form of the plural marker (‑t̪ŋ/‑tәŋ/ ‑tAŋ53 vs. ‑ča/‑žә/‑rAʔ 53 respectively). Except for 2pl in Purki Balti, which has the ‑t̪ŋ form, the plural used for the exclusive form is the more general plural marker. In Ladakhi it is also possible to add a second plural marker (-kun ~ -gun or -sәk) to the forms. Among the Tamangic languages, Chantyal (Noonan 2003a) does not Table 6. Bodish 1sg Lhasa Tibetan (Central Tibetan) Baima (Eastern Tibetan) Balti (Western Tibetan) Ladakhi (Western Tibetan) nTsho-sna (Cuona) Monpa Tamang (Tamangic) Gurung (Tamangic) Nar-Phu (Tamangic)
12
ŋa ŋa35 ŋa ŋә ŋe13/ŋAi13a ŋá ŋa ŋæ ˆ/ŋɦæˆb
1pl-incl. 12
1pl-excl. 14
54
ŋa -raŋ -tsho ʑo13-ko53 ŋa-t̪ aŋ ŋә-tәŋ ŋA35-tAŋ53 jàŋ ŋɦjoˇɦ ŋɦî-(tɕuke)
ŋa˜12-tsho54 ŋe35-ko53 ŋa-tʃa ŋә-ʑә ŋA35-rAʔ53 ín ŋi ŋɦyâŋ-(tɕuke)
a This form of the pronoun is used to emphasize agentivity, and appears with the agentive marker. b This is an emphatic form (Noonan 2003b).
297
298 Randy J. LaPolla
show the inclusive–exclusive distinction in the plural, but has a unique dual inclusive form made up of the 1sg and 2sg pronouns (nagi < na ‘1sg’ + kâi ‘2sg’). There is no dual exclusive form. Tamang (Mauzadon 2003), Nar-Phu (Noonan 2003b), and Gurung (Glover 1974) all mark the distinction in the plural with different pronoun forms (though the two forms may be historically related in Nar-Phu and possibly Gurung).
4. Mizo-Kuki-Chin Most languages within the Mizo-Kuki-Chin group, which is spread across both sides of the India-Burma border, do not show the inclusive–exclusive distinction (e.g. Mizo (Lushai), Lai, Lepcha, Thado, Anal, Chiru, Rangkhol, Kabui, Khoirao, Hyow, Meitei, Mru, Tangkhul Naga, Lotha, Rengma, and Sema). Among those languages that show the inclusive–exclusive distinction, presented in Table 7, Cho Chin (Jordan 1969) and Karbi (Jeyapaul 1987) follow the pattern seen above, i.e. the exclusive form is composed of the 1sg pronoun plus the plural marker, while the inclusive form involves an innovative pronoun (the same plural marker is used for all forms). Cho Chin also follows that pattern in the dual as well.10 In Tiddim (Henderson 1957, 1965), both of the plural pronouns differ from the singular form, though the exclusive has the same velar initial as the 1sg form. In Sizang Chin (Stern 1963), -te13 is the usual plural marker. Stern (1963: 236) seemed unsure of the difference between ei55-te13/i:55 and ko:55-(te13), as he says the former are “probably inclusive forms”, but as they are so similar to the Tiddim forms, I will assume the former are inclusive forms. Sizang also has person marking prefixes and suffixes on the verb, but they do not distinguish inclusiveness. In Angami (Giridhar 1980), we have different forms for inclusive and exclusive dual and plural, though the additional plural marker -kô can be added to both plural forms. The position of Ao (Gurubasave 1980) as Mizo-Kuki-Chin or Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw is as still unresolved. Because the 1sg pronoun (which also has a possessive prefix form ke-) seems to pattern more closely with the languages discussed here, we will include it here. In Ao Table 7. Mizo-Kuki-Chin
Cho (Hko) Chin Karbi (Mikir) Tiddim Chin Sizang (Siyin) Chin Angami Naga, Kohima Ao
1sg
1dl-incl. 1dl-excl. 1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
kei ne kei-(maʔ) ke:i55-(ma:) ɑ¯
niʔ-ni – – – ɑˆvū
kei-ni – – – hiê-niē
miʔ-mi e-tum ~ i-tum ei-(tε/maʔ/ma:u) ei55-te13/i:55 ú-(kô)/wé
kei-mi ne-tum kou-(tε/ma:u) ko:55-(te13) hiē-(kô)
ní
–
–
ase-nok
o-nok
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages 299 Table 8. Mikir and Chin verb affixes
Mikir (Hills-Karbi) Cho (Hko) Chin Tiddim Chin (narrative) Tiddim Chin (colloquial)
1sg
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl.
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
nekaʔkaˇ-iŋ
– ni– –
– kaʔ-ni– –
e- ~ imii-ha-ŋ
nekaʔ-mikaˇ-VERB-uʔ -uŋ
the two plural pronouns have the same plural marker, and the inclusive–exclusive distinction is marked by a difference in the pronoun, which in both cases is unrelated to the 1sg form. In Mikir there is a set of obligatory (hierarchical) person-marking prefixes which is a transparent recent grammaticalization where the free pronouns became prefixed to the verb. See Table 8. Cho Chin also has a set of verb prefixes (which Jordan (1969: 30) says are “contracted forms” of the free pronouns). Both of these languages maintain the inclusive–exclusive distinction. The development of verbal affixes based on the free pronouns is a common sort of grammaticalization in Tibeto-Burman (see LaPolla 1992, 1994, 2001, 2003a). In these cases the free pronouns had an inclusive–exclusive distinction, and the verb prefixes maintain the distinction. In Tiddim there are two sets of pronominal affixes, one prefixal, associated with the narrative style, and one suffixal, associated with the colloquial style. These two sets possibly reflect layering, that is, two different grammaticalizations of pronominal affixes, though the same plural marker (-uʔ) appears in both sets. The narrative set may be the newer of the two, as the forms more closely reflect the current free pronouns, essentially being short forms of the free pronouns. The colloquial set seems older, as the forms have no obvious provenience (see also Peterson 2000).11 We can clearly see that the colloquial forms involve a velar nasal marking first person, plus the usual -uʔ plural marker in the 1pl exclusive form, and a different plural marker for the inclusive form. In Tiddim Chin the pronominal prefixes associated with the narrative style can also appear on nouns in both styles: 1sg kaˇ-, 1pi i-, 1pe kaˇ-noun-uʔ, 2sg naˇ-, 2pl naˇnoun-uʔ, 3sg -aˇ, 3pl aˇ-noun-uʔ.
5. Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw The Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw languages12 are mainly spoken in northeastern India and Bangladesh, but Jinghpaw is also spoken in Northern Burma and Yunnan Province, China. Within this group, Jinghpaw and the Bodo languages Kachari and Kokborok do not show the inclusive–exclusive distinction, and within the Konyak languages Nocte does not show the distinction, while Tangsa (Das Gupta 1980)
300 Randy J. LaPolla Table 9. Bodo-Konyak
Garo Chang Mosang Tangsa Jogli Tangsa Kimsing Tangsa Longcang Tangsa Moklum Tangsa
1sg
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl.
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
aŋ-(a) ŋo/kaŋa ŋa ŋi ŋa ŋa
– sa-ti ~ sa-ji – – – – –
– ka-si – – – – –
an-tʃiŋ sa-nn nei-he naŋ-taŋ na-ʃi naŋ hi-taŋ
tʃiŋ-(a) ka-nn ni-ʃi ni-taŋ nai-ʃi ni i:
and Chang (Hutton 1987) do, as does Garo (Burling 1963, 2003b). See Table 9. In Chang the 1sg pronoun has the form ŋo when it does not take any postposition, but has the base form ka- when it takes a postposition, is used as a possessive prefix on a noun, or is used in the emphatic pronoun construction: kabu (also ŋebu) 1sg genitive, kaka 1sg ablative, kala 1sg dative, kato 1sg accusative, ka-matpan 1sg emphatic pronoun. This form (ka-) is also used in the exclusive forms, as opposed to sa(provenience unknown) used in the inclusive forms. Only Chang has dual marking, and the forms follow the same sa-/ka- pattern as the plural forms in distinguishing inclusive and exclusive. In the different Tangsa dialects we find a variety of patterns with often the pronoun and the plural marker differing between inclusive and exclusive forms. In general, -ʃi is the more common plural marker, although the Jogli and Moklum dialects have -tŋ (it is unclear whether this -tŋ has any relationship to the similar form found in some of the Bodish languages used for inclusive plurals). In Moklum -tŋ is used only for the inclusive form, and in Mosang there is a unique inclusive plural -he. No generalization seems possible about the relationship between the 1sg pronoun and the plural forms, as the former are all based on *ŋa, while the latter seem to be based on *na or *ni. These languages do not have person marking on the verb. As mentioned above, generally the Idu-Taraon and Kaman languages do not show an inclusive–exclusive distinction, but Sun (1983) gives forms for dual (where the word for ‘two’ is added to the 1sg pronoun), and for inclusive and exclusive plurals in the Chayu dialect of southern Tibet. See Table 10. These forms differ only in the initial consonant of the middle syllable, and Sun does not mention the origin of this difference. The dialect of Ceta village in Lohit District of Arunachal Pradesh, described by Pulu (1978) does not show the same forms. The Lohit dialect word alombrō ‘many’ can be added to nouns to form plurals, and it seems a cognate of this word is the source of the plural marking on the pronouns of the Chayu dialect (in Chayu the form loŋ35-bɹo31 can also be added to nouns to form plurals). The inclusive form then may have developed from a fusion of the 1sg and 2sg (ɲo35) pronouns (as in Lahu and Newar), plus the plural marker.
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages Table 10. Idu 1sg Idu (Sun 1983) Idu (Pulu 1978)
35
ŋa ŋá
1dl 35
1pl-incl. 31
55
ŋa ka -ni –
35
31
1pl-excl. 35
31
ŋa -na -loŋ -(bɹo ) ŋa35-a31-loŋ35-(bɹo31) iɲí –
6. Western Himalayan Within Western Himalayan, a group of languages spoken in Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in northwestern India, Byangsi, Johari, and Rongpo do not show the inclusive–exclusive distinction. In Raji (Krishan 2001a) and Chaudangsi (Krishan 2001b) the use of an Indo-Aryan loanword meaning ‘all’, -dʑәmmәl and ‑dʑәmma or lәiri respectively, with the 1pl form gives an inclusive sense. See Table 11. In Darma (Krishan 2001c: 140), the same pattern is followed, though with a native word bir-mi [all-person]. The dual marker in Raji, Chaudangsi, and Darma (e.g. Darma ni-mi), is transparently ‘two people’. In Bunan (Grierson 1909: Vol. III.1, 469–78) and Manchad (S. R. Sharma 1996) the form of the dual and plural is the same for inclusive and exclusive, but the pronoun differs. There is also an emphatic form of the 1sg pronoun in Bunan, iŋgi, and from this we might suggest that at least the Bunan forms follow the pattern seen above, that the exclusive form has the more basic pronoun. According to D. D. Sharma (1982: 127) Pattani does not have an inclusive–exclusive distinction, and has ɲe- as the base form for all non-singular forms (e.g. 1dl ɲe-ku, 1pl ɲe-re), but Saxena (1977: 79) gives inclusive and exclusive forms, with the differences based on the pronoun used, making the pattern and forms very similar to that found in Manchad (S. R. Sharma 1996). In Kinnauri also (D. D. Sharma 1988) the distinction is marked in the plural by the form of the basic pronoun, not by the plural marker, while in the dual the two forms are totally unrelated. Saxena (1997: 77) also gives a slightly different paradigm for Kinnauri, with an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the dual but not in the plural, and the form kiɕaŋ used for both 1pl and 1di (niɕi is used for 1de). In Tinani (S. R. Sharma 1996) there is both a difference in the form of the dual and plural markers and the form of the pronoun used for the plural. The plural form -ne is used for second-person plural as well (third person takes -re, as in Manchad); -naŋ is used only in the 1pi form. The 1di form also seems to have a relic of the dual marker found in Manchad and Pattani. D. D. Sharma (1989: 145–6, cited in Saxena 1997) gives a somewhat different paradigm for Tinani. In the paradigm he gives, the plural inclusive and exclusive differ not in the plural marker, but in the pronoun, as in Manchad and Pattani. In these languages there is person marking on the verb, including dual and plural marking in most languages, but no inclusive–exclusive distinction is made.13 From the form of the plural person marking reconstructable for this group, *ɲi (Saxena 1997: 89), it would seem the exclusive forms in those languages that show a distinction in the pronouns used are the more basic and historically prior forms.
301
302
Randy J. LaPolla Table 11. Western Himalayan 1sg
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl. 1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
na
na-ni-dʑәmmәl na-ni
Chaudangsi
na-dʑi ~ nhi- – mi dʑi ~ dʑe in-ni-mi –
Darma Bunan (Gahri)
dʑi ~ dʑe niŋ-ni-mi gji eraŋ-(njispi)
in-dʑәmma/in- in lәiri niŋ-bir-mi niŋ eraŋ-ɟi/eraŋ-ʑi hiŋ-ɟi/hiŋ-ʑi
Manchad Pattani Lower Kinnauri Tinani (S. R. Sharma) Tinani (D. D. Sharma)
gje gè gә ~ әŋ gje gje
Raji
hen-gu héŋ-gù kasaŋ i-ɕa-g i-ɕa
– hiŋ(njispi) ɲje-ku hena-re nè-kù hénә-rè ni-ɕi kasaŋ-a ɲji-ɕ ɲje-naŋ ɲi-ɕi ɲe-na
ɲje-re ~ ɲe-re nè-rè niŋ-a ɲje-ne e-na
7. Eastern Himalayan The Eastern Himalayan languages (all in Nepal) include the Kiranti/Rai group (broadly defined), Kham, Magar, and Sunwar, and Newar. Kham, Magar, and Sunwar do not show the inclusive–exclusive distinction. The Kiranti languages do show the distinction, as shown in Table 12, and in both the dual and the plural, generally using the same mechanism for marking the distinction in both the dual and plural. Within this group, only Khaling (Toba 1984), Dumi (van Driem 1993), and Hayu (Michailovsky 1988: 124–5; 2003) follow the pattern we’ve seen in much of the rest of the family: the forms take the same dual or plural markers (allowing for vowel harmony) but differ in the form of the pronoun, with the exclusive pronoun being the same as the 1sg pronoun (in Dumi). In Hayu it isn’t necessary to mark number in first- and third-person forms in the absolutive, though dual and plural can be marked by suffixing -nak-pu ‘two people’ and -khata respectively. Inclusive and exclusive can’t be marked. But in the possessive form of the pronouns, first person distinguishes five forms, including inclusive and exclusive forms. In the rest of the Kiranti languages, there is a very different pattern: the pronouns are the same for inclusive and exclusive, but the exclusive takes a velar-initial suffix while the inclusive is unmarked. The exclusive is then the more formally marked member of the pair. In Thulung (Ebert 2003) and Bahing (Hodgson 1858) the exclusive marker replaces the plural marker, but not the dual marker.14 These languages also differ from most of the rest of the family (except Cho Chin and Karbi) in that they retain the inclusive–exclusive distinction in their person marking systems, given in Table 13. Even Chepang, which does not show the distinction in the free pronouns (1sg ŋa, 1dl ŋi-ci ~ ni-ci, 1pl ŋi), does show the distinction in the person marking. Looking at the forms of the suffixes (below), it would
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages Table 12. Kiranti/Rai 1sg
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl.
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
Khaling Dumi Hayu (absolutive) Hayu (possessive) Camling Athpare Bantawa
uŋ aŋ gu ~ gu: ɑŋ kaŋa ~ ka˜ aŋa ɯŋka
i-tsi in-tsi gu-(nakpu) uŋ-tshe kai-tsi an-tsi ɯŋka-tsi
o-tsu an-tsɨ – ɑŋ-tshe kɯ-ts-ka an-tsi-ga ɯŋka-tsa
i-k iŋ-ki gu-(khata) u˜:-ki kai-(ni) an-i ɯŋka-n-(tsi)
Thulung Bahing Phedappe Limbu Belhare
go go aŋga ŋka
gu-tsi gó-si an-tshi ŋke-tshi
gu-tsu-ku gó-sú-kú an-tshi-ge ŋke-ŋ-tshi-ŋ
gu-i gó-i an-i ŋke
o-k aŋ-kɨ – ɑ˜ :-ki kai-ka an-i-ga ɯŋka-n-ka(tsi) gu-ku go-ku an-i-ge ŋke-ŋ
seem that in all but Khaling and Dumi a velar suffix marks the exclusive forms, as in the free pronouns. Here Hayu differs from Khaling and Dumi in that it still has the velar suffix for the exclusive plural in the person marking system. Lohorung person marking data has been added from van Driem (1992); no data on the free pronouns is given in that article. Dumi, Khaling, Hayu, and Lohorung have -k in both their inclusive and exclusive pronoun forms, but this -k seems to be independent of the exclusive marking velar suffix, as in Hayu and Lohorung a second velar suffix is added to the exclusive form. Given the data here, and the fact that the rest of the paradigm (all but the velar suffix) matches the Dulong-Rawang person-marking paradigm and to a lesser exTable 13. Kiranti/Rai person marking
Khaling (Toba 1988: 202) Dumi (van Driem 1993: 96) Hayu (Michailovsky 1974) Lohorung Camling Kulung (Tolsma 1999) Thulung (Allen 1975) Bahing Limbu (van Driem 1999) Belhare Chepang
1sg
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl.
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
-ŋa: -tә -ŋo -ʔŋa -uŋa -o: -ŋ -ŋa -ʔe -ŋa -ŋa
-ji -ti -tshi-k -tɕi -tsi -tsi -tsi -sa -si -tsi -tәjh-tse
-jua – -tsho-k -tɕi-ga -tsi-ka -tsi-ka -tsu-ku -su-ku -si-ge -tsi-ŋa -ŋә-tse
-ki -ki-ti -ke -ki -i -ja -i -ja a-i -tәjh-ʔi
-kaa -ki-ta -ko-k -ki-ŋ-ka -i-(m)-ka -ja-ka -ku -ka -i-ge -i-ŋa -ŋi ~ ŋ-se
a Khaling has a different set of suffixes for 1st person dual transitive agents, and these forms corres‑ pond more closely to the forms in the other languages: 1di -si, 1de -su.
303
304 Randy J. LaPolla Table 14. Newar 1sg
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
Dolakha Newar Kathmandu Newar
dʑi dʑi
thi-dʑi/tɕhi-dʑi dʑhi:-(pĩ:)
isi dʑi-pĩ:
tent the Western Himalayan paradigm (see LaPolla 2000), the likely development of this paradigm is that the original 1pl marker was *-i, and then an exclusive-marking velar suffix developed before the split-up of the Kiranti group. Belhare also has an inclusive–exclusive distinction in its possessive noun prefixes: 1sg a-, 1di ŋketshi-, 1de ŋkeŋtshiŋ-, 1pi ŋke-, 1pe ŋkeŋ-. These forms are transparently copies of the free pronouns which have become affixes on nouns, and, except for the 1sg form, have the same forms as the free pronouns. The ancient Tibeto-Burman language of the Kathmandu Valley, Classical Newar (Jørgensen 1941), has a rather complicated pronominal system. There are three semantically equivalent forms for 1sg (dʑe, dʑi, dʑɑ),15 exclusive plurals formed by adding -pani to these forms, a historically later and less common exclusive plural dʑi-mi, and a large number of inclusive plural forms which form two groups, one group of forms which is not clearly analyzable into morphemes (dʑhɑdʑe, dʑhedʑe, dʑhidʑi, dʑhedʑhe, dʑhidʑhi, dʑedʑhe), and one group that is clearly ‘you and I’ (tɕhadʑe, tɕhe-dʑe, tɕhi-dʑi, dʑe-tɕhe, dʑi-tɕhi; the 2sg pronoun is tɕhe, tɕhi, or tɕha). The inclusive plural forms in the Dolakha dialect (Genetti 1994: 60–1, Genetti 2003) clearly reflect this latter pattern. See Table 14. The Kathmandu dialect (Hargreaves 2003) marks the inclusive–exclusive distinction only in the aspiration of the initial of the pronoun and the vowel length. The plural marking is also optional in the inclusive.
8. Dulong-Rawang Dulong (LaPolla 2003c, personal fieldwork), Rawang (personal fieldwork), and Anong (H. Sun 2000) are relatively closely related dialects spoken in Northwestern Yunnan and Northern Burma. Of these three, Rawang does not mark the distinction at all.16 Dulong marks it using a form cognate to Tibetan raŋ ‘self ’ for the inclusive (adding the word for ‘two’ in the dual in Dizhengdang Dulong), possibly due to Tibetan influence. See Table 15. Anong marks the distinction in the dual and plural, with the dual forms taking an old pronominal dual marker (< *tsi). The inclusive– exclusive distinction is marked in the dual by a difference of pronoun, but in the plural by a difference of plural marker. These languages also have person marking on the verb, but the inclusive–exclusive distinction is not reflected in the person marking. H. Sun (1981: 86) gives dif-
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages Table 15. Dulong-Rawang
Rawang Kongmudang Dulong Dizhengdang Dulong Anong
1sg
1dl-incl.
1dl-excl.
ŋɑ` ŋɑ` әg ŋa55 ~ a31 ‑io31
ŋɑ`-n – īŋ-nε¯ – rә¯ŋ-ɲī әjɯ ` ŋ-ɲī ŋa55-iɯŋ55 a31-iɯŋ55-si31 ‑si31
1pl-incl.
1pl-excl.
ŋɯ ` ŋ-mɑʔ ŋɑ`-mɑʔ ɹɑ¯ŋ īŋ ɹә¯ŋ әjɯ ` ŋ-(mɑʔ) a31-ɳi35 a31-iɯŋ55
ferent forms for dual exclusive and dual inclusive for the person marking in Kongmudang Dulong, but this seems to be a mistake, as I have not found this distinction in my own fieldwork on the language, and it would mean there was a distinction in the dual not found in the plural.
9. Summary and conclusion We have seen that the inclusive–exclusive distinction, when it is found in TibetoBurman, is often an innovation within a single low level grouping, or even of single languages within a group. Often even closely related languages or different dialects of a single language differ in terms of whether or not they mark the distinction. Only one group, the Kiranti group, has marking of the distinction that can be reconstructed to the proto level. Kiranti is also the only group as a whole that marks the inclusive–exclusive distinction in its person marking system (verbal suffixes) as well. We have also seen that there are five main ways of marking the distinction found in Tibeto-Burman: 1. having the same dual/plural marker but different pronouns, 2. having the same pronoun but different dual/plural markers, 3. having completely different forms, 4. having a form which is a coalescence of the first person and second-person forms, 5. adding a special marker to the dual/plural form for inclusive or exclusive. In the case of (1) and (3), we find that of the two pronouns, generally the pronoun used in the exclusive form is the historically prior and less marked form. In the case of (2), generally the plural marker used in the exclusive form is the historically prior and less marked form. We can therefore conclude, at least in Tibeto-Burman, the inclusive form is a late development, and generally involves a more marked form. Only in the Kiranti languages is the exclusive the more marked form.
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Notes 1. The name Tani for this group (formerly known as Mirish or Abor-Miri-Dafla) is from Sun 1993a, 1993b, 2003. The group includes Adi, Apatani, Bengni, Bokar, Gallong, Hill Miri, Miji, Mising, Nishi, and Tagin. 2. Abbreviations used: 1 first person, 2 second person, 3 third person, sg singular, dl dual, pl plural, di dual inclusive, de dual exclusive, pi plural inclusive, pe plural exclusive. 3. The lack of third person marking and plural marking makes Proto-Tibeto-Burman (as well as Old Chinese, which also had no plural marking) an exception to Greenberg’s (1963) Universal 42: “All languages have pronominal categories involving at least three persons and two numbers”. 4. In several languages of the Qiangic, Eastern Himalayan, Western Himalayan, and DulongRawang groups we find a dual marker with a dental or palatal affricate initial. If these languages are more closely related to each other than to the other branches of Tibeto-Burman, as I have suggested (LaPolla 2000, 2003a), then we could reconstruct *tsi as a dual marker for the pronoun paradigm in the proto-language of this group. The Queyu and rGyalrong forms might then be similar because they are shared retentions. 5. The forms given for the pronouns will be the nominative/absolutive forms unless otherwise marked. Forms for person marking (verbal affixes) given in the discussion below will generally be those of the intransitive non-past forms. 6. Akha is said to be part of the Haya dialect (Li & Wang 1986), and more remote from the Bika dialect (of which Biyue is a part), but in terms of the inclusive–exclusive opposition it patterns more like Biyue than Haya Hani. 7. Eastern Naxi is also discussed in He & Jiang (1985), and it is claimed (p. 114) that the Eastern dialect does not show an inclusive–exclusive distinction; it is said that ɲɑ33tsɯ31‑kv31 covers both meanings. It is also said that -tsɯ31-kv31 is the plural marker for the second- and third-person forms as well. In the lexical list on p. 171, though, the forms ɲɑ33, γo33‑tsɯ33‑kv21, and ɲɑ33-ʐa21 are given for 1sg, 1pi, and 1pe respectively for the Eastern dialect, and the plural forms for second and third person have the plural marker -ʐa21, not -tsɯ31‑kv31. It may be that though both sets of pronouns are called “Eastern dialect” in the book, they represent different sub-varieties, and one of the two employs the two different plural markers and a different pronoun base to create an inclusive–exclusive distinction. 8. On p. 207 Tian & He (1986) give inclusive and exclusive forms, but the inclusive forms are simply the exclusive forms plus the word for ‘all’. This can be done in just about any language. 9. Tshangla (Central Monpa, Sharchhokpa-lo; Andvik 2003) and Motuo Menba (Sun et al. 1980) do not show the inclusive–exclusive distinction. 10. I should note here that the 1pl form in Tangkhul Naga (ithum, which does not distinguish inclusive and exclusive; Arokianathan 1987) is cognate with one form of the inclusive pronoun in Mikir (I would have expected the single form in those languages that don’t have the inclusive–exclusive distinction to be cognate with the exclusive form). 11. More work needs to be done to determine if either of these sets can be reconstructed to some deeper level of the family. Even if one or both of the sets are reconstructable, a separate question is whether the inclusive–exclusive distinction holds for the proto-level, as
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages some languages that have a cognate system, such as Hyow (Peterson 2000), do not have the distinction. 12. The name of the group and its composition is from Burling (2003a), except for the placement of Ao in Mizo-Kiki-Chin (based on information from Alec Coupe, personal communication, December 2002). See also Benedict (1976). 13. Though Takahashi (2001), in reporting on Pangi Kinnauri, lists a verb suffix identical to the 2dl/2pl form as a 1dl/1pl exclusive form, e.g. dza:tʃ ‘ate (it) (1de/1pe/2dl/2pl)’ vs. dza: ʃe: ‘ate (it) (1di/1pi)’. 14. The sources for the other data are Ebert (2003) (Camling, Athpare and Bantawa), van Driem (1987, 1999) (Limbu), and Bickel (2003) (Belhare). 15. Jørgensen (1941) is not clear on the nature of the sounds he writes as “c”, “ch”, “j”, and “jh”. He says they are palatals, but does not say if they are stops or affricates. As the modern languages have affricates in corresponding forms, I assume these symbols represent palatal affricates, and have regularized the transcription to “tɕ”, “tɕh”, “dʑ”, and “dʑh” respectively. 16. Rawang has the same plural marker mɑʔ as the optional exclusive marker in Dizhengdang Dulong, but the dual and plural are all based on the 1sg pronoun: 1sg ŋà, 1dl ŋà-ní [1sg + ‘two’], 1pl ŋà-maʔ. We have seen plural markers in Lolo-Burmese with a form similar to mɑʔ, and this may be one reason some scholars have suggested a close relationship among these languages. The form is a general plural marker for animate nouns in many of the languages. There is also another form for 1pl, ŋɯ ¯ ŋ-mɑʔ, and this is given as 1pl inclusive in Bradley (1993), but my informants say there is no difference between the two pronouns in terms of inclusiveness. The difference is just that ŋɯ ¯ ŋ-mɑʔ is a bit more polite. I don’t know if this reflects a loss of the distinction or some other factor.
References Allen, N. J. 1975. Sketch of Thulung grammar, with three texts and a glossary. Ithaca NY: Cornell University China-Japan Program [Cornell University East Asia Papers 6]. Andvik, E. 2003. Tshangla. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 439–55. Arokianathan, S. 1987. Tangkhul Naga grammar. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. Benedict, P. K. 1972. Sino-Tibetan: A conspectus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [Princeton-Cambridge Studies in Chinese Linguistics II]. Benedict, P. K. 1976. Sino-Tibetan: Another look. Journal of the American Oriental Society 96(2): 167–97. Bickel, B. 2003. Belhare. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 546–70. Bradley, D. 1979. Lahu dialects. Canberra: Australian National University Press [Oriental Monograph Series 23] Bradley, D. 1993. Pronouns in Burmese-Lolo. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 16(1): 157–209. Burling, R. 1961. A Garo grammar. Poona: Linguistic Society of India [Indian Linguistics Monograph Series 21]. Burling, R. 2003a. The Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 167–92. Burling, R. 2003b. Garo. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 387–400.
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308 Randy J. LaPolla Chang Hongen. 1986. Lahuyu jianzhi (A brief description of the Lahu language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Chen Kang & Wu Da. 1998. Yiyu yufa (Nuosu hua) (Yi grammar (Nuosu dialect)). Beijing: Central University of Nationalities Press. Chen Shilin, Bian Shiming & Li Xiuqing (eds). 1985. Yiyu jianzhi (A brief description of the Yi language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Dai Qingxia. 1985. Achangyu jianzhi (A brief description of the Achang language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Dai Qingxia, Huang Bufan, Fu Ailan, Renzengwangmu & Liu Juhuang. 1991. Zang-Mianyu shiwu zhong (Fifteen Tibeto-Burman languages). Beijing: Yanshan Chubanshe. Dai Qingxia, Liu Juhuang & Fu Ailan. 1987. On the Gazhuo language of the Mongolian people of Yunnan Province. Yuyan Yanjiu 1987(1): 141. Das Gupta, K. 1980. The Tangsa language: A synopsis. Shillong: The Philology Section, Research Department, North-East Frontier Agency. DeLancey, S. 2003. Lhasa Tibetan. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 270–88. Ding, P. S. 2003. Prinmi. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 588–601. Ebert, K. H. 2003. The Kiranti languages. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 505–17. Gai Xingzhi. 1986. Jinuoyu jianzhi (A brief description of the Jinuo language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Gao Huanian. 1958. Yiyu yufa yanjiu (A study on Yi grammar). Beijing: Kexue Chubanshe. Genetti, C. E. 1994. A descriptive and historical account of the Dolakha Newari dialect. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of the Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa [Monumenta Serindica 24]. Genetti, C. E. 2003. Dolakha Newar. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 355–70. Giridhar, P. P. 1980. Angami grammar. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages [CIIL Grammar Series 6]. Glover, W. W. 1974. Sememic and grammatical structures in Gurung (Nepal). Norman OK: SIL. Gong Hwang-cherng. 2003. Tangut. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 602–20. Greenberg, J. H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J. H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of language, 73–113. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Grierson, Sir G. A. (ed.). 1903–28. Linguistic survey of India, III, Parts 1–3, Tibeto-Burman Family. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Gurubasave Gowda, K. S. 1980. Ao grammar. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. Hansson, I.-L. 2003. Akha. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 236–52. Hargreaves, D. J. 2003. Kathmandu Newar (Nepāl Bhāśā). In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 371–84. He Jiren & Jiang Zhuyi. 1985. Naxiyu jianzhi (Brief description of the Naxi language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Henderson, E. J.A. 1957. Colloquial Chin as a pronominalized language. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 20: 323–7. Henderson, E. J. A. 1965. Tiddim Chin: A descriptive analysis of two texts. London: Oxford University Press [London Oriental Series 15]. Hodgson, B. H. 1858. Comparative vocabulary of the languages of the broken tribes of Nepal. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 27: 393–456. Hope, E.R. 1974. The deep syntax of Lisu sentences: A transformational case grammar. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics B 34].
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Randy J. LaPolla Mu Yuzhang & Duan Liang. 1983. Lisuyu gaikuang (An overview of the Lisu Language). Minzu Yuwen 1983.4. Nagano Yasuhiko. 2003. Cotse rGyalrong. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 469–89. Noonan, M. 2003a. Chantyal. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 315–35. Noonan, M. 2003b. Nar-phu. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 336–52. Peterson, D. A. 2000. On the status of the Southern Chin subgroup. Paper presented to the 33rd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Bangkok and Trang, October 2–6, 2000. Pulu, J. 1978. Idu phrase book. Shillong: Directorate of Research, Goverment of Arunachal Pradesh. Rangan, K. 1979. Purki grammar. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. Saxena, A. 1997. Towards a reconstruction of the proto-West Himalayish agreement system. In D. Bradley (ed.), Tibeto-Burman Languages of the Himalayas, 73–94. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics A 86]. Sharma, D. D. 1982. Studies in Tibeto-Himalayan linguistics: A descriptive analysis of Pattani (a dialect of Lahaul). Vishveshvaranand Vishva Bandhu Institute of Sanskrit and Indological Studies, Panjab University. Hoshiarpur. Sharma, D. D. 1988. A descriptive grammar of Kinnauri. Delhi: Mittal Publications. Sharma, D. D. 1989. Tribal languages of Himachal Pradesh. Delhi: Mittal Publications [Studies in Tibeto-Himalayan Languages 2]. Sharma, S. R. 1996. Pronouns and agreement in Western Himalayan Tibeto-Burman languages. Indian Linguistics (Journal of the Linguistic Society of India) 57(1–4): 81–102. Stern, T. 1963. A provisional sketch of Sizang (Siyin) Chin. Asia Major, n. s., 10(2): 22–78. Sun Hongkai. 1981. Qiangyu jianzhi (A brief description of the Qiang language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Sun Hongkai. 1983. Yidu Luobayu gaiyao (A brief description of the Idu Lhoba language). Minzu Yuwen 1983(6): 63–79. Sun Hongkai. 1984. Woguo bufen Zang-Mianyu zhong mingci de rencheng lingshu fanchou (The category of genitive person marking on nouns of some Tibeto-Burman languages of China). Zhongyang Minzu Xuebao 1984(1): 78–84. Sun Hongkai. 1985a. Liujiang liuyu de minzu yuyan ji qi xishu fen lei (The ethnic languages of the Six Rivers area and their genetic affiliations). Minzu Xuebao 3: 99–274. Sun Hongkai. 1985b. Nuzu Rouruoyu gaikuang. Minzu Yuwen 1985(4): 63–78. Sun Hongkai. 2000. Anongyu gaikuang (A brief introduction to the Anong language). Minzu Yuwen 2000(4): 68–80. Sun Hongkai. 2001. Naxiyu zai Zang-Mianyuzu yuyan zhong de lishi diwei (The historical position of Naxi among Tibeto-Burman languages). Yuyan Yanjiu 2001(1): 90–9. Sun Hongkai, Huang Chenglong & Zhou Maocao. 2002. Rouruoyu yanjiu (Studies on the Ruoruo language). Beijing: Zhongyang Minzu Daxue Chubanshe. Sun Hongkai & Liu Lu (eds). 1986. Nuzu yuyan jianzhi (Nusuyu) (A brief description of the language of the Nu people (Nusu language)). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Sun Hongkai, Lu Shaozun, Zhang Jichuan & Ouyang Jueya (eds). 1980. Menba, Luoba, Dengren de yuyan (The languages of the Menba, Luoba and Deng peoples). Beijing: Social Sciences Press. Sun, J.T-S. 1993a. A historical-comparative study of the Tani (Mirish) branch. Ph. D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Tibeto-Burman languages Sun, J.T-S. 1993b. The linguistic position of Tani (Mirish) in Tibeto-Burman: A lexical assessment. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 16(2): 143–88. Sun, J. T.-S. 1998. Nominal morphology in Caodeng rGyalrong. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 69(1): 103–49. Sun, J.T-S. 2003. Tani languages. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 456–66. Takahashi, Y. 2001. A descriptive study of Kinnauri (Pangi dialect): A preliminary report. In Y. Nagano (ed.), New research on Zhangzhung, 97–120. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Thurgood, G. & R. J. LaPolla (eds). 2003. The Sino-Tibetan languages. London: Routledge. Tian Desheng & He Tianzhen. 1986. Tujiayu jianzhi (A brief description of the Tujia language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Toba, S. 1984. Khaling. Tokyo: ILCAA [Asian & African grammatical manual No. 13d, second edition]. Toba S. 1988. The pronominal affixation system in Khaling. In D. Bradley, E. J. A. Henderson & M. Mazaudon (eds), Prosodic analysis and Asian linguistics: to honour R. K. Sprigg, 201–4. Canberra: Australian National University [Pacific Linguistics C 104]. Tolsma, G. 1999. A grammar of Kulung. Ph. D. dissertation, Leiden University. van Driem, G. 1987. A grammar of Limbu. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. van Driem, G. 1992. Le proto-kiranti revisité: Morphologie verbale du lohorung. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 24: 33–75. van Driem, G. 1993. A grammar of Dumi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. van Driem, G. 1999. The Limbu verb revisited. In Y. P. Yadava & W. Glover (eds), Topics in Nepalese linguistics, 209–30. Kathmandu: Royal Nepal Academy. Wang Feng. 2001. Xishan Baiyu gaikuang (An overview of the Xishan Bai language). Minzu Yuwen 2001(5): 70–80. Wheatley, J. 2003. Burmese. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 195–207. Wiersma, G. 2003. Bai. In G. Thurgood & R. J. LaPolla (eds), 651–73. Xu Lin & Zhao Yansun. 1984. Baiyu jianzhi (A brief description of the Bai language). Beijing: Nationalities Press. Xu Xijian & Xu Guizhen. 1984. Jingpozu yuyan jianzhi (Zaiwa) (A brief description of the Zaiwa language of the Jingpo people). Beijing: Nationalities Press.
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Chapter 11
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken Radboud University Nijmegen
This chapter surveys the inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the pronoun and personal reference systems of 65 languages from 33 language families in central-western South America (Bolivia, Rondonia (Brazil), Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia). Our data tentatively support the idea of a unidirectional historical development, following the First Person Hierarchy as proposed by Cysouw (2003). The incidence of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in the region is somewhat but not extremely far above the world average, and in the majority of the cases where there is such a distinction it seems to be a basic, i.e. morphologically underived category. Therefore, there is no support for a global areal spread of inclusivity in the region, although contact-induced change is likely in specific cases. Keywords: South America, areal typology, person systems, historical development
1. Introduction The analytic inclusive–exclusive distinction in person systems seems to have been first introduced in the sixteenth century by grammarians working on missionary grammars and translations in two Andean languages, Aymara and Southern Peruvian Quechua (cf. Haas 1969, Hardman-de Bautista 1972, Mannheim 1982, Adelaar 1993). The distinction was based on a type of ‘we’ excluding the second person (excluyendo/exclusivo), and a ‘we’ including the second person (incluyendo/inclusivo). Hymes (1972: 105–6), however, has correctly pointed out the inappropriateness of the use of the term ‘inclusive’ as one applying to the first person, since it actually combines first and second persons, and, thus represents a category logically coordinate with the distinctions of ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ person. Hymes, therefore, proposes the terms ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘inclusive’, and ‘third’ as four coordinate categories of person, with the term ‘fourth’ as an alternative synonym for ‘inclusive’. Mannheim (1982: 152–3) has pointed out that the inclusive–exclusive distinction is installed quite differently in Aymara and Quechua. While Aymara encodes the inclusive–exclusive split in its person system, Quechua does so in its number system. Extending Hymes’ terminological suggestion, Mannheim suggests that Aymara has an ‘inclusive person’, while Quechua has an ‘inclusive number’. Adelaar (1993: 211), however, states that Mannheim could only draw this conclusion, because he
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based it exclusively on data from the southern Quechua dialects (the Quechua IIC subgroup according to Torero’s 1964 classification). The more conservative Quechua dialects, including the whole Quechua I subgroup, which is located on the central highland of Peru, follow the Aymara model. Adelaar, furthermore, argues that the redefinition of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in terms of a system consisting of four persons offers unexpected perspectives for a cross-linguistic study of the indigenous languages of the Americas in general. While some languages and language families seem to show traces of a four-person system comparable to that of Aymara, a greater number of languages and families have three-person systems complemented by a number distinction. However, in these systems, the firstperson plural is marked by a special indivisible morpheme, while combinations of morphemes mark the second- and third-person plural. For divergent languages like Guayabero (Guahiban, Colombia), Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan, Mexico), Yucatec Maya (Mayan, Mexico), and Mapuche (Araucanian, Chile) a Proto-system of four persons can tentatively be reconstructed: first, second, third, and fourth (inclusive). Adelaar (1993: 213) points out that the historical case of Ecuadorian Quechua is illustrative for the type of evolution that the person systems of these languages have undergone. The first-person plural inclusive suffix ‑nchik lost its inclusive meaning and became a general first-person plural marker. This process apparently repeated itself in different language families. The goal of this chapter is to establish to what extent the inclusive–exclusive distinction plays a role in the languages of central-western South America (Bolivia, Rondonia (Brazil), Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia), and, if languages make this distinction, to what extent the person systems may be reconstructed as four-person systems, the genetic perspective. The organization of the chapter is as follows. Section 2 takes the typological perspective and presents the general typological and methodological approach used to survey the 65 sample languages of this chapter. In Section 3 we will take a closer look at the specific forms found in the various language families represented in the sample, from the genetic perspective, to study their possible historical development. In Section 4, departing from the areal perspective, we will try to come to some generalizations about possible earlier areal contact situations between languages showing the inclusive–exclusive distinction. Finally, some concluding remarks will follow in Section 5.
2. The typological perspective The biggest problem in typological research is the availability of relevant data. Usually sample languages are not selected at random, but on the basis of the best available data. We have not used a specific sampling method for two reasons. In the first place our survey involves areal typology rather than an investigation of a certain phenomenon in the languages of the world, which would call for a stratified sample. Secondly, it still is hard to get access to relevant data, even though the number
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
of linguistic descriptions of South-American languages has been growing steadily in the past years. For this chapter we “mucked around in grammars” in the Greenbergian tradition, consulted language specialists, and used our own field notes. The result is a corpus of data on the person systems of 65 languages from the centralwestern South-American region from southern Colombia bordering Ecuador and Peru to eastern Bolivia (cf. Map 1 in Appendix 1). We looked at free person markers — personal pronouns in all cases — and, if pronoun data were not available, at bound cross-reference markers referring to the subject arguments of intransitive (S) and the subject (A) and object (O) arguments of transitive clauses. Furthermore, we looked at free and bound possessive markers, leaving dual forms aside, fully realizing that in order to reach a more complete picture of the person systems encountered in the sample languages, these need to be included in future research. It was not always possible to obtain comparable data for all languages, as would have been ideal. Both the exclusion of dual forms and the fact that sometimes cross-reference markers were considered have their disadvantages. This means that our conclusions can only be tentative. Given that we are using a geographical region as the basis for our sample, it is obvious that areal influences are a likely possibility (cf. Section 4). On the other hand, the linguistic diversity of the sample is very high, since it represents 21 language families and another 12 language Isolates (cf. Table 2). The person-marking types and the First Person Hierarchy presented in Cysouw (2003: 98), represented in (1), will serve as a parting point for the analysis of the person-marking paradigms discussed in this chapter.
(1) First Person Hierarchy no-we > unified-we > only-incl > incl/excl > minimal/augmented
The sample does not contain any languages of the ‘no-we’ type, i.e. languages that completely lack a separate form for non-singular first person — and second and third person for that matter — such as the well-known Pirahã case in (2).
(2) Pirahã (Muran; Everett 1986: 280) 1 ti 2 gíxai 3 hiapióxio
According to Everett (1986: 280), there are no special plural forms for the pronouns in (2), and, generally, first-person plural and second-person plural are expressed periphrastically. An interesting case is formed by the Rondonian Isolate Kanoê, which may have arisen out of a ‘no-we’ type. The non-singular person markers are all formed by adding the plural suffix ‑te to their singular counterparts.1 Consider the Kanoê free pronoun paradigm in (3).
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(3) Kanoê (Isolate; Bacelar 2004: 141) Singular Group2 1+2(+3) ajte 1 aj 1+3 ajte 2 mi 2+3 mite 3 oj 3+3 ojte
Those languages that only exhibit one form for non-singular first person are of the ‘unified-we’ type, i.e. languages that do not distinguish between three different types of ‘we’: 1+2, 1+2+3, and 1+3, or, according to Cysouw (2003: 95), languages in which these three categories are marked by a single morpheme. Consider, for example, the free pronoun paradigm of Awa Pit — a Barbacoan language spoken in the border area between Colombia and Ecuador — in (4):
(4) Awa Pit (Barbacoan; Curnow 1997: 86) Singular Group 1+2(+3) au 1 na 1+3 au 2 nu 2+3 u 3 us 3+3 uspa
The Jaqaru example in (5) shows what has been called a four-person system, in which the only referential number distinction is made by the ‘inclusive we’ (1+2 or 1+2+3) form. Besides this form there are no other non-singular forms. The pivot of this system seems to be the opposition between inclusion or exclusion of the addressee.
(5) Jaqaru (Aymaran; Hardman 1999: 27) Singular Group 1+2(+3) jiwsa 1 na 2 juma 3 upa
Cysouw (2003: 147–51) labels this type of person marking as the ‘only-inclusive’ type, which usually patterns as follows: the category 1+3 (‘exclusive we’) corresponds with 1, the category 2+3 corresponds with 2, and, finally, 3+3 corresponds with 3. Cysouw’s approach would lead to the representation of the Jaqaru person system as in Figure 1. The ‘inclusive–exclusive’ type is exemplified by the free (emphatic) pronoun paradigms of the Rondonian languages Wari’ and Karo in (6) and (7), respectively:
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
jiwsa
1+2 1+2+3
1
na
1+3
2
juma
2+3
3
upa
3+3
Figure 1. The Jaqaru ‘only-inclusive’ type
(6) Wari’ (Chapacuran; Everett & Kern 1997: 303) Singular Group 1+2(+3) wari’ 1 wata’ 1+3 warut 2 wum 2+3 wahu’ 3m wiriko 3+3m wirikoko 3f wirikam 3+3f wirikakam 3n je
(7) Karo (Tupían, Tupí-Ramarama; Gabas Jr. 1999: 39) Singular Group 1+2(+3) iʡtə 1 õn 1+3 té 2 ẽn 2+3 kaʡto 3m at 3+3 tap 3f ŋa
The Bolivian lowland Isolate Cayubaba forms an interesting case, since its paradigm of possessive circumfixes shows possible traces of a former four person-system. Consider (8):
(8) Cayubaba (Isolate; Key 1967: 48–9) Singular Group 1+2(+3) o-noun-ø 1 a-noun-i 1+3 a-noun-ihi 2 apa-noun-a 2+3 apa-noun-ihi 3 a-noun-che 3+3 a-noun-iki 3imp d-noun-ø
Note that in (8) in the non-singular first, second, and third person the first or prefixed part of the possessive circumfix is equal to the singular counterpart, whereas the second or suffixed part of the circumfix is formed by the plural suffix ‑ihi/‑iki. This might be evidence for a historical process of reanalysis of an earlier ‘only-inclusive’ type.
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The sample contains two candidate languages, Chayahuita and Jebero, for the ‘minimal/augmented’ type, i.e. languages that distinguish between three different types of ‘we’: 1+2, 1+2+3, and 1+3. This distinction is exemplified by the Chaya huita free pronoun paradigm in (9) and the Jebero subject cross-reference paradigm in (10).
(9) Chayahuita (Cahuapanan; Hart 1988: 262) Singular Group 1+2 kanpo’ 1+2+3 kanpoa’ 1 ka 1+3 kiya, këya 2 këma 2+3 kanpita 3 ina 3+3 inapita
(10) Jebero (Cahuapanan; Bendor-Samuel 1961: 76) Singular Group 1+2 -lək 1+2+3 -ləkwaʡ 1 -lək 1+3 -liðək 2 -la 2+3 -lamaʡ 3 -li 3+3 -linaʡ The 1+2 forms in (9) and (10) are in fact isolated dual-like forms in the respective paradigms. Since no other dual forms appear in the paradigms, Cysouw (2003: 139– 40) classifies this kind of pronominal marking with three different types of ‘we’ as the ‘minimal/augmented’ type. The Yagua free pronoun paradigm in (11), however, also shows three different types of ‘we’, but unlike the Chayahuita and Jebero case, the form nááy is in fact a dual form in a paradigm with more dual forms, and, thus, has separate status. Therefore, in our approach, Yagua is classified as pertaining to the ‘inclusive/exclusive’ type. (11) Yagua (Peba-Yaguan; Payne & Payne 1990: 370) Singular Group Restricted group 1+2(+3) vú̩ ú̩ y 1 ray 1+3 núúy nááy 2 jiy 2+3 jiréy są´ą´da 3 níí 3+3 riy naada Of the 65 sample languages 37 (57%) have the category of inclusive–exclusive, while the remaining 28 (43%) languages exhibit only one form for non-singular first person. Of the 37 languages that make some kind of inclusive–exclusive distinction, eight are of the ‘only-inclusive’ type, 27 of the ‘inclusive/exclusive’ type, and two of the ‘minimal/augmented’ type. The sample contains no languages of the ‘no-we’ type. Table 1 now gives the percentages of the person-marking types encountered
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America Table 1. The 65-languages sample percentage-wise No-we
Unified-we
Only-inclusive Inclusive/exclusive Minimal/augmented
0 = 0%
28 (43.1%)
8 (12.3%)
27 (41.5%)
2 (3.1%)
in the sample. Taking Siewierska and Bakker (this volume) as a point of reference, we can say that the frequency of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in the languages we sampled is slightly higher (57%) than the world-wide distribution sampled by Siewierska and Bakker (46%).
3. The genetic perspective Taking the language isolates into account as separate language families, it can be said that 18 (54,5%) out of the 33 language families in the sample exhibit the inclusive–exclusive distinction. In this section we will explore the question to what extent these systems are derived from other forms, or to what extent they can be reconstructed as part of the original Proto-language. If we look at the occurrence of the inclusive–exclusive distinction from this purely genetic perspective, Arawakan is a family with a clear split. Arawakan generally does not exhibit the distinction (cf. Aikhenvald 1999: 88), but there are some exceptions to be accounted for. Whereas the person systems of Southern Maipuran (Baure, Trinitario, Iñapari, Piro) and Western Maipuran (Yanesha’), do not distinguish between inclusive and exclusive forms, the Pre-Andine Maipuran (Campa) languages Ashéninca, Campa Caquinte, Machiguenga, and Nomatsiguenga do. These four languages have a person system similar to that of Aymara (12) (cf. also the system in Jaqaru (5)), as exemplified by the free pronoun paradigms of Ashéninca, Machiguenga, and Nomatsiguenga in (13) through (15), and the subject crossreference prefixes of Campa Caquinte in (16) — the only forms available in the source:3 (12) Aymara (Aymaran; Hardman, Vásquez & Yapita 1988: 182) Singular Group 1+2(+3) jiwasa 1 naya 2 juma 3 jupa
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(13) Ashéninca (Arawakan; Reed & Payne 1986: 324) Singular Group 1+2(+3) akaa 1 naaka 2 eeroka 3m irirori 3f iroori (14) Machiguenga (Arawakan; Snell 1998: 31) Singular Group 1+2(+3) aro(-egi) 1 naro 2 viro 3m iriro 3f iroro (15) Nomatsiguenga (Arawakan; Shaver 1996: 34) Singular Group 1+2(+3) eíró 1 naro 2 obiro 3m iríro 3f iroro (16) Campa Caquinte (Arawakan; Swift 1988: 62) Singular Group 1+2(+3) a1 no2 pi3m i-, iri3f oPertaining to the ‘only-inclusive’ type, examples (12) through (15) obviously exhibit a four-person system, which is exemplified by the free pronouns of the respective languages, but the same type of ‘only-inclusive’ marking is apparently pervasive throughout the entire person system of these languages, as shown by the Caquinte A and agentive S cross-reference markers in (16). Comparing these prefixes — and those of the other Campa languages — with the Proto-forms given by Aikhenvald, we can only speculate on a possible reinterpretation of the non-focused A/Sa marker as an inclusive marker. Consider the likely forms of Proto-Arawakan A, Sa, and possessive prefixes in (17):
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
(17) Proto-Arawakan (Aikhenvald 1999: 88) Singular Group 1+2(+3) wa1 nu- 1+3 wa2 (p)i- 2+3 (h)i3m ri-, i- 3+3 na3f thu, uimp panon-foc A/Sa i-, aSince number distinction apparently only plays a minimal role in the core person system of languages of the ‘only-inclusive’ type, the obvious question is how person plurality is expressed in these languages. In the case of free person markers, plural suffixes that are used to inflect nouns may be added, but only if the number of persons or things referred to is not disambiguated by the context. In the case of bound cross-reference markers, suffixes belonging to the verb morphology may be added to convey a plural notion. Thus, in ambiguous contexts the Ashéninca plural suffix ‑payee(ni), which is used to pluralize nouns or adjectives used as nouns, can be added to the free person markers naaka (1+3) and aaka (1+2 or 1+2+3) to render a plural notion of these markers. The discontinuous verbal suffix ‑aiy…ni may be added to the verb complex to indicate a plural subject or object. Consider the examples from Reed and Payne in (18): (18) Ashéninca (Arawakan; Reed & Payne 1986: 324–5) a. naaka-payee ‘we:excl’ 1-pl aaka-payeeni ‘we:incl’ 1+2-pl b. no-kem-ak-e-ri 1-hear-pftv-nonfut-3m ‘I heard him.’ c. no-kem-aiy-ak-e-ri-ni 1-hear-pl-pftv-nonfut-3m-pl ‘We heard him/them.’ ‘I heard them.’ Northern Maipuran Resígaro does not show the ‘only-inclusive’ type of person marking, but makes the ‘straightforward’ inclusive–exclusive distinction:
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(19) Resígaro (Arawakan; Allin 1979: 116–17) Singular Group 1+2(+3) fú 1 n –ó 1+3 muu 2 phú 2+3 hú 3m tsú 3+3 n –ú 3f tsó The remaining Arawakan languages in the sample are all of the ‘unified-we’ type. Consider the Yanesha’ free pronoun paradigm in (20): (20) Yanesha’ (Arawakan; Duff-Tripp 1997: 61) Singular Group 1+2(+3) ya 1 na 1+3 ya 2 p˜a 2+3 sa 3 ña 3+3 ñet Other sample languages that pattern according to the ‘only-inclusive’ type are Tarma Quechua — which belongs to the Quechua I subgroup — the nearly extinct Pacaraos Quechua dialect, and, as mentioned, Jaqaru — Aymara’s sister-language in the Aymaran family. The Bolivian highland languages Chipaya (21) and Uru (22), both belonging to the Uru-Chipayan family, seem to have moved from the ‘onlyinclusive’ type to the ‘inclusive/exclusive’ type. The form ‑nak(a) functions like a (+3) plural marker, and has been added to the singular first- and third-person pronouns to create plural forms. The form ‑trum/-chu(m) resembles Quechua ‑nchi as a (+2) pluralizer. In Quechua verb morphology, (1+2) and (2+3) are marked ‑nkichik and ‑nchik, respectively. (21) Chipaya (Uru-Chipayan; Cerrón Palomino 2002: 29–30) Singular Group 1+2(+3) utrumnak 1 wer 1+3 wernak 2 am 2+3 amtruk 3m nii 3+3m niinak 3f naa 3+3f naanak (22) Uru (Uru-Chipayan; Muysken field notes) Singular Group 1+2(+3) uchumi, wakpa chumi 1 wił 1+3 witnaka 2 amp 2+3 amp chuka 3 ni 3+3 ninaka
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
Apart from Arawakan, Quechuan is the only other language family in the sample that is starting to show a split as far as the inclusive–exclusive distinction is concerned. Huánuco Quechua and Ayacucho Quechua, classified as Quechua IIC, seem to be moving from the ‘only-inclusive’ to the ‘inclusive/exclusive’ type. Consider the free pronoun paradigms of Tarma Quechua (23), Huánuco Quechua (24), and Ayacucho Quechua (25): (23) Tarma Quechua (Quechuan; Adelaar 1977: 259) Singular Group 1+2(+3) nuqanchi(k) 1 nuqa 2 qam 3 pay (24) Huánuco Quechua (Quechuan; Weber 1989: 76) Singular Group 1+2(+3) noqanchi(:) 1 noqa 1+3 noqaykuna 2 qam 2+3 qamkuna 3 pay 3+3 paykuna (25) Ayacucho Quechua (Quechuan; Parker 1965: 35) Singular Group 1+2(+3) ñuqanchik 1 ñuqa 1+3 nuqayku 2 qam 2+3 qamkuna 3 pay 3+3 paykuna Whereas Tarma Quechua has a clear four-person system (‘only-inclusive’ type), the Quechua I language Huánuco Quechua has -kuna nominal plural for 1+3, 2+3, and 3+3. Ayacucho Quechua seems to have developed a grammaticalized first-person exclusive pronoun nuqayku. The non-singular second- and third-person pronouns are still formed by adding the plural suffix ‑kuna to the singular forms. However, both Huánuco Quechua and Ayacucho Quechua show traces of an earlier ‘only-inclusive’ person system. As we have seen above, the same goes for the Bolivian highland languages Chipaya and Uru. From a genetic perspective it is also possible to subdivide the inclusive forms in different languages into underived or original forms and derived forms. With ‘derived’ we mean that the forms in question show evidence of a clear internal morphological structure suggesting that they have been formed out of earlier building blocks, while in the case of an ‘original’ form there is no such evidence. Thus, we have seen in examples (5) and (12) that Aymaran has an original, underived form for the fourth person. The same goes for Boran, as exemplified in (26) and (27).
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(26) Bora (Boran; Thiesen 1996: 33) Singular Group 1+2(+3) meé 1 oó 1+3 muúha 2 uú 2+3 ámuúha 3m diíbye 3+3 diítye 3f diílle (27) Miraña (Boran; Seifart p.c.) Singular Group 1+2(+3) me:múʔáj 1 ó= 1+3 múʔáj 2 ú= 2+3 ámu:ʔaj 3m di:be 3+3 di:te 3f di:dʒe Bora and Miraña seem to have a special ‘inclusive’ morpheme me:, which appears independently in Bora and is prefixed to the non-singular exclusive form in Miraña. Other language families exhibiting an original inclusive form are Cahuapanan — exemplified by the Chayahuita and Jebero free pronoun paradigms in (9) and (10), respectively — Peba-Yaguan (11), and Tucanoan (28). (28) Orejón (Tucanoan; Velie & Velie 1981: 122) Singular Group 1+2(+3) mai (juna) jã 1 yi 1+3 yiquɨ (juna) jã 2 mɨ 2+3 mɨsa (juna) jã 3m ñi aguɨ 3+3m ĩti juna jã ñiona jã 3f ñio ago 3+3f Tupían seems to have original forms as well. The sample contains six Tupían languages, of which four belong to the Tupí-Guaraní branch. The agreement prefixes of three of these four languages, Guaraní-Chiriguano (30), Sirionó (31), and Yuki (32), seem to correspond with the Proto-Tupí-Guaraní person prefixes referring to A and agentive S arguments in independent clauses (29). (29) Proto-Tupí-Guaraní (Jensen 1990: 130) Singular Group 1+2(+3) ja1 a- 1+3 oro2 ere- 2+3 pe3 o- 3+3 o-
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
(30) Guaraní-Chiriguano (Tupían, Tupí-Guaraní; Dietrich 1986: 86) Singular Group 1+2(+3) ya-/ña1 a- 1+3 ro2 re- 2+3 pe3 o- 3+3 o (31) Sirionó (Tupían, Tupí Guaraní; Priest & Priest 1967: 252) Singular Group 1+2(+3) nãne1 a- 1+3 ure2 ere- 2+3 hẽ3 e- 3+3 e (32) Yuki (Tupían, Tupí-Guaraní; Villafañe 2004: 207) Singular Group 1+2(+3) ya1 a- 1+3 ore2 ere- 2+3 je3 o-, e-, i-, u-, 3+3 o-, e-, i-, u-, gu-/gwe/ji-/yi- gu-/gwe/ji-/yiKokama, however, has been classified as a Tupí-Guaraní language, but according to Cabral (1995) the language cannot be unambiguously classified, since its linguistic subsystems do not find correlates in a single language or linguistic family.4 Thus, the Kokama agreement markers in (33) — with the exception of the second person (non-)singular — do not seem to derive from Proto-Tupí-Guaraní. (33) Kokama (Tupían, Tupí-Guaraní (Mixed?); Cabral 1995: 132) Singular Group 1+2(+3) inita-, *ca-5 1+3 tana-, *penu1 2 na- 2+3 epe3 ra-, *ya- 3+3 ra(na)-, *inuThe inclusive forms of the Tupían sample languages all seem to be original forms. (34) Mekens (Tupían, Tupí-Tupari; Galucio 2001: 38) Singular Group 1+2(+3) ki1 o- 1+3 ose2 e- 2+3 eyat3 i-, s- 3+3 teyat3c se- 3c+3c se-
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(35) Karo (Tupían, Tupí-Ramarama; Gabas Jr. 1999: 81) Singular Group 1+2(+3) iʔ= 1 o= 1+3 té= 2 e= 2+3 karo= 3 to= 3+3 to= Uru-Chipayan (21, 22), Zaparoan — exemplified by the Zaparoan free pronoun paradigm in (36) — Cayubaba (8), Chiquitano (37), Waorani (38), and Kwaza (39) all seem to have original forms for the inclusive markers as well. (36) Záparo (Zaparoan; Peeke 1962: 179–81) Singular Group 1+2(+3) pa 1 ko 1+3 kana 2 cha 2+3 kina 3 naw 3+3 na 3imp noka (37) Chiquitano (Isolate; Galeote Tormo 1993: 128) Singular Group 1+2(+3) axoñi 1 axɨnɨ 1+3 axɨsomɨ 2 axɨkɨ 2+3 axaño 3m axti, tyonenti 3+3m axɨma, tyonema 3f tyone 3+3f axio, tyoneio (38) Waorani (Isolate; Peeke 1973: 128) Singular Group 1+2(+3) bõdõ 1 botõ 1+3 bõditõ 2 bitõ 2+3 bĩditõ 3 tõbẽkã 3+3 tõbẽkã (39) Kwaza (Isolate; van der Voort 2004: 235) Singular Group 1+2(+3) txanã 1 si 1+3 tsitsɛ 2 xyi 2+3 xyitsɛ 3 ĩ 3+3 ĩ Some Arawakan Campa languages have derived inclusive forms. Examples (13) and (14) show that Ashéninca and Machiguenga seem to exhibit some kind of bare
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
form for the inclusive marker: Ashéninca aaka as opposed to first singular naaka, and Machiguenga aro as opposed to first singular naro. Northern Maipuran Resígaro in (19), which is heavily influenced by Bora, has muu- as an innovation for the inclusive marker. As we have seen in examples (23) through (25), the Quechuan inclusive forms are derived as well. Itonama has the same form for the first-person non-singular inclusive and the second-person non-singular. Consider the Itonama free pronoun paradigm in (40): (40) Itonama (Isolate; Crevels field notes) Singular Group 1+2(+3) dihni 1 osni, osni’ka 1+3 sihni 2m o’ni 2+3 dihni 2f ko’ni 3m ohni 3+3 ohnitye’ke 3f pini As we will see in Section 4, in Mosetén the inclusive marker only occurs in the transitive and intransitive cross-reference paradigms of the verb, which makes its status as an original form quite unlikely. Movima, finally, has an interesting inclusive marker in its transitive cross-reference paradigm — and possessive paradigm for that matter — since it is clearly derived from the combination of the first- and second-person singular. Consider the Movima transitive cross-reference markers in (41): (41) Movima (Isolate; Haude p.c.) Singular Group 1+2(+3) ił=verb-n 1 ił= 1+3 ił=verb-y’li 2 -n 2+3 -nkweł 3m -’us 3+3 -’is 3f -sne 3n -’as
4. The areal perspective In some of the languages in our sample, inclusive forms seem to have emerged through contact with neighbouring languages. As already pointed out, the Arawakan family shows an innovation as far as the Campa languages are concerned, which may be due to Quechuan influence. Nevertheless, the question then remains why a language like Yanesha’, which is very heavily influenced by Quechua, has not adopted the inclusive–exclusive distinction. We have already seen in the previous section that Northern Maipuran Resígaro (19), which is heavily influenced by Bora, has muu- as an innovation for the
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i nclusive marker. This form is probably based on the dual form ‑mu‑, which is to be found in Bora (26) and Miraña (27). According to van der Voort (fc 2005), the Kwaza inclusive marker txana (39) may be a loan from the Salamãi (Tupían, Tupí-Mondé) form toniʡe or tòná ‘we’ (BeckerDonner 1955: 330–1), even more because the speakers of Salamãi were close neighbours of the Kwaza. The fact that the remaining Kwaza free pronouns and those of its neighbouring Isolates Kanoê and Aikanã do not show any resemblance to Tupían forms, may be indicative of the borrowed status of the Kwaza inclusive– exclusive distinction. As alluded to above, another intriguing case is formed by Mosetén, one of the dialects belonging to the small Isolated language family Mosetenan, spoken in the Bolivian foothills of the Andes. Whereas in this language the free pronoun tsin is used for non-singular first-person inclusive and exclusive reference, the inclusive–exclusive distinction is made in the transitive and intransitive cross-reference paradigms of the verb. According to Sakel (2002; this volume), the inclusive marker ‑ja appears to have been brought about by language contact, since it probably is a formal loan from another language. Consider (42), in which the free pronoun paradigm of Mosetén is given, and (43), which gives the intransitive inflection of tsä’ï- ‘wake up’. (42) Mosetén (Mosetenan; Sakel 2002: 8; 2004: 117) Singular Group 1+2(+3) tsin 1 yäe 1+3 tsin 2 mi 2+3 mï’ïn 3m mi’ 3+3 mi’in 3f mo’ 3+3 mo’in (43) Singular Group 1+2(+3) tsä’ëjä’ 1m tsä’ï 1+3 tsä’ï 1f tsä’ï’ 1+3 tsä’ï’ 2m tsä’ï 2+3 tsä’ï 2f tsä’ï’ 2+3 tsä’ï’ 3+3 tsä’ï (ïn) 3m tsä’ï 3f tsä’ï’ 3+3 tsä’ï’ (ïn) Similarly, the possibility cannot be excluded that the Quechua first-person inclusive form emerged modelled upon the Aymaran paradigm (Adelaar p.c.). A more detailed analysis of possible areal effects will have to wait until more is known about the relationship of the different languages. Furthermore, we have not included most neighbouring Brazilian languages in our survey, which makes it impossible to give a comprehensive evaluation of possible areal effects. Nonetheless, many of the inclusive languages appear to be clustered together. Areas of concentration include the following languages, which are numbered according to Map 1 in Appendix 1 (members of a single family conjointly in square brackets ):
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
Northern Peru and adjacent Ecuador and Colombia: [3. Bora, 4. Miraña], 10.Yagua, 15. Orejón, [24. Arabela, 25. Iquito, 26. Záparo], 29. Waorani, 37. Resígaro Central Peru: [11. Ayacucho Quechua 12. Huánuco Quechua, 13. Pacaraos Quechua, 14. Tarma Quechua], 2. Jaqaru, [33. Ashéninca, 34. Campa Caquinte, 35. Machiguenga, 36. Nomatsiguenga] Bolivian lowlands and adjacent Rondonia: [5. Moré, 6. Wari’], 9. Mosetén, [18. Karo, 19. Mekens], 27. Cayubaba, 30. Itonama, 31. Kwaza, 32. Movima
5. Conclusion In this chapter we have tried to survey to what extent the inclusive–exclusive distinction plays a role in the languages of central-western South America (Bolivia, Rondonia (Brazil), Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia), and, if languages make this distinction, to what extent the person systems may be reconstructed as four-person systems. As we have seen in Table 1, of the 65 sample languages 37 (57%) have the category of inclusive–exclusive. Of these 37 languages eight (12.3%) are of the ‘onlyinclusive’ type. Apart from these eight languages, Quechuan (Huánuco Quechua, Ayacucho Quechua), Uru-Chipayan, and Cayubaba show clear traces of a former ‘only-inclusive’ person-marking type, which may provide further evidence for the grammaticalization path of person-marking systems. Table 2 gives an overview of the person-marking strategies in the linguistic families of central-western South America. While crosses (X) mark the occurrence of the different person-marking types in the various language families, arrows (→) mark probable historical changes. Contemporary stages are printed in regular font, hypothetical previous and future stages in grey. As becomes clear from Table 2, our results indeed suggest a unidirectional development, in cases where change has occurred, following the person hierarchy proposed by Cysouw (2003). All changes, as far as we have been able to establish, appear to go in the same direction. Cysouw’s person hierarchy is based on the two implicational universals represented in (44), which can be combined into a hierarchy of conditions (cf. Cysouw 2003: 96–7). (44) a. b
Exclusive → Inclusive Split Inclusive → Exclusive
Thus, there has to be an inclusive for there to be an exclusive, and an exclusive for there to be a split inclusive. The person-marking types resulting from the different fulfilled conditions constitute the building blocks of Cysouw’s First Person Hiearchy in (1), which is repeated here.
(1) First Person Hierarchy no-we > unified-we > only-incl > incl/excl > minimal/augmented
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No-we
Unif-we
Only-incl
+→
+→ +
+
+
+ + + +→
+→
+→
+ +
+
+ →+ + + →+ +
+→ +
→+ + +→
Min/aug
→+ +
+ + + + + + +
Incl/excl
→+ + + +
→
→+ +
Although tentative, the results of Table 2 seem to provide diachronic support for Cysouw’s person hierarchy. To return to the issue of the status of the inclusive category within the different language families, in Table 3 the same linguistic families are represented once again, with respect to the status of the inclusive–exclusive distinction. If a family has an inclusive category, can it be reconstructed as a basic category for the family, or does it appear to be morphologically derived? To what extent is the family split with respect to the feature of inclusive?
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
As mentioned earlier, 18 out of the 33 language families in the sample exhibit the inclusive–exclusive distinction. In 12 out of these 18 families the fourth person category of inclusive can be considered a basic one with some confidence, while in the remaining six families (Arawakan, Quechuan, Chapacuran, Mosetenan, Movima, and Itonama) it appears a distinct possibility that the category was not basic. For some of these at least, an areal contact explanation seems plausible. In 15 families there is no evidence of an inclusive–exclusive distinction, the incidence of the disTable 3. The status of the inclusive category in the languages of central-western South America Language family Arawakan Aymaran Barbacoan Boran Cahuapanan Chapacuran Hibito-Cholonan Harakmbut-Katukinan Jabutian Jivaroan Nambikwaran Panoan Peba-Yaguan Quechuan Tacanan Tucanoan Tupian Uru-Chipayan Witotoan Zaparoan Candoshi-Shapra Cayubaba Chiquitano Cofán Waorani Itonama Kanoê Kwaza Leko Mosetenan Movima Munichi Yurakaré
Inclusive
Underived
± +
+
+ + +
+ +
+ ±
+
+ + +
+ + +
+
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tinction is somewhat but not extremely far above the world average, and in the majority of the cases where there is such a distinction it seems to be a basic category. For these reasons a global areal account of inclusivity does not seem to be on the right track. More detailed analysis of the precise spatial distribution of the feature and the precise morphological features in the language families that have it is called for to see how plausible language contact is as an explanation for its distribution.
Acknowledgements We are very grateful to Willem Adelaar, Astrid Alexander-Bakkerus, Laércio Bacelar, Carola Emkow, Rafael Fischer, Antoine Guillaume, Katharina Haude, Jeanette Sakel, Cristián Salvatierra, Frank Seifart, Simon van de Kerke, Rik van Gijn, Hein van der Voort, and Lucrecia Villafañe for sharing their data with us. For extensive comments on an earlier version of this chapter, we especially thank Michael Cysouw. Furthermore we also wish to thank Elena Filimonova, Hein van der Voort, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments, and Willem Doelman for his cartographic design. Needless to say, none of them is responsible for any errors, infelicities, or misinterpretations in this chapter.
Abbreviations a=transitive subject; ba=Bolivian Amazonia; bf=Bolivian foothills; bh=Bolivian highland; bo=Bolivian Oriente; ca=Colombian Amazonia; cf= Colombian foothills; ea=Ecuadorian Amazonia; ec= Ecuadorian coast; excl=exclusive; f=feminine; ie=inclusive/exclusive; loc=location; imp=impersonal; incl=inclusive; loc=location; m=masculine; ma=minimal/ augmented; n=neuter; non-foc=non-focused; nonfut=non-future; nw=no-we; oi=onlyinclusive; pa=Peruvian Amazonia; pf=Peruvian foothills; pftv=perfective; ph=Peruvian highland; pl=plural; pm=person marking; ra=Rondonian Amazonia; s=subject; sa=intransitive subject; uw=unified-we; 1=first person; 2=second person; 3=third person; 3c=third person correferential.
Notes 1. Like many other languages in the region, Kanoê lacks nominal number. Its pronominal system, however, does distinguish between singular and non-singular person markers by means of the plural suffix ‑te. The fact that this suffix, which also occurs in the neighbouring Isolate Aikanã (cf. van der Voort fc. 2005), resembles the Kwaza pronominal plural marker ‑tse may point to a borrowed category of plural pronouns and, therefore, an earlier ‘no-we’ type. 2. In order to establish a cross-linguistically more sensible typology, Cysouw (2003: 66) argues for a redefinition of the notion of ‘plurality’ as ‘group marking’. In doing so, the opposition singular versus plural is also redefined as singular versus non-singular. Moreover, the dual is included in Cysouw’s (2003: 189) ‘restricted group’ categories. In this chapter we will adhere to this new definition. 3. It is broadly assumed in the literature (cf. Haspelmath 1998: 137; Croft 2000: 157) that grammaticalization processes underlie unilateral changes, such as the following: emphatic
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America personal pronoun > clitic pronoun > agreement affix. As Siewierska and Bakker (this volume) point out, such a process may involve, apart from the formal loss of independent morphological status and phonological reduction, a decrease of encoded semantic distinctions as well. Therefore, we fully realize that free pronouns may behave differently from agreement markers and vice versa. 4. An extensive comparison of Kokama and Tupínambá, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in the 16th and 17th centuries along the Brazilian coast, have led Cabral (1995) to the conclusion that, except for a great number of lexical similarities and a number of sound correspondences, Kokama differs considerably from Tupínambá in its phonology, morphology and syntax. 5. The Kokama agreement markers preceded by the * belong to female speech.
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Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken Duff-Tripp, M. 1997. Gramática del idioma Yanesha’ (Amuesha). Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 43]. Eastman, R. & Eastman, E. 1963. Iquito syntax. In B. F. Elson (ed.), Studies in Peruvian Indian languages 1, 145–92. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields 9]. Everett, D. L. 1986. Pirahã. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazonian languages, Volume 1, 200–325. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Everett, D. L. & Kern, B. 1997. Wari’. The Pacaas Novos language of Western Brazil. London: Routledge. Fast, G. & Larson, M. L. 1974. Introducción al idioma aguaruna. Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Documento de Trabajo 3]. Gabas Jr., N. 1999. A grammar of Karo, Tupí (Brazil). Doctoral dissertation, University of California at Santa Barbara. Galeote Tormo, J. 1993. Manityana auki besɨro. Gramática moderna de la lengua chiquitana y vocabulario básico. San Javier, Bolivia: Centro de Pastoral y Cultura Chiquitana. Galucio, A. V. 2001. The morphosyntax of Mekens (Tupí). Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago. Gibson, M. L. 1996. El Munichi: Un idioma que se extingue. Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 42]. Guillaume, A. 2004. A Grammar of Cavineña, an Amazonian language of northern Bolivia. Doctoral dissertation, La Trobe University. Haas, M. R. 1969. ‘Exclusive’ and ‘inclusive’: A look at early usage. International Journal of American Linguistics 35: 1–6. Hardman-de Bautista, M. J. 1972. Early use of inclusive/exclusive. International Journal of American Linguistics 38: 145–6. Hardman, M. J. 1999. Jaqaru. Munich: Lincom Europa [Languages of the World/Materials 183]. Hardman, M.J., Vásquez, J. & Yapita, J.de Dios. 1988. Aymara: Compendio de estructura fono lógica y gramatical. La Paz: Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara. Hart, H. L. 1988. Diccionario chayahuita-castellano (Canponanquë nisha nisha nonacaso’). Yarinacocha, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 29]. Haspelmath, M. 1998. Review of A. C. Harris and L. Campbell, Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective (1995). Linguistic Typology 2(1): 131–9. Helberg Chávez, H. 1989. Skizze einer Grammatik des Amarakaeri. Doctoral dissertation, Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen. Hymes, D. 1972. On personal pronouns: “Fourth” person and phonesthematic aspects. In M. S. Smith (ed.), Studies in linguistics in honor of George L. Trager, 100–21. The Hague: Mouton. Jackway, M. A. (ed.). 1987. Vocabulario huambisa. Yarinacocha, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 24]. Jensen, C. 1990. Cross-referencing changes in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. In D. L. Payne (ed.), Amazonian linguistics. Studies in Lowland South American languages, 115–58. Austin: University of Texas Press. Juank, A. 1982. Aujmatsatai, yatsuchi. Manual de aprendizaje de la lengua shuar, Volume 1, 2nd edition. Macas: Mundo Shuar.
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America Key, H. 1967. Morphology of Cayuvava. The Hague: Mouton [Janua Linguarum, series practica 53]. Leach, I. M. 1969. Vocabulario ocaina. Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 4]. Lindskoog, J. N. & Lindskoog, C. A. 1964. Vocabulario cayapa. Quito: Ministerio de Educación Pública and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie de Vocabularios Indígenas Mariano Silva y Aceves 9]. Loriot, J., Lauriault, E. & Day, D. 1993. Diccionario shipibo-castellano. Yarinacocha, Peru: Mi nisterio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 31]. Mannheim, B. 1982. Person, number and inclusivity in two Andean languages. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 17(2): 139–56. Matteson, E. 1965. The Piro (Arawakan) language. Berkeley: University of California Press [University of California Publications in Linguistics 42]. Matteson, E. (ed.). 1967. Bolivian Indian grammars, 2 vols. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields 16]. Montag, S. 1981. Diccionario cashinahua, 2 vols. Yarinacocha, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 9]. Ottaviano, J. C. & Ottaviano, I. 1967. Tacana. In E. Matteson (ed.), Volume 1, 139–207. Parker, G. 1965. Gramática de Quechua Ayacuchana. Lima: Universidad Mayor de San Marcos. Parker, S. 1995. Datos de la lengua Iñapari. Yarinacocha, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Documento de Trabajo 27]. Payne, D. L. & Payne, T. E. 1990. Yagua. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazonian languages, Volume 2, 249–474. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Peeke, M. C. 1962. Structural summary of Záparo. In B. F. Elson (ed.), Studies in Ecuadorian Indian languages 1, 125–216. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma [Linguistic Series 7]. Peeke, M. C. 1973. Preliminary grammar of Auca. Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Oklahoma [Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics 39]. Pitman, D. 1980. Bosquejo de la gramática araona. Riberalta, Bolivia: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Notas Lingüísticas de Bolivia 9]. Priest, P. N. & Priest, A. 1967. Sirionó. In E. Matteson (ed.), Volume 2, 195–255. Prost, G. R. 1967. Chácobo. In E. Matteson (ed.), Volume 1, 285–359. Reed, J. C. & Payne, D. L. 1986. Asheninca (Campa) pronominals. In U. Wiesemann (ed.), Pronominal systems, 323–31. Tübingen: Narr. Rich, R. G. 1999. Diccionario Arabela-Castellano. Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 49]. Sakel, J. 2002. The status of the first-person plural inclusive marker in Mosetenan. Paper presented at the L&C meeting November 19, 2002, Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen. Sakel, J. 2004. A grammar of Mosetén. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 33]. Shaver, H. 1996. Diccionario nomatsiguenga-castellano, castellano-nomatsiguenga. Yarinacocha, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 41].
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Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken Snell, B. A. 1998. Pequeño diccionario machiguenga-castellano. Lima: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Documento de Trabajo 32]. Swift, K. E. 1988. Morfología del Caquinte (Arawak Preandino). Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 25]. Telles, S. 2002. Fonologia e gramática Latundê/Lakondê. Doctoral dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Thiesen, W. 1996. Gramática del idioma Bora. Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 38]. Torero, A. 1964. Los dialectos quechuas. Anales Científicos de la Universidad Agraria 2: 446– 78. Tuggy, J. C. 1966. Vocabulario candoshi de Loreto. Yarinacocha, Peru: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 2]. van der Voort, H. 2004. A grammar of Kwaza. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 29]. van der Voort, H. Fc. 2005. Kwaza in a comparative perspective. Ms. accepted for publication by IJAL in 2004. Van Wynen, D. & Van Wynen, M. 1962. Tacana y Castellano. Cochabamba: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano and Ministerio de Educación [Vocabularios Bolivianos 2]. Velie, D. & Velie, V. 1981. Vocabulario orejón. Yarinacocha, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano [Serie Lingüística Peruana 16]. Villafañe, L. 2004. Gramática yuki: Lengua tupí-guaraní de Bolivia. Doctoral dissertation, University of Nijmegen. Weber, D. J. 1989. A grammar of Huánuco Quechua. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Appendix 1: Location of the sample languages 1. Aymara 2. Jaqaru 3. Bora 4. Miraña 5. Moré 6. Wari’ 7. Chayahuita 8. Jebero 9. Mosetén 10. Yagua 11. Ayacucho Quechua 12. Huánuco Quechua 13. Pacaraos Quechua 14. Tarma Quechua 15. Orejón 16. Kokama 17. Guaraní-
Chiriguano 18. Karo 19. Mekens 20. Sirionó 21. Yuki 22. Chipaya 23. Uru 24. Arabela 25. Iquito 26. Záparo 27. Cayubaba 28. Chiquitano 29. Waorani 30. Itonama 31. Kwaza 32. Movima 33. Ashéninca 34. Campa Caquinte 35. Machiguenga 36. Nomatsiguenga
37. Resígaro 38. Baure 39. Trinitario 40. Iñapari 41. Piro 42. Yanesha’ 43. Awa Pit 44. Chachi 45. Cholón 46. Harakmbut 47. Arikapu 48. Aguaruna 49. Huambisa 50. Shuar 51. Lakondê 52. Cashinahua 53. Chácobo 54. Shipibo-Conibo 55. Araona 56. Cavineña
57. Tacana 58. Huitoto 59. Ocaina 60. Candoshi-Shapra 61. Kanoê 62. Cofán 63. Leko 64. Munichi 65. Yurakaré
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America
Map The approximate Map 1. 1. The approximate location location of ofthe the65 65sample samplelanguages languages
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Mily Crevels and Pieter Muysken Table 4. The 65 sample languages Language
Family
PM LOC Source
Aymara Jaqaru Bora Miraña Moré Wari’ Chayahuita Jebero Mosetén Yagua Ayacucho Quechua Huánuco Quechua Pacaraos Quechua Tarma Quechua Orejón Kokama Guaraní-Chiriguano Karo Mekens Sirionó Yuki Chipaya Uru Arabela Iquito Záparo Cayubaba Chiquitano Waorani Itonama Kwaza Movima Ashéninca Campa Caquinte Machiguenga Nomatsiguenga Resígaro Baure Trinitario Iñapari Piro Yanesha’ Awa Pit Chachi
Aymaran Aymaran Boran Boran Chapacuran Chapacuran Cahuapanan Cahuapanan Mosetenan Peba-Yaguan Quechuan Quechuan Quechuan Quechuan Tucanoan Tupian Tupian Tupian Tupian Tupian Tupian Uru-Chipayan Uru-Chipayan Zaparoan Zaparoan Zaparoan Isolate Isolate Isolate Isolate Isolate Isolate Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Arawakan Barbacoan Barbacoan
OI OI IE IE IE IE MA MA IE IE IE IE OI OI IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE IE OI OI OI OI IE UW UW UW UW UW UW UW
PH PH PA CA BA RA PA PA BF PA PH PH PA PA PA PA BO RA RA BA BA BH BH PA PA EA BA BO EA BA RA BA PA PF PA PF PA BA BA PA PA PF CF EC
Hardman et al. 1988 Hardman 1999 Thiesen 1996 Frank Seifart p.c. Angenot-de Lima 2002 Everett & Kern 1997 Hart 1988 Bendor-Samuel 1961 Sakel 2003 Payne & Payne 1990 Parker 1965 Weber 1989 Adelaar 1987 Adelaar 1977 Velie & Velie 1981 Cabral 1995 Dietrich 1986 Gabas Jr. 1999 Galucio 2001 Priest & Priest 1967 Villafañe 2004 Cerrón-Palomino 2002 Muysken field notes Rich 1999 Eastman & Eastman 1963 Peeke 1962 Key 1967 Galeote Tormo 1993 Peeke 1973 Crevels field notes van der Voort 2004 Haude p.c. Reed & Payne 1986 Swift 1988 Snell 1998 Shaver 1996 Allin 1979 Baptista & Wallin 1967 Cristián Salvatierra p.c. Parker 1995 Matteson 1965 Duff-Tripp 1997 Curnow 1997 Lindskoog & Lindskoog 1964
Incl + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + − − − − − − −
Inclusive–exclusive distinctions in the languages of central-western South America Cholón Harakmbut Arikapu Aguaruna Huambisa Shuar Lakondê Cashinahua Chácobo Shipibo-Conibo Araona Cavineña Tacanan Huitoto Ocaina Candoshi-Shapra Kanoê Cofán Leko Munichi Yurakaré
Hibito-Cholonan HarakmbutKatukinan Jabutian Jivaroan Jivaroan Jivaroan Nambikwaran Panoan Panoan Panoan Tacanan Tacanan Tacanan Witotoan Witotoan Isolate Isolate Isolate Isolate Isolate Isolate
UW PF UW PA
Alexander-Bakkerus p.c. Helberg Chávez 1984
− −
UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW UW
van der Voort p.c. Fast & Larson 1974 Jackway (ed.) 1987 Juank 1982 Telles 2002 Montag 1981 Prost 1965 Loriot et al. 1993 Emkow p.c. Guillaume 2004 Ottaviano & Ottaviano 1967 Burtch 1983 Leach 1969 Tuggy 1966 Bacelar 2004 Fischer p.c. van de Kerke p.c. Gibson 1996 van Gijn p.c.
− − − − − − − − −a − − − − − − − − − −
RA PA PA EA RA PA BA PA BA BA BA PA PA PA RA EA BF PA BF
a Although Van Wynen & Van Wynen (1962: 200), Ottaviano & Ottaviano (1967: 197), and Pitman (1980: 82) postulate an inclusive–exclusive distinction for Tacanan, recent fieldwork has strength‑ ened the thought that Tacanan may indeed lack such a distinction (Emkow p.c., Guillaume p.c., 2004).
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Chapter 12
Inclusive and exclusive in Turkic languages Irina Nevskaya Russian Academy of Sciences/Frankfurt University
The article describes Turkic language means that render inclusive and exclusive semantics. We show that phenomena traditionally referred to as inclusive–exclusive categories in the Turkological literature (i.e. multi-plural personal pronouns and Yakut dual pronouns) belong to different functional fields. However, most Siberian Turkic languages and Turkmen have developed a morphological inclusive in their imperative paradigms. Among them, we distinguish the following two groups: (1) languages with distinct minimal and augmented inclusives, (2) languages with a general inclusive. In addition, some Turkic languages have developed special exclusive imperative forms. Otherwise, they use non-imperative forms in imperative contexts to express exclusive. We also discuss how inclusive and exclusive semantics is expressed in the Turkic pronominal sphere and in certain syntactic constructions. Keywords: Turkic languages, inclusive (general, minimal, augmented), exclusive
1. Introductory notes In grammar descriptions of different Turkic languages, there is a great confusion in the usage of the terms inclusive–exclusive: • A number of Turkic languages and their dialects differentiate two non-singular imperative forms of the first person (also called hortative, exhortative, or cohortative in the typological literature) which some turcologists treat as inclusive versus exclusive ones. We agree with Nina Dobrushina and Valentin Goussev that these forms are opposed as minimal inclusive versus augmented inclusive ones (see Dobrushina & Goussev, this volume). We deal with this issue in Section 2. We describe formal patterns of building augmented inclusive in Section 3. • In the pronominal sphere, the opposition of plural forms of personal pronouns with and without an additional marker of plurality is also sometimes considered to be that of inclusive–exclusive. We will show that this phenomenon encodes relations of different types, i.e. that multi-plural pronouns denote either a group of persons opposed to the rest of society, or individualized plurality, otherwise they are used for mere stylistic purposes. We will further show that Turkic personal pronouns of the first-person plural are indifferent to the category of inclusive–exclusive although their meaning can be interpreted as inclusive or exclusive in certain contexts. We describe these phenomena in Section 4.
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• Section 5 deals with so-called dual cooperative personal pronouns in Yakut which are also sometimes treated as inclusive–exclusive ones. We will discuss their semantics and functions and the sources of their development. We will show that they can be seen rather as a copy of the corresponding Mongolian coordinative construction than as a distorted reflection of the category of inclusive–exclusive pronouns found in the neighbouring Manchu-Tungusic languages. Although Turkic languages do not have the category of inclusive–exclusive encoded grammatically either in the verbal or in the nominal paradigm as an all-Turkic phenomenon, they all have the possibility to express inclusive and exclusive semantics by special coordinative, comitative and privative nominal phrases. See Section 6.
2. The category of inclusive–exclusive in the Turkic imperative paradigm The Turkic imperative paradigm shows quite a number of peculiarities in comparison with the paradigms of other moods, e.g. cumulative markers (Plank 1999: 282) Table 1. Turkic non-singular imperative forms of the first person Language
1st person “dual”
1st person “plural”
Yakut
Il-ıax ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ al-ıaq ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ al-aal/al-alı ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ al-aalı ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ al-aŋ ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ al-aalıq/al-alıq/al-alı/al-ajlı/al-al ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’
ıl-ıaγıŋ ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-ıaγıŋ ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-alıŋar ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-aalıŋ/al-aalıŋar ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-aŋar ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-aalıqtar/al-alıqtar/al-aaldar ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’
al-aalı ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ al-ala/al-alaq/al-alax ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ al-aŋ/al-aq/al-aaŋ/al-aaq /al-alı ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’
al-aq ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-alaqtar/al-alaxtır ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-aŋar/al-aqtar/al-aaŋar /al-aaqtar ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’ al-alıŋ ‘Let us take! (you:pl and me)’
Dolgan Tuvan Tofan Khakas Altay-kiži (a dialect used as literary Altay) Tuba (a North Altay variety) Kumandy (a North Altay variety) Shor (with its dialects) Turkmen
al-alı ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’
Inclusive and exclusive in Turkic languages
encoding both mood and person-number distinctions. Furthermore, some Turkic languages (Yakut, Dolgan, Tuvan, Tofan, Khakas, Shor, Chulym, Altay and Turkmen) differentiate two non-singular forms of the first person (see Table I). In Turkic grammar descriptions, they are defined as exclusive and inclusive imperative forms of the first-person plural by some authors (Grönbech 1936; Menges 1980; Ubrjatova 1991), or as dual and plural imperative forms of the first person by other scholars (Dyrenkova 1941: 173; Isxakov and Pal’mbax 1961: 394; Korkina 1970: 148; Baskakov (ed.) 1975: 189; Rassadin 1978: 222, etc.). Our analysis of their use supports the opinion of Dobrushina and Goussev (Dobrushina & Goussev, this volume) that they are opposed as minimal inclusive versus augmented inclusive ones. The forms characterised as exclusive or dual ones refer to two persons — the speaker and the addressee. They are further traditionally glossed as imperative first-person dual inclusive ones. The forms defined as inclusive or plural ones refer to the speaker and two or more addressees. In glosses, we refer to them as imperative first-person plural inclusive ones. Here are some language examples from a number of Turkic linguistic varieties. Yakut (Ubrjatova (ed.) 1982: 320–2): bar-ıax ‘Let us go (you:sg and me)!’ versus bar-ıaγıŋ ‘Let us go (you:pl and me)!’. Dolgan (Ubrjatova 1985: 179–82): bar-ıaq ‘Let us go (you:sg and me)!’ versus bar-ıaγıŋ ‘Let us go (you:pl and me)!’.
(1) Tuvan (Isxakov, Pal’mbax 1961: 391–7) Delegij-ni ergij už-aal! world-acc whole fly-imp.inc.1du ‘Let us (you:sg and me) fly over the whole world!’
(2) Ogl-um, qız-ım! Meeŋ-bile ırla-ž-ıŋar! son-poss.1sg daughter-poss.1sg I:gen-com sing-coop-imp.inc.1pl ‘My son, my daughter! Let us sing together!’
Tofan (Rassadin 1978: 222–5): al-aalı ‘Let us take! (you:sg and me)’ versus alaalıŋ/al-aalıŋar ‘Let us take (you:pl and me)!’. Khakas (Baskakov 1975: 89–190): sad-aŋ ‘Let us sell (you:sg and me)!’; sad-aŋar ‘Let us sell (you:pl and me)!’ Further examples:
(3) Če, amdı, aγarın daa pol-za, par-aŋ! well:prtcl now slowly although:prtcl be-cond go-imp.inc.1du ‘And now, slow as it may be, let us go (you and me)!’
(4) Am gorod kĭzĭ-zĭn is kör-eŋer! now city person-poss.3sg.acc listen try-imp.inc.1pl ‘Let us listen to a man from the town now (you:pl and me)!’
Altay language varieties:1 Tuba: kör-ööli ‘Let us see (you:sg and me)!’ versus kör-öök ‘Let us see (you:pl and me)!’ (Baskakov 1966: 84). Further examples:
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(5) D’e, marγ-ıž-ıp ij-ek! well:prtcl contest-coop-conv send:aux-imp.inc.1pl ‘Well, let us (you:pl and me) contest!’
(6) bar-aq! go-imp.inc.1pl ‘Let us (you:pl and me) go!’
(7) tart-ıž-alı, küre-ž-eli! fight-coop-imp.inc.1du fight-coop-imp.inc.1du ‘Let us fight (you:sg and me)!’
(8) köžö öl-ök! /öl-öli! together die-imp.inc.1pl /die-imp.inc.1du ‘Let us die (you:pl and me)/Let us die!’ (you:sg and me)
Apparently, not all linguistic varieties spoken in Altay make this distinction, although they possess the corresponding forms of the imperative. Thus, the Kuu (or Chalkan) variety of Altay has, apparently, lost this opposition (or has never developed it): the respective forms are used synonymously as general inclusive ones. See Kuu (Chalkan) examples (Baskakov 1985: 76–8):
(9) par-aq! / par-aqtar! / par-aqtır! go-imp.1pl / go-imp.inc.1pl / go-imp.inc.1pl ‘Let us go (you:sg and me or you:pl and me)!’
(10) Bir qatap küzek eez-in-e ajt-t-ı: once cat master-poss.3sg-dat say-pst-3sg Qaat al-ara bar-aqtır! de-d-i. wife take-inf go-imp.inc.1pl say-pst-3sg ‘Once the cat told his master, “Let us find you a wife!”’ With two participants, we would expect the minimal inclusive imperative form here in other Altay varieties. However, the form of the imperative of the first-person plural is used referring only to the speaker and the addressee. The authors do not always mention the scope of reference of each imperative form. Thus, Baskakov distinguishes five forms of the first-person plural in Kumandy (a Northern Altay dialect) without characterizing them further: al-ala/ al‑alaq/al‑alax/al-alaqtar/al-alaxtır ‘let us take!’ (Baskakov 1972: 117). The examples, however, give us a hint. (11) Kumandy (Baskakov 1972: 117) Aq qas par-aq! ti-j, white goose go-imp.inc.1du say-prs qara qas‑ kel-ek! ti-j. black goose come-imp.inc.1du say-prs ‘The white goose says, ‘Let us go!’ The black goose says, ‘Let us come!’
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This is a riddle, its answer is ‘spring’. It describes changeable spring weather in the form of a dialogue of two participants — a white goose and a black one. The imperative form -aq/‑ek is used here to refer to two participants. Respectively, we can define it as the first person minimal inclusive imperative form. (12) Üč qarındaš ajt-qan: Če, par-aqtar! three brother say-pst well:prtcl go-imp.inc.1pl ‘The three brothers said, ‘OK! Let us go!’ In example (12), with three participants, augmented inclusive imperative is used. Turkmen is the only Turkic language outside Siberia that makes the distinction of the minimal and augmented inclusive forms of the imperative (Baskakov (ed.) 1970: 299; Clark 1998: 269–70): the minimal inclusive form is ‑a:lı/‑ä:li, the augmented inclusive form is ‑a:lı:ŋ/‑ä:li:ŋ: göðlä:li ‘Let’s (two) look at (something)’, göðlä:li:ŋ ‘Let’s (all) look at (something)’. The fact that the discussed forms are really inclusive ones and not just first-person plural forms indifferent to the category of inclusive or exclusive can be proved by their incompatibility with exclusive contexts. They cannot be used in situations when the guests are leaving while the host is staying; the speaker has to use other ways to express his appeal to the other guests to leave while applying to the host: (13) Shor (personal fieldwork) a. Če, par-ar-ıs! prtcl go-fut-1pl ‘OK! We are leaving (but not you)! (Lit.: we will go)’ b. Če, par-gaj-bıs! prtcl go-perm-1pl ‘OK! We are leaving (but not you)! (Lit.: We agree to leave)’ c. *Če, par-aqtar! prtcl go-imp.inc.1pl ‘OK! Let us go (but not you)!’ To express exclusivity, Shor uses future or permissive tense forms of the first-person plural that can contextually express imperative meanings and are indifferent to the category of inclusive–exclusive (see examples 13a, b; see also Mixajlova (1997) about the imperative use of non-imperative mood forms in Shor). The Shor imperative form of the first person augmented inclusive would be ungrammatical in this case (13c). It can be used only in the situation when the speaker is addressing both the host and the other guests proposing that they all should leave together with him. The permissive/optative forms are also used by other Siberian Turkic languages to express causation both in inclusive and in exclusive contexts while they are indifferent to the category of inclusive–exclusive. Some Yakut grammar descriptions even include these forms into the imperative paradigm (e.g. Ubrjatova (ed.) 1982: 324). Khakas, on the contrary, has developed an exclusive imperative form of the firstperson plural -i:bĭs/-i:bıs as Dobrushina and Goussev show (Dobrushina & Gous-
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sev, this volume). We will gloss it as first-person plural exclusive imperative. This imperative form has already been mentioned in Khakas grammar descriptions: Baskakov (ed.) (1975: 189), Patačakova (1977: 79), and Anderson (1998: 31), but the authors did not define it as an exclusive form, although the examples in Patačakova (1977), sparse as they are, illustrate its exclusive semantics: (14) Khakas (Patačakova 1977: 79) a. Al-i:bıs! take-imp.exc.1pl ‘We will take ([this], not you)!’ b. Id-i:bĭs! do-imp.exc.1pl ‘We will do ([this], not you; let us do this)!’ The fact that Siberian Turkic languages have developed a morphological inclusive category is especially remarkable since Western Turkic languages do not encode this distinction morphologically. They have only one first-person plural imperative form which seems to have a general plural semantics and to be indifferent to inclusive–exclusive semantics. It can, apparently, be used in both inclusive and exclusive contexts: (15) Turkish (M. Erdal, p.c.) Gid-elim! go-imp.1pl ‘Let us go (you:sg or you:pl and me)!’ This invitation to a cooperative action can be understood only inclusively. But if we introduce a pronominal subject that is normally unnecessary since the person is expressed on the verb, this sentence will have an exclusive interpretation: (16) Turkish (M. Erdal, p.c.) Biz gid-elim! we go-imp.1pl ‘We are leaving (but not you)!’ It should be noted that it is not always possible to judge about the use of an imperative form in exclusive contexts since such contexts are normally very rare. Imperative prefers inclusive because of its semantics: while the imperative main function is causation, the addressee is the main participant of the action (Dobrushina & Goussev, this volume). Therefore, inclusive semantics is a better candidate to get encoded morphologically. However, this does not explain why inclusive got encoded morphologically only in Siberian Turkic. Apparently, the Turkic languages developed this category rather recently: it is present neither in Old Turkic,2 nor in the majority of modern Turkic languages. We suppose that the formation of this category in Siberian Turkic languages had been fostered by contacts with other Siberian languages. As a matter of fact, the oppos-
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ition of several non-singular forms is also found in other Altaic languages, Mongolic and Manchu-Tungusic in the first place. Thus, in Manchu-Tungusic languages, the category of inclusive–exclusive is represented by personal verb forms and by a special set of inclusive–exclusive pronouns. Turkic has developed a similar category in the imperative paradigm, i.e. the category of minimal and augmented inclusive forms of the first person. On the other hand, it is also plausible that Siberian Turkic could have preserved this category due to these contacts in case it used to be an all-Turkic category originally. Thus, among Siberian Turkic languages with a morphological inclusive, we distinguish at least two groups: 1) languages with distinct minimal and augmented inclusives (the majority of the discussed languages), 2) languages with a general inclusive (Chalkan). To express exclusive semantics, these languages either use nonimperative forms in the imperative contexts or special exclusive forms (Khakas).
3. Formal patterns of building augmented inclusive As Table 1 shows, there is a great variety of inclusive imperative forms of the first person in Siberian Turkic (see also Nasilov et al. 2001). On the one hand, this variety can be explained by the dialectal structure of these languages. They are mostly young literary languages (like Altay, Khakas, Tuvan, Shor, etc.), very rich in dialectal and sub-dialectal spoken vernaculars preserving different stages of the development of the imperative forms (among others). The dialectal forms are widely used by the native speakers, and they penetrate the written variety. Let us examine the Shor inclusive forms of the imperative of the first person. In literary Shor, there are two inclusive forms of the first person: the minimal inclusive form ‑Aŋ (‑AAŋ)3 and the augmented inclusive one, whose marker consists of the minimal inclusive affix plus the plural marker ‑LAr: ‑AŋnAr (‑Aŋ + ‑LAr) or ‑AAŋnAr (‑AAŋ + ‑LAr): par-aaŋ ‘Let us go’: two persons, the addressee and the speaker, are meant; par-aaŋ-nar ‘Let us go’: all the participants of a speech situation are meant. In the Upper-Mras and Upper-Kondum varieties of Shor, the minimal inclusive affix ends in ‑Q (Mixajlova 1997: 11), as in Altay, Chulym and Tuvan, whereas the augmented inclusive marker is also composed of the minimal inclusive affix plus the marker of plurality: ‑AAqtAr < ‑AAq + ‑LAr ~ ‑AqtAr < ‑Aq + ‑LAr. In the Shor materials written down by W. Radloff in the nineteenth century (1866), one can find a more ancient minimal inclusive imperative of the first person ‑AlI which has now disappeared. We suppose that the marker of the first-person plural ‑Q, used in possessive and finite paradigms in many Turkic languages, was added to the minimal inclusive form ‑AlI to produce the augmented inclusive forms *‑AlIq > ‑AAQ > ‑AQ. Later, as the former minimal inclusive affix ‑AlI got out of use, these were reanalysed as the minimal inclusive ones, and the need arose to reestablish this opposition by adding the plural marker ‑LAr to produce new augmented inclusive forms.
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The Shor literary forms ‑AAŋ ~ ‑Aŋ (the minimal inclusive one) and ‑AŋnAr (‑Aŋ + ‑LAr) ~ ‑AAŋnAr (‑AAŋ + ‑LAr) (the augmented inclusive one) could have developed similarly from the minimal inclusive affix ‑AlI. The marker of the second person ‑(X)ŋ was added to the minimal inclusive form to produce augmented inclusive forms: ‑AlI + ŋ > ‑AlIŋ > ‑AAŋ > ‑Aŋ. After the affix ‑AlI got obsolete the plural marker was added to produce new augmented inclusive forms. Altay-Sayan Turkic language data of the nineteenth century give evidence of quite a number of inclusive imperative forms of the first person: ‑AlI, ‑AlIQ, ‑AAQtAr, ‑AlIŋ, ‑AAŋnAr, ‑AldAr, (anon. 1869: 64–5). In Shor alone, one can find all the stages of the development of the first-person inclusive markers from ‑AlI to ‑AlIQ and then to ‑AAQ/‑AAQtAr, as well as from ‑AlI to ‑AAŋ/‑AAŋnAr. These data seem to confirm Schönig’s hypothesis that the Proto-Turkic affix of the first-person plural could be ‑AlI (1987: 213). On the other hand, this variety of Turkic imperative forms (see Table 1) exists due to the fact that there are two formal patterns of building augmented inclusive in Turkic, distinguished by Schönig (1987: 211–12). The first pattern called additive is used by Yakut, Tofa, Tuvan, and Turkmen. In their augmented inclusive formants, the minimal inclusive marker is followed by the suffix of the second-person plural (i.e. we+you), compare Yakut ‑IAx (minimal inclusive) and ‑IAG+Iŋ (augmented inclusive; ‑Iŋ is the imperative marker of the second person), Tofa ‑AAlI (minimal) vs ‑AAlI+ŋ (augmented). The Altay-Sayan Turkic languages (Khakas, Shor, and Altay language varieties) along with Chulym show a multiplicative pattern of the development of Turkic inclusive forms: the minimal inclusive affix is followed by the plural marker (i.e. we+we). As we have shown on the example of the Shor inclusive imperative forms of the first person, this pattern is an innovation; the need to reestablish the opposition of minimal versus augmented inclusive imperative forms arose due to the fact that the ancient affix ‑AlI was slowly getting out of use in these languages. And vice versa, the Turkic languages with the additive pattern preserve a more ancient stage of the development of Turkic inclusive markers.
4. The category of inclusive–exclusive among Turkic personal pronouns In Turkish, there are no unique pronominal forms that distinguish inclusive versus exclusive person forms (Kornfilt 1997: 298). This is also true for all Turkic languages. A very special pronominal set exists in Yakut (see Section 5). However, in Turkic, there are several pronominal candidates that could, in principle, differentiate exclusive and inclusive meanings and are interpreted as inclusive versus exclusive pronouns by some Turcologists. Grönbech was, apparently, the first among Turcologists to use the terms inclusive–exclusive to describe Turkic phenomena. He considered Turkic personal
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ronouns with an additional marker of plurality (e.g. Turkish bizler from biz ‘we’ p plus the plural marker ‑lAr and sizler from siz ‘you:pl’) to be inclusive pronouns, while biz and siz were defined as exclusive ones (Grönbech 1936: 81).4 We will refer to such forms as multi-plural pronouns. Later, Ubrjatova also argued that Turkic pronouns of the biz+ler type function as inclusive ones (1991: 7–9). Such pronouns have been found in Altay, Tuvan, Karakalpak, Kirghiz, Kazakh, etc. (Isxakov 1956: 208). Our observation is that such multi-plural forms are found in the spoken variety of practically all Turkic languages. However, it is quite rare that grammar books mention such forms. Here are some examples on how Turcologists treat this phenomenon. Baskakov (ed.) (1970: 180–1) states that Turkmen bizler is the same as biz, or it denotes a separate group of people or a people community; sizler is the same as siz, or it is a separate group of people, or it is a polite form. The grammar also mentions that such forms belong to the spoken variety, but are met in the literary language as well. Isxakov & Pal’mbax (1961: 216) say that in spoken Tuvan, the personal pronouns can contain two or even three plural affixes: bister (bis ‘we’ + ‑LAr ‑ the plural affix) // bisterler (bis ‘we’ + ‑LAr + ‑LAr). They further remind that the ‑s in bis is also an ancient plural affix. Analogously, there exist several Tuvan pronouns of the secondand third-person plural: silerler (siler ‘you:pl’ from siz ‘you:pl’ + ‑LAr + ‑LAr), olarlar (olar ‘they’ from ol ‘he/she/it’ + ‑LAr + ‑LAr). In Turkish (Kornfilt 1997: 286–7), the second-person plural form siz can be used as a form of politeness for the second-person singular as well as plural. Due to this fact, the number distinction gets neutralized. Furthermore, the first-person plural form biz can be used colloquially for the first-person singular.5 According to her opinion, in order to make the number distinction clear, it is possible colloquially to suffix the first- and second-person plural pronouns with the regular plural suffix ‑lAr: biz-ler, siz-ler. Thus, she explains the existence of the forms bizler and sizler in Turkish as a result of the neutralization of the number distinction in the pronominal sphere. This factor should, certainly, be taken into consideration. However, we also observe some semantic differentiation between biz and siz on the one hand and bizler and sizler on the other hand in Turkish, as well as between the corresponding forms of plural personal pronouns in other Turkic languages. The difference between them is not easy to grasp. Our informants mostly confirm that such personal pronouns exist in their native languages, but they have difficulties in explaining their difference with the “normal” ones. According to Johanson (1998: 51), in nominal phrases with the plural marker, plural affixes mostly signal individual plurality, e.g. Turkish elmalar ‘[single] apples’, while the singular has a broad, partly number-indifferent range of use, which also includes collective or generic reference. According to our data, the multi-plural personal pronouns are often used to denote an isolated group of people who want to oppose themselves to the others, but
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sometimes they are used as synonyms to the “normal” ones. In Altay, this phenomenon has been described by Tybykova (1991: 110) who defines such pronouns as collective ones expressing irony and despise: bister ‘we and the like’, slerler ‘you and the like’. Here are some Altay examples.6 (17) Altay (A. Ozonova, p.c.) Bis-ter bastıra-zı-naŋ bijik e-mej, we-pl other-poss3-abl high be-neg.conv tegin iš-ti ne ed-eten-is! simple work-acc why do-part.oblig-1pl ‘Aren’t we higher than all the others?! Why should we do such simple work!’ (18) Bis-ter tüŋej.le oŋdo-r emes, we-pl anyway understand-fut neg.prtcl ne d’art-arγa albadan-atan? why explain-inf try-part.oblig ‘We will not understand (a thing) anyway, why should one try to explain?!’ The speaker wants to oppose the group of people referred to by bister to the others. Such statements can sound very ironically. They often appear in the context of a rhetoric question. This also concerns the multi-plural pronouns of the second and third persons. (19) Olor-lor üredülü, bičikči de, they-pl well-educated learned prtcl bis-tij ulus-la ne d’aqšılaž-atan? we-comp people-com why greet.each.other-part.oblig ‘They are well-educated, learned people, why should they exchange greetings with people like us?!’ These data support the point of view expressed in Baskakov (ed.) (1970: 180–1) that multi-plural pronouns denote a separate group of people opposed to the rest of society. However, they can be used just for stylistic purposes since personal pronouns without an additional plural marker can also denote a separate group of people. As for the category of inclusive–exclusive, Turkic personal pronouns seem to be indifferent to it, opposite to the Turkic imperative paradigm. Since they are neutral in this connection, Turkic pronouns can be interpreted as inclusive or exclusive ones in certain contexts: Turkish biz can be used with reference to the speaker and the addressee, with reference to the speaker and a third person, with reference to the speakers, with reference to the speaker, the addressee and third persons, etc., the most important factor is that the speaker should include herself/himself in the referred group, i.e. it displays properties of “we in non-inclusive languages” (see Daniel, this volume). One interesting feature of Turkic plural personal pronouns should be mentioned in this connection. In Turkish, constructions of the type ‘we (and) the priest’ can
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occur with the meaning ‘I and the priest’ (Kornfilt 1997: 286–7). That is, such constructions are systematically ambiguous: (20) (Biz) Ahmet-le dün sinema-ya git-ti-k.7 (we) Ahmet-com yesterday cinema-dir go-pst-1pl a. ‘Yesterday we went to the movies with Ahmet.’ b. ‘Yesterday Ahmet and I went to the movies.’ The interpretation a assigns the general plural meaning to the pronoun biz ‘we’; it can be interpreted both exclusively and inclusively: “we (but not you) and Ahmet” referring to the speakers and a third person, but not to the listener — the exclusive interpretation, “we (including you) and Ahmet” — the inclusive one. The interpretation b means that the pronoun biz is used in the only exclusive function: “I and Ahmet” referring to the speaker and a third person expressed in both cases by a separate nominal phrase. The inclusive interpretation is impossible in this case. The phenomenon also occurs with pairs of pronouns. The listener/listeners can, thus, also be explicitly included into the scope of reference of ‘we’: (21) (Biz) sen-in-le bu akşam sinema-ya gid-ecek-ti-k. (we) you:sg-gen-com this evening movies-dir go-fut-pst-1pl a. ‘We are going to the movies together with you this evening.’ b. ‘I am going to the movies together with you this evening.’ The same constructions are also possible for the second and for the third-person plural pronouns. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to assign an inclusive or an exclusive meaning to Turkic plural personal pronouns as their paradigmatic semantics. As we have already said, they are neutral in this respect. Moreover, the only exclusive use of the plural personal pronouns is limited to the construction with comitative affixes (or postposition). Other constructions (e.g. the general coordinator ve in Turkish or a coordinative conjunction la in Altay) cannot be used in this function. There are two more points which I would like to make in this context. Firstly, it is remarkable that the construction “we and the priest” does not have an exclusive interpretation with the imperative forms in the Turkic languages that have morphological inclusives. Compare the following Altay examples. In (22) and (23), nonimperative verb forms are used: the indicative form of the past tense (22) and the form of the permissive mood (23). The only exclusive interpretation of the pronoun bis ‘we’ is possible. In (24) and (25), imperative verb forms are used, and the only exclusive interpretation of this pronoun is blocked: we explain this by the fact that the non-singular imperative forms of the first person are inclusive ones. In order to exclude the addressee in the imperative, one has to choose the construction “I and Pete [without you]”, see (26), or use a non-imperative form (see 13a and 13b). (22) Bis Petja-la kino-go bar-ıp d’ür-d-is. we Pete-com movies-dat go-conv go:aux-pst-1pl a. ‘We went to the cinema together with Pete.’ b. ‘I went to the cinema together with Pete.’
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(23) Bis Petja-la kino-go bar-γaj-ıs. we Pete-com movies-dat go-perm-1pl a. ‘OK! We will go to the cinema together with Pete.’ b. ‘OK! I will go to the cinema together with Pete.’ (24) Petja-la kino-go bar-aq! Pete-com movies-dat go-imp.inc.1du ‘Let us (the speaker and the adressee) go to the cinema together with Pete.’ (25) Petja-la kino-go bar-aqtar! Pete-com movies-dat go-imp.inc.1pl ‘Let us (the speaker and the addressees) go to the cinema together with Pete.’ (26) Petja-la kino-go bar-ajın! Pete-com movies-dat go-imp.1sg ‘Let me go to the cinema together with Pete.’ Secondly, it is not always easy to distinguish the comitative construction from the coordinative one, especially in the languages like Altay where originally the same element has developed both comitative and coordinative functions. It is the postposition birlen/birle/bile/ble/le/be meaning ‘with, together with’ which has got contracted in different ways in Turkic languages (e.g. la/le in Altay and ba/be/pa/ pe/ma/me in Shor; we use further la/le to refer to this element). In Siberian Turkic and in Chuvash, it has got synharmonical variants and can already be considered the marker of the comitative-instrumental case and/or a general coordinator. In Altay, this element has also developed into a general coordinator and can join together not only nominal groups, but also verbal predicates. It is written separately in this case as distinct from the comitative affix. In the case of the comitative construction, the element la/le stands after the subordinate noun which follows the grammatical subject of the sentence: Altay bis Ahmet-le … [we Ahmet-com] ‘We/I with Ahmet …’. The pronoun we can have an only exclusive interpretation here, similarly to example (20). The pronoun bis ‘we’ alone is the topic of the sentence where this construction appears. In the case of the coordinative construction, la/le stands after the first coordinative subject: Altay bis le Ahmet… [we and Ahmet] ‘We and Ahmet…’. Both ‘we’ and ‘Ahmet’ belong to the topic. The only exclusive interpretation is not possible here. The parameters of the person marking on the verb in a coordinative construction are also remarkable. They can be described in the following way. There is a certain person hierarchy (well-established cross-linguistically, though not universal) with the first person having the highest rank, then the second person follows, and the third person has the lowest rank. The person marking on the verb chooses the person of the coordinative subject of the highest rank in the plural number. If one of the coordinative subjects is the first person the verb gets the marking of the first-person plural, no matter whether it is expressed by the first-person singular or
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plural pronoun, and no matter which of the coordinative subjects is joined by the coordinative conjunction; else, if one of the coordinative subjects is the second person (singular or plural) the verb gets the marking of the second-person plural (Tybykova 1991: 111–12 has described these rules for Altay): (27) Bıjıl men le D’eleči süt plan-ın this.year I and Djelechi milk plan-poss3.acc ažıra büdür-erge mold’on-d-ıbıs. over fulfil-inf promise-pst-1pl ‘I and Djelechi have promised to produce more milk this year than it was planned.’
5. Yakut dual collective pronouns Yakut has specific forms of the first- and second-person plural pronouns, i.e. bihigi ‘we’ and ähigi ‘you:pl’ which apparently go back to the combinations of the all-Turkic pronouns ‘we’ and ‘you:pl’ with the numeral ikki ‘two’ (Böhtlingk 1851: 264). These forms presumably used to serve as dual ones, but later have developed plural semantics. However, the opposition of dual and plural forms has been renewed and, at present, Yakut has so-called dual-collective (dvojstvenno-sobiratel’nye) pronouns bihikki ‘the two of us’ and ähikki ‘the two of you’: bihigi + ikki and ähigi +ikki (Ubrjatova (ed.) 1982: 188–90) interpreted as exclusive ones by Grönbech (1936: 81). The pronoun bihikki denotes cooperative agents and refers to the speaker plus another person (the addressee or a third person) expressed by a separate nominal phrase whose head noun is in the nominative, i.e. this pronoun means ‘I together with somebody else’: (28) kini bihikki biirge he/she we.together together ‘I together with him/her’ (29) Oxonoos bihikki biir nähiliäk-tääx džom-mut. Afanasij we.together one village-with people-1pl ‘I and Afanasij are from one village.’ In these contexts, the pronoun bihikki has exclusive meaning indeed. But it can also have inclusive semantics as in (30): (30) Än bihikki-tääγär bil-äl-lär-ä buoluo. you:sg we.together-comp know-aor-pl-poss3 maybe ‘They might know more than we do (i.e. more than I and you together).’ The pronoun ähikki denotes cooperative agents as well, but it refers to the addressee plus another person, i.e. this pronoun means ‘you:sg together with somebody else’ and has dual semantics:
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(31) Tüül-ääx ihin Zaxar Ivanovič ähikki äppiättii-git. fur-dat for Zakhar Ivanovich you.together responsible-2pl ‘You and Zakhar Ivanovich are responsible for the furs.’ The phrase “a dual-cooperative pronoun + a cooperative agent” occupies one syntactic place in the sentence structure and can be any nominal member of the sentence: a subject (29) and (31), a circumstantial modifier (30), etc. In case this phrase is the subject of the sentence, the person marking on the verb follows the general rules for coordinative subjects (see 29, 31).
6. Expression of inclusive and exclusive semantics in Turkic languages Although Turkic languages have neither special inclusive and exclusive verb forms (except for the first-person inclusive imperative forms of a number of Turkic languages) nor special inclusive and exclusive pronouns they can distinguish between inclusive and exclusive semantics by other language means. Thus, in Turkish, “the comitative -y=la and the privative ‑sIz are used to express inclusive and exclusive semantics”, according to Kornfilt who was, probably, the first to connect these language means with the expression of inclusive–exclusive in Turkic languages (1997: 298): (32) (biz) sen-in-le opera-ya git-ti-k. (we) you:sg-gen-com opera-dir go-pst-1pl ‘We went to the opera together with you (you:sg).’ (33) (biz) opera-ya sen-siz git-ti-k. (we) opera-dir you:sg-priv go-pst-1pl ‘We went to the opera without you (you:sg).’ (34) (biz) siz-in-le opera-ya git-ti-k. (we) you:pl-gen-com opera-dir go-pst-1pl ‘We went to the opera together with you (you:pl).’ (35) (biz) opera-ya siz-siz git-ti-k. (we) opera-dir you:pl-priv go-pst-1pl ‘We went to the opera without you (you:pl).’ The same constructions are also used for inclusion and exclusion of the third person in the first or second person. (36) (biz) onlar-la opera-ya git-ti-k. (we) they-com opera-dir go-pst-1pl ‘We went to the opera together with them.’ (37) (biz) opera-ya onlar-sız git-ti-k. (we) opera-dir they-priv go-pst-1pl ‘We went to the opera without them.’
Inclusive and exclusive in Turkic languages
(38) (siz) onlar-la opera-ya git-ti-niz. (you:pl) they-com opera-dir go-pst-1pl ‘You went to the opera together with them.’ (39) (siz) opera-ya onlar-sız git-ti-niz. (you:pl) opera-dir they-priv go-pst-1pl ‘You went to the opera without them.’ In case a Turkic language has lost the privative affix at some stage, other language means are used to express the exclusive meaning, i.e. in Shor, the negative particle čoq is used for this purpose: sen čoq ‘without you’.
7. Conclusion Thus, in the imperative paradigm of some Turkic languages and dialects we differentiate two non-singular forms of the first person, i.e. minimal inclusive (traditionally denoted as exclusive or dual) and augmented inclusive (traditional inclusive or plural) which means that the semantics of inclusive got grammaticalized in Turkic. Among Turkic languages with a morphological inclusive, we distinguish at least two groups: (1) languages with distinct minimal and augmented inclusives (the majority of the discussed languages), (2) languages with a general inclusive (Chalkan). To express exclusive semantics, these languages either use non-imperative forms in the imperative contexts (most of them) or specialized exclusive forms (Khakas). In the pronominal sphere, plural and multi-plural forms are not opposed as inclusive versus exclusive ones: multi-plural forms tend to denote either an isolated group of people opposed to the rest of society, or an individual plurality, otherwise they are used for mere stylistic purposes while plural forms denote unmarked plurality. The Turkic personal pronoun of the first-person plural is neutral in respect to the category of inclusive–exclusive and can be defined as “we in non-inclusive languages”. Finally, the so-called cooperative personal pronouns in Yakut do not have inclusive versus exclusive functions, but express duality. All Turkic languages can express exclusive and inclusive semantics, as any language can, but they do this by coordinative, comitative and privative language means. The very fact that Siberian Turkic languages have developed inclusive forms in the imperative and dual forms in the pronominal sphere (Yakut) is very remarkable. On the one hand, this can be seen as an attempt to copy the category of inclusive–exclusive found in the neighbouring Manchu-Tungusic languages with Turkic means. On the other hand, this influence could also have come from Mongolic, since it happened in practically all Siberian Turkic languages including those that did not have prominent Manchu-Tungusic contacts. But we cannot exclude a possibility that these features could also be remnants of an original category.
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Abbreviations abl acc aor aux com comp cond conv coop dat dir du exc fut gen imp
ablative accusative aorist auxiliary comitative comparative conditional converb cooperative dative directive dual exclusive future genitive imperative
inc inf loc neg oblig part perm pl poss prf priv prs prtcl pst sg
inclusive infinitive locative negation obligation participle permissive plural possessive perfect privative present particle past singular
Notes 1. Language varieties spoken in Northern Altay (Tuba, Chalkan, and Kumandy) used to be treated as dialects of the Altay language, but they are separate languages. The fact has recently been recognized also officially. 2. A rather late copy of the Old Turkic text Qutadgu Bilig has some ‑(A)lI and ‑(A)lIŋ forms with minimal inclusive semantics beside the common ‑(A)lIm. However, this manuscript has also further Middle Turkic features. Thus, we can say that we do not have any evidence of Turkic inclusive forms before the Middle Turkic period (Erdal 2004: 236). 3. Turkic affixes may have up to 16 morphonological variants. Therefore, we use an archimorphemic representation of Turkic formants which is a tradition in Turcology: A denotes a after stems with back vowels and e after stems with front vowels. I denotes ı in words with back vowels and i in words with front vowels. Q denotes q in words with back vowels and k otherwise. The values of L are specified by the morphonological rules of the respective Turkic language. Thus, for Shor, L denotes n after nasals, t after voiceless consonants and otherwise l. In some Turkic varieties L also denotes d after r, l, j (also in the Kondum dialect of Shor). Vowels in brackets () appear only after stems ending in consonants. Morphonology of genetically identical affixes may vary considerably between different Turkic languages or even between a literary language and its dialects. We present major varieties of an affix using a slash /. 4. Grönbech also defined Yakut compound pronouns en bihikki ‘you and we’ and kini bihikki ‘he and we’ (combinations of personal pronouns en ‘you’ and kini ‘he/she’ with bihigi ‘we’ +ikki ‘two’) as inclusive pronouns and the corresponding pronoun bihigi ‘we’ (bihigi, in its turn, goes back to the all-Turkic pronoun bis ‘we’ plus ikki ‘two’) as an exclusive one (Grönbech 1936: 81) (see Section 5 for more details). 5. Marcel Erdal has expressed the opinion that this is possible only in very limited contexts, so that the default meaning of biz is ‘we’ (personal communication).
Inclusive and exclusive in Turkic languages 6. I express my gratitude to Dr. Ajana Ozonova (Institute of Philology, Siberian Division of the Russian Academy, Novosibirsk) who supplied me with the Altay examples and helped to evaluate them. 7. According to Marcel Erdal (personal communication), the subject position does not exist in a Turkic sentence since the agent is expressed on the verb. Therefore, the pronoun biz should not be mentioned even in brackets in examples (20) and (21). However, he has also stated that the pronoun can appear in order to express contrast (we and not you). In my opinion, this means that the position of the subject does exist in this construction.
References Anderson, G. D. 1998. Xakas. Europa: Lincom. anon. 1869. Grammatika altajskogo jazyka, sostavlennaja členami altajskoj missii. Kazan’: Tipografija Kazanskogo Universiteta. Baskakov, N. A. 1958. Altajskij jazyk (vvedenie v izučenie altajskogo jazyka i ego dialektov). Moskva-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. Baskakov, N. A. 1966. Severnye dialekty altajskogo jazyka. Dialect černevyx tatar (tyba-kiži). Moskva: Nauka. Baskakov, N. A. 1972. Severnye dialekty altajskogo jazyka. Dialekt kumandincev (kumandykiži). Moskva: Nauka. Baskakov, N. A. 1985. Dialekt lebedinskix tatar-čalkancev (kuu-kiži). Moskva: Nauka. Baskakov, N. A. (ed.). 1970. Grammatika turkmenskogo jazyka. I. Fonetika i morfologija. Ašxabad: Ilım. Baskakov, N. A. (ed.). 1975. Grammatika xakasskogo jazyka. Moskva: Nauka. Böhtlingk, O. 1851. Über die Sprache der Jakuten. Sankt Peterburg: Imperatorskaja Akade mija nauk. Clark, L. 1998. Turkmen manual. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Daniel, M. This volume. Understanding inclusives. Dobrushina, N. & Goussev, V. This volume. Inclusive imperative. Dyrenkova, N. D. 1941. Grammatika šorskogo jazyka. Moskva-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. Erdal, M. 2004. A grammar of Old Turkic. Leiden: Brill. Grönbech, K. 1936. Der türkische Sprachbau. Kopenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard. Isxakov, F. G. 1956. Ličnye mestoimenija. In N. K. Dmitriev (ed.), Issledovanija po sravnitel’noj grammatike tjurkskix jazykov. Volume 2: Morfologija, 208–63. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR. Isxakov, F. G. & Pal’mbax, A. A. 1961. Grammatika tuvinskogo jazyka. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo vostočnoj literatury. Johanson, L. 1998. The structure of Turkic. In L. Johanson & É. Csató (eds), The Turkic languages, 30–67. London: Routledge. Korkina, E. I. 1970. Naklonenija glagola v jakutskom jazyke. Moskva: Nauka. Kornfilt, J. 1997. Turkish. London: Routledge. Menges, K. H. 1980. Kategorija vključitel’nosti/isključitel’nosti v tjurksrix jazykax. In B. A. Tulebaev (ed.), Problemy sovremennoj tjurkologii. Materialy II Vsesojuznoj konferencii (27–9 sentjabrja 1976 g., Alma-Ata), 385–7. Alma-Ata: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka” Kazaxskoj SSR.
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Irina Nevskaya Mixajlova, N. I. 1997. Formy pobuždenija v šorskom jazyke. Avtoreferat dissertacii na soiskanie učenoj stepeni kandidata filologičeskix nauk. Novosibirsk: Institut filologii SO RAN. Nasilov, D. M., Isxakova, X., Safarov, Š. & Nevskaya, I. A. 2001. The imperative sentences in Turkic languages. In V. S. Xrakovskij (ed.), Typology of imperative constructions, 181– 220. München: Lincom. Patačakova, D. F. 1977. Formy povelitel’nogo naklonenija v dialektax xakasskogo jazyka (k istorii formirovanija dialektnyx priznakov). In M. N. Borgojakov (ed.), Voprosy xakasskoj filologii, 73–93. Abakan: Xakasskij naučno-issledovatel’skij institut jazyka, literatury i istorii. Plank, F. 1999. Split mophology: How agglutination and flexion mix. Linguistic Typology 3: 279–340. Radloff, W. 1866. Proben der Volksliteratur der türkischen Stämme Süd-Sibiriens. I. Teil. Sankt Peterburg: Imperatorskaja Akademija nauk. Rassadin, V. I. 1978. Morfologija tofalarskogo jazyka v sravnitel’nom osveščenii. Moskva: Nauka. Schönig, C. 1987. Diachronic and areal approach to the Turkic imperative paradigm. In M. van Damme & H. Boeschoten (eds), Utrecht Papers on Central Asia, 205–22. Utrecht: Institute of Oriental Languages [Utrecht Turcological Series 2]. Tybykova, A. T. 1991. Issledovanija po sintaksisu altajskogo jazyka. Novosibirsk: Izdatel’stvo Novosibirskogo universiteta. Ubrjatova, E. I. 1985. Jazyk noril’skix dolgan. Novosibirsk: Nauka. Ubrjatova, E. I. 1991. Ešče raz ob isključitel’nosti (èkskljuzive) i vključitel’nosti (inkljuzive) v jakutskom jazyke. In E. I. Ubrjatova & M. I. Čeremisina (eds), Jazyki narodov Sibiri: Grammatičeskie issledovanija, 3–11. Novosibirsk: Nauka. Ubrjatova, E. I. (ed.). 1982. Grammatika sovremennogo jakutskogo literaturnogo jazyka. Moskva: Nauka.
Chapter 13
Development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction A possible loan scenario in Mosetenan Jeanette Sakel University of Manchester
The Mosetenan languages (unclassified) Mosetén and Chimane are spoken in the transition between the foothills of the Bolivian Andes and the Amazon basin. They make a distinction between a first-person plural inclusive and exclusive in the verbal cross-reference endings, though not in personal pronouns. The cross-reference markers for first-person plural inclusive subjects are furthermore not conform to the rest of the paradigm, and can be analyzed as recent developments. I argue that the idiosyncrasies of the first-person plural inclusive marking appeared due to the introduction of an inclusive–exclusive distinction through borrowing, even though the direct source of the marker and category remain unclear. Keywords: inclusive–exclusive, borrowing, Amazon, Mosetenan
1. Introduction1 This is a study on the development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction through loan, which is one of the many scenarios in which an inclusive–exclusive distinction can arise. I mainly draw on data from the language family Mosetenan from Lowland Bolivia. There are two major types of contact-induced change: (1) the mere loan of a pattern, using morphemes that already exist in the target language, and (2) the transfer of a morpheme from the source language. Different terms have been used in the literature to describe these types of changes, e.g. Aikhenvald (2002: 4) calls the first one ‘indirect diffusion’ and the second one direct ‘diffusion’, Heath (1984: 367) basically describes (1) as ‘structural convergence’ and (2) as ‘direct transfer’. I will use the terms ‘transfer of pattern’ for (1) and ‘borrowing of material’ for (2). The inclusive–exclusive distinction arising through language contact has been documented in a number of languages. For example, in the Kupwar linguistic area (Gumperz & Wilson 1971) an inclusive distinction seems to have been introduced into the pronominal systems of Kupwar Urdu and probably also Kupwar Kannada through borrowing of the first plural inclusive marker from the neighboring language Marathi. Likewise, an inclusive–exclusive distinction appears to
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have developed in some Arawakan languages.2 Such a distinction is atypical in Arawakan (Aikhenvald 1999), but some of these languages mark for a first-person plural inclusive, re-interpreting morphemes already apparent in the language to cover inclusive meanings (i.e. a mere loan of the structure without borrowing the morpheme): Bare and Tariana use impersonal forms with first-person plural inclusive meanings and Terêna and Campa use the original first-person singular for first singular and first plural exclusive, while the original first-person plural form has an inclusive meaning. According to Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 67), moderate to heavy structural borrowings can occur in intense contact situations. As opposed to lexical and syntactic loans, morphological loans are not very common. They usually appear when two languages — one usually superior to the other — are in close contact over a long period and at least part of the group is perfectly bilingual. In another scenario, speakers of a language X have learnt a language Y, incorporating one of X’s marked features into Y. Usually, languages that are typologically similar more easily take structural loans from other languages, though Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 53) also list a number of cases of structural borrowing between typologically distant languages. An example of this is the introduction of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Kupwar Urdu, due to contact with the typologically distant language Marathi, mentioned above. This introduction furthermore complicates the system, which is uncommon, since, according to Thomason & Kaufman, structural loans usually lead to a simplification of the system. The introduction of an inclusive–exclusive distinction through loan appears in the language family Mosetenan from Lowland Bolivia (cf. Sakel 2004). This small unclassified3 Amazonian language family consists of two closely related languages: Mosetén and Chimane. Mosetén has two major dialects, which are referred to by the names of the central villages: Mosetén of Covendo and Mosetén of Santa Ana, both spoken in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes, on the Upper Beni river, while the Chimanes live in the adjacent Amazonian lowland region around the city of San Borja.4 The system of inclusive marking in Mosetenan is typologically very interesting: personal pronouns have no separate forms for inclusive or exclusive first-person plural, while there is an elaborate system of inclusive–exclusive marking in the verbal cross-reference forms. Furthermore, these inclusive markers differ radically from the other forms in the paradigm. I argue that this special status of the inclusive first-person plural has to do with its introduction into Mosetén through loan. The source language, however, is still unknown, even if there are a number of indications of what it is. This chapter is structured as follows: after defining the first-person plural inclusive, I give an overview over the inclusive forms in Mosetenan. Then, I analyse of the introduction of inclusive marking in Mosetenan by looking at the sources of the separate forms of inclusive marking.
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan
2. The definition of first-person plural inclusive The distinction between first-person plural inclusive and first-person plural exclusive has traditionally been described in terms of the inclusion or exclusion of the addressee. When the addressee is included in the ‘we’, one usually talks about a firstperson plural inclusive, while when excluded it is a first-person plural exclusive.5 Cysouw (2003) comes up with a finer categorization. He distinguishes five main patterns of first-person plural marking: ‘unified-we’, ‘no-we’, ‘only-inclusive’, ‘inclusive–exclusive’, ‘minimal/augmented’ as well as a number of rare types. In simple terms, ‘unified-we’ means that there is a single form for all types of ‘we’. ‘No-we’ expresses that there is no special marking for ‘we’ — Cysouw gives the English inflectional marking as an example, where all the plural forms are identical. ‘Only-inclusive’ means that the first-person plural exclusive is not marked,6 while there is special marking for the first-person plural inclusive, consisting of speaker (hence 1) and addressee (hence 2) and variably other persons (hence 3), i.e. 1+2 or 1+2+3. The ‘inclusive–exclusive’ type has special marking for both first-person plural inclusive and first-person plural exclusive. Finally, the type ‘minimal/augmented’ distinguishes three different forms for ‘we’, namely 1+2 (commonly called inclusive dual, or what Cysouw calls ‘minimal inclusive’), 1+2+3 (this he calls augmented inclusive) and 1+3 (exclusive). Inclusive marking can appear on different types of elements, such as personal pronouns, possessive pronouns and verbal cross-reference forms. Siewierska & Bakker (this volume), distinguish between free and bound forms. They found differences in the encoding of inclusivity in these forms in about a quarter of the languages of their sample. In the vast majority of languages, free forms were more elaborately marked for inclusivity — following a hierarchy — than bound elements. Only in a few languages (such as Chepang, Tibetan), the bound forms had more elaborate marking than the free ones. Siewierska & Bakker (ibid.) explain this development in that most bound markers originate from free markers, having developed through grammaticalization. In this way, they became semantically bleached. Thus, many free forms have more elaborate marking than the (bleached) bound forms. Siewierska & Bakker (ibid.) explain the reverse, i.e. the bound forms being more elaborately marked for the inclusive than the free forms, by free forms being able to can undergo semantic bleaching after the grammaticalization of bound forms. Furthermore, the current free forms could be an innovation that appeared after the grammaticalization of the bound forms, which can be the reason for a formal distinction between free and bound markers. Mosetenan has three different strategies for marking the first-person plural. These show in the following structures: personal pronouns (unified-we pattern), intransitive verbs (only-inclusive) and transitive verbs (mixed pattern: only-inclusive with third person object forms and inclusive–exclusive pattern with firstand second-person object forms). In this way, the bound (cross-reference) forms in Mosetenan are more elaborate in marking for the inclusive than the free forms
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Jeanette Sakel Table 1. The personal pronouns in Mosetenan Mosetenan form 1SG 2SG 3SG M 3SG F 1P (I, EX) 2P 3P M 3P F
yäe mi mi’ mö’ tsin mï’ ïn mi’in mö’in
(personal pronouns). The development of this rather infrequent type of marking in Mosetenan can be explained by the loan of inclusive marking, rather than by bleaching in grammaticalization, as discussed by Siewierska & Bakker (ibid.). In order to understand the way in which such a loan can have appeared, let us first look at the different types of first-person plural marking in Mosetenan.
3. The first-person plural of personal pronouns in Mosetenan Personal pronouns in Mosetenan do not distinguish between a first-person plural inclusive or exclusive. I.e. in terms of Cysouw (2003), these pronouns can be described as a type of ‘unified-we’. The pronominal form tsin ‘we’ is used for both firstperson plural inclusive and first-person plural exclusive, shown in Table 1. Likewise the possessive pronouns, which are built up by personal pronouns and another marker, do not have an inclusive–exclusive distinction.
3.1. The first-person plural in the intransitive inflection of Mosetenan As opposed to the free pronouns, there is an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the verbal cross-reference paradigms. The majority of intransitive cross-reference forms in Mosetenan differentiate between masculine and feminine subjects only. They show no marking for person or number.7 The only exceptions to this are the forms of the first-person plural inclusive subject, -ja’ and ‑n’. These markers do not have separate gender forms and mark exclusively for person and number, i.e. firstperson plural inclusive. The inflection of the intransitive verb tsä’ï- ‘wake up’ is shown in Table 2. The first-person plural inclusive can be expressed by two forms: ‑ja’ 8 and ‑n’. While ‑ja’ is used by all speakers of Mosetén and Chimane, the form ‑n’ only appears in the dialect of a minority of families in Covendo. The marker ‑n’ is not used in Chimane (Wayne Gill, p.c.), or Mosetén of Santa Ana. The families from Covendo who
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan Table 2. Intransitive inflection: example tsä’ï- ‘wake up’ Verbal forms 1 M SG 1 F SG 2 M SG 2 F SG 3 M SG 3 F SG 1P I M 1PIF 1P EX M 1P EX F 2MP 2FP 3MP 3FP
tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ë-jä’ / tsä’ë-n’ tsä’ë-jä’ / tsä’ë-n’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø (ïn) tsä’ï-’ (ïn)
use both ‑ja’ (1) and ‑n’ (2) apply them alternatively without differences in meaning, but they usually prefer ‑n’:
(1) Tsin nöi’-yä-khñe-n’. 1p tired-vy-strong-1pi.s ‘We are very tired.’ ele/at
(2) Tsin nöi’-yä-khñe-ja’. 1p tired-vy-strong-1pi.s ‘We are very tired.’ ele/at
In the definition of Cysouw (2003), the intransitive inflection in Mosetenan applies an ‘only-inclusive’: the first-person plural inclusive is marked, while there is no special marker for the first-person plural exclusive, which is rather treated in the same way as all the remaining persons in the paradigm.
3.2. The first-person plural in the transitive inflection of Mosetenan The transitive inflection paradigm has reference to two participants: subject and (primary) object. These forms agree with a subset of gender, number and person of subject and object, leading to a great variation in the organization of the forms in the cross-reference paradigm. Still, the forms of the first-person plural inclusive subject differ substantially from the other forms, in the same way as in the intransitive inflection. Table 3 shows the isolated cross-reference forms of the transitive paradigm in Mosetén of Covendo (cf. Sakel 2004). The slightly different forms in the other variants of Mosetenan will be discussed below.9
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364 Jeanette Sakel Table 3. The transitive inflectional paradigm in Mosetén of Covendo S
O 1SG
1SG M 1SG F 2SG M 2SG F 3SG M 3SG F 1Pmex 1Pfex 1P M I 1P F I 2P M 2P F 3P M 3P F
-ti -ti’ -ti’ -ti’ -n -n -ti -ti’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -n -n
2SG
3SG M 3SG F
1P EX
1P I
2P
3P
-ye -ye -ti -ti’ -n -n -yak -yak -tikha’ -tikha’ -ti -ti’ -n -n
-te -te -te -te -te -te -te -te -ti -ti -te -te -te -te
-ti -ti’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -n -n -ti -ti’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -n -n
-ti -ti’ -ti -ti’ -sin’ -sin’ -ti -ti’ -tikha’ -tikha’ -ti -ti’ -sin’ -sin’
-yak -yak -ti -ti’ -nak -nak -yak -yak -tikha’ -tikha’ -ti -ti’ -nak -nak
-ksi -ksi’ -ksi -ksi’ -ksi -ksi’ -ksi -ksi’ -kseja’/ ‑ksen’ -kseja’/-ksen’ -ksi -ksi’ -ksi -ksi’
-’ -’ -’ -’ -’ -’ -’ -’ -ti’ -ti’ -’ -’ -’ -’
First-person plural inclusive subjects with third-person singular objects are marked by ‑ti-. When the object is masculine, -ti- appears without further marking (3). When the object is feminine, a glottal stop follows the ‑ti- (4).
(3) Pa’-ki-ti-ra’ tyäkä’-dyërä’ ij-a-ti. beat-an-1pi. s.m.o-ir em-mo kill-vi-1pi.s-m.o ‘We will beat it (the tapir, m) and thus kill it.’ ste/vc
(4) Dyoshkha’ khao’-jo-n’ tya’kaj-yi-ti-’! go.hor flee-vj-1pi.s behind-vy-1pi.s-f.o ‘Let us go, flee, leave her behind.’ ste/vj
The cross-reference forms of first-person plural inclusive subjects and third-person singular objects differ radically from the other forms in the paradigm, since all other forms with third-person singular objects look the same way (-’ with a feminine object and ‑te with a masculine object, cf. Table 3). The forms for a first-person plural inclusive subject with a plural object are not based on ‑ti-, but appear with the intransitive forms ‑ja’ and ‑n’ 10 in combination with the marker ‑ksi-11 ‘third-person plural object’.
(5) Mö’-dyera’ cuarto tya-kse-ja’ paj-ki mö’-khan 3f.sg-mo room.e give-3p.o-1pi.s so-co 3f.sg-in khosh-i-’-in. sleep.vi-f.s-p ‘We could give them (f) this room, so that they (f) can sleep in it.’ sele/jh
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan
In the same way as with singular objects, inclusive subjects with plural objects behave differently from the other third person object forms in the cross-reference paradigm (cf. Table 3). Differently from the singular object forms, these plural forms appear with the markers ‑ja’ and ‑n’, which also mark the inclusive in the intransitive paradigm. As in the intransitive, there is no distinction for the gender of the subject. The explanation for this lies in the intransitive nature of the third-person plural object marker ‑ksi-, which probably diachronically derives from a derivational affix appearing with intransitive verbs, downplaying the plurality or mere existence of the object. Being formally intransitive, the subject agreement pattern of this marker resembles that of the intransitive inflection, i.e. there is gender agreement with all subjects apart from the first-person plural inclusive subjects, which appear with special marking by ‑ja’ or ‑n’.12 The other inclusive subject forms in the paradigm (cf. Table 3) are reflexive forms that appear when the subject is partially or properly included in the object or vice versa. The reflexive marker used for first-person plural inclusive subjects ‑tikha’ is different from all other reflexive markers ‑ti (m) and ‑ti’ (f). While the latter mark for the gender of the subject, -tikha’ has no gender agreement forms. The reflexive paradigm also closely resembles the paradigm of intransitive marking. Apart from there appearing a ‑ti- in the reflexive form, all persons are marked for gender except for the inclusive form, which appears with extra marking. In the intransitive inflection, the markers are–ja’ or ‑n’. In the reflexive, the marker is -kha’. Compare the intransitive inflection of tsä’i- ‘wake up’ with the reflexive inflection of jishyi-ti- ‘comb oneself ’ in Table 4. As has been shown until now, all inclusive subject forms differ substantially from the other forms in the paradigms. The first-person plural inclusive object forms, Table 4. Intransitive and reflexive paradigms
1 M SG 1 F SG 2 M SG 2 F SG 3 M SG 3 F SG 1P I M 1PIF 1P EX M 1P EX F 2MP 2FP 3MP 3FP
Intransitive verb ‘wake up’
Reflexive verb ‘comb oneself ’
tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ë-jä’ / tsä’ë-n’ tsä’ë-jä’ / tsä’ë-n’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø tsä’ï-’ tsä’ï-Ø (ïn) tsä’ï-’ (ïn)
jishyi-ti-Ø jishyi-ti-’ jishyi-ti-Ø jishyi-ti-’ jishyi-ti-Ø jishyi-ti-’ jishyi-ti-kha’ jishyi-ti-kha’ jishyi-ti-Ø jishyi-ti-’ jishyi-ti-Ø jishyi-ti-’ jishyi-ti-Ø (in) jishyi-ti-’ (in)
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366 Jeanette Sakel Table 5. (Transitive) inclusive subject forms in Mosetén of Santa Ana and Chimane S
O 1SG
2SG
3SG M
3SG F
1P EX
1P I
2P
3P
1P I M
-tikha’
-tikha’
-ja
-ja’
-tikha’
-tikha’
-tikha’
-kseja’
1P I F
-tikha’
-tikha’
-ja
-ja’
-tikha’
-tikha’
-tikha’
-kseja’
however, appear to be rather conform with the paradigm. The form marking a third person subject and an inclusive object ‑sin’ is, for example, comparable to the form ‑nak marking a second-person plural object with a third person subject. In the same way, the first-person plural inclusive reflexive object forms do not stick out of the paradigm, appearing with the forms ‑ti (m) or ‑ti’ (f), depending on the gender of the subject. There is no special reflexive marking by ‑tikha’ or the like, as with inclusive subjects. The other variants of Mosetenan, i.e. Mosetén of Santa Ana and Chimane, have slightly different first-person plural inclusive subject forms in combination with third-person singular objects. All the other forms in the cross-reference paradigm are the same. Table 5 shows the forms of the inclusive subjects in Mosetén of Santa Ana and Chimane. In Mosetén of Santa Ana (Sakel 2004) and Chimane (Gill 1999), the form ‑ja- is used to mark all first-person plural inclusive subjects in the transitive and in the intransitive paradigm. With third-person singular objects, there is gender agreement with the object (6) and (7).13 The other forms of the cross-reference paradigm, including the forms of third-person plural objects and inclusive subjects (8), as well as inclusive object forms (9), are the same as in Mosetén of Covendo (cf. Table 3).
(6) Chimane (Gill 1999: 23, 43, 64):14 Tsun ñïbe’-je-ja-’ mö’ phen. we give-vm-1pi.s-3f.o 3f woman ‘We gave (something) to the woman.’
(7) Tsun ñïbe’je-ja-Ø mu’ muntyi’. we give-vm-1pi.s-3m.o 3m man ‘We gave (something) to the man.’
(8) Tsun jeya-kse-ja’. 1P say-3p.o-1pi.s ‘We say (something) to them (m or f).’
(9) Jadak mu’ ma’-je-’ toj-ji-sin’. seem 3m want-vm-3f.o shoot-vm-1pi.o ‘It seems he wants to shoot us (m or f).’
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan
4. The introduction of inclusive marking in Mosetenan Having looked at the forms of the first-person plural inclusive in the cross-reference paradigm, it has become clear that the first-person plural inclusive has a special status in the grammar of Mosetenan: 1. there is no free pronoun for the inclusive, 2. all first-person plural inclusive subject markers deviate from the paradigm, such as by appearing with a different kind of gender agreement system or with a longer or unexpected form. By viewing the inclusive as a loan in Mosetenan, we can explain its different status from the other elements in the language. A loan scenario that involves the borrowing of a morpheme could partly explain a number of idiosyncrasies in the inclusive marking in Mosetenan: only verbal markers for the inclusive have been borrowed, while no pronominal inclusive form was borrowed. The reason for this is unclear until we know more about how this loan scenario has taken place. From the synchronic point of view, however, we know a bit about the source language(s): the paradigmatically exceptional lack of gender agreement with the subject could be explained by the morpheme marking the first-person plural inclusive in Mosetenan being borrowed from a language that does not mark for the gender of the subject [Aymara, Quechua, Takana and Tupí-Guaraní have no gender or classifier system (apart from the Tupí-Guaraní languages Parintintín and Kayabí — Jensen 1999:148). Arawakan languages, on the other hand, have classifier and gender systems.]. Apart from that, the source language has probably nominative–accusative marking in the cross-reference paradigm, since the special inclusive forms only appear with subjects, and not objects [of the languages with no gender marking, Quechua and Aymara have nominative– accusative alignment]. Mosetenan, on the other hand, has a number of (minor) ergative traits in the cross-reference endings (especially in those of third person objects, partly resembling the marking of third person subjects in the intransitive paradigm, compare Table 2 and 3) and it is rather strange that such special inclusive marking occurs with subjects only. Furthermore, there may not be very prominent forms for personal pronouns in the source language(s) due to the fact that no pronominal form was borrowed into Mosetenan [both Quechua and Aymara are prodrop languages]. Still, another reason for this can be that all Mosetenan varieties apply pro-drop. Borrowing a pronominal inclusive marker can thus have been uneconomic, since the inclusive is obligatorily marked on the verb already. Let us now look at the different inclusive markers one by one and explain their source, as well as the way they were introduced into Mosetenan:
4.1. ‑ja’ The form ‑ja’ is a first-person plural inclusive subject marker in all variants of Mosetenan. It is the only marker for the inclusive in Mosetén of Santa Ana and Chimane. Analyzing this form as a loan from another language would explain why ‑ja’
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odds out from the homogeneous cross-reference system of intransitive verbs by marking for subject person instead of subject gender. A number of surrounding languages have marking for first-person plural inclusive. Furthermore, some have morphemes that resemble ‑ja’ with a related (1st plural) meaning.15 The inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan can have developed through contact with one of these languages (cf. also Crevels & Muysken, this volume for other languages with similar distinctions in South America). For my investigation of this matter, I primarily look at the languages that are presently spoken in direct vicinity of Mosetenan. Due to the distribution of languages and language families in South America, it can also be the case that the language that was the source of the first-person plural inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan is spoken in a very different area today, if it hasn’t vanished at all. My findings are summarized in Table 6. There are various forms ‑ja’ with similar meanings as in Mosetenan. The best candidate for this out of the languages discussed here is Aymara. However, ‑ja’ marks an exclusive possessor in Aymara, rather than the inclusive first-person plural. Furthermore, the marking by ‑ja’ appears with a pronominal form instead of in the cross-reference paradigm, as in Mosetenan. Still, a closer analysis of the elements in both languages could reveal a connection between the forms in Aymara and Mosetenan. Similarly, some other morphemes in surrounding languages remind of the form and partly meaning of ‑ja’ in Mosetenan. Thus, a general first-person plural marker *ha- has been re-constructed for Proto-Arawakan. This marker is used as a first-person plural inclusive marker in some languages of this family, although these are not spoken in the vicinity of Mosetenan. Furthermore, Yurakare has an optional subject marker ‑ja that appears on pronouns. A similar form also exists in Bolivian Guaraní, marking agentive nominalizations and factuals. Some of the resembling morphemes in surrounding languages are prefixes, while the form found in Mosetenan is a suffix. In this case, a relationship with ‑ja- in Mosetenan is not excluded, since this can be explained by the development of prefixes and suffixes through free pronominal forms. In one language the marker is suffixed and prefixed in the other. Like this, some languages prefix a person marker to agree with the subject, while the same marker is suffixed when agreeing with the object. Along the same lines, the fact that ‑ja- in some languages expresses a general first-person plural does not mean that this language cannot be a possible source for ‑ja’ in Mosetenan. According to Greenberg (1998), first-person plural inclusive markers can turn into general first-person plural markers. Thus, after the borrowing of ‑ja’ to Mosetenan, the inclusive marker in the source language could have turned into a general first-person plural marker. A reversed development is also imaginable: a general first-person plural marker could have been re-interpreted as a first-person plural inclusive marker, which then was borrowed into Mosetenan. Even if this overview does not present us with a clear source for ‑ja’, the evidence that forms with similar meanings occur in surrounding languages strengthen the claim that ‑ja’ is a loan in Mosetenan. Moreover, the language-internal evidence
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan 369
supports this, because ‑ja’ deviates largely from the Mosetenan paradigm(s). Furthermore, there is no other morpheme ‑ja- in Mosetenan that could have been reinterpreted language-internally. Table 6. The existence of a form [ha], the existence of a 1st person plural inclusive, etc. in the languages (language families) surrounding Mosetenan a [ha] or [ha] meaning similar form exists
1P I exists
form of 1P I
Yurakare (unclassified)
‑ja [ha]
optional subject no marker on pronoun
no
Aymara (Aymaran)
-ja [ha]
1P exclusive possessive marking (the inclusive form is ‑sa)
cross-reference and pronoun
pronoun: jiwasa poss.pron.: -sa cross-ref:b -ctanc (1P incl→3) -cistuv(3→1P incl)
Bolivian Quechua (Quechuan)
no
no
cross-reference and pronoun
cross-ref./part of pronoun: ‑nchis
Leko (unclassified) no
no
no
no c
Mojo (Arawakan)
1P (general) protoArawakan: [parallel to other form: *ha*w(V)-]
atypical: cross-reference and pronoun
Asheninca: cross-ref.: a-/Ø- -ai pronoun: aaka
Takana (Takanan)
no
no
pronominal suffix
-da (inclusive) -a (exclusive)
agentive nominalization and factual
cross-reference and pronoun
prefixes: ya- / transitive form in some languages *ti-(ti-, či-, si-) d
(Bolivian) Guaraní -ja [ha] (Tupí-Guaraní)
a
My data are from the following sources: Yurakare: Rik van Gijn (p.c.); Aymara: Hardman (2001); Bolivian Quechua: Pieter Muysken (p.c.), van de Kerke (1996); Leko: Simon van de Kerke (p.c. , 2000) Arawakan: Aikhenvald (1999); Takana, Cavineña, Araona, Ese Ejja: Antoine Guillaume (p.c.) & Van Wynen & Van Wynen (1962); (Bolivian) Guaraní: Jensen (1998) & Willem Adelaar (p.c.) & Wolf Dietrich (p.c.). b I only give the forms in the present tense. c The first-person plural inclusive is only found in Campa, Terêna, Asheninca and Palikur. d In some Tupí-Guaraní variants, a marker *ti- appears in the transitive paradigm to express firstperson plural inclusive. This reminds of the marking of transitive forms by -ti- in Mosetén of Covendo. Still, this similarity seems to be due to chance: -ti- can be explained as a language-internal invention in both Mosetén and Tupí-Guaraní (Jensen 1998, 1999).
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4.2. ‑tiIn Mosetén of Covendo, the first-person plural inclusive is marked by ‑ti- in the transitive paradigm with third-person singular objects, while in the other variants of Mosetenan the marker ‑ja- (discussed above) is used. The form ‑ti- in Mosetén of Covendo is homophonous with other markers in the cross-reference endings in all variants of Mosetenan, namely a second-person singular acting on a first-person singular (2→1) and the reflexive marker16 (for other studies of such homophonies, cf. Cysouw, this volume). In Mosetén of Covendo, ‑ti- seems to be a re-interpretation of the reflexive marker to cover the meaning of inclusive. There are also few other languages, in which a reflexive can be likely to have developed into a first-person plural inclusive marker.17 I have the hypothesis, that all markers (i.e. reflexive, 2→1 and inclusive) are related, probably having developed from the reflexive form into a 2→1 and a first-person plural inclusive marker. The development of a homophony between the markers for a first person acting on a second person (1→2) or 2→1 with a first-person plural marker has been discussed for a number of languages. According to Greenberg (1987, 1998), the marker for the first-person plural inclusive is in some languages related to bipersonal markers of a first person in association with a second person. He bases his findings on examples from the language families Carib and Algic. Greenberg describes the development of these connections in that first-person plural inclusive forms first develop into general first-person plural markers and later extend to singular environments of first and second person. In Mosetén of Covendo, a formal connection exists between first-person plural inclusive and 2→1. However, Mosetén of Covendo differs from Carib and Algic languages in that in these languages, the ‘first-person exclusive plural […] is the odd man out in the whole system’ (Greenberg 1998: 426), whereas in Mosetenan the first-person plural inclusive differs substantially from the rest of the paradigm. Thus, a different explanation or path of development may lay behind the Mosetenan forms. There is furthermore evidence in Mosetén of Covendo that the first-person plural inclusive marker is a reinterpretation from the 2→1 marker (or the reflexive). Somewhat closer to my findings in Mosetén of Covendo are a number of Arawakan languages, some of which have developed a first-person plural inclusive (Aikhenvald 1999). In Campa and Terêna, the original first-person singular has extended its meaning to first singular and first plural exclusive, while the original firstperson plural form has developed a first-person plural inclusive meaning. Thus, the first-person plural exclusive has the same form as the first-person singular, whereas the newly arisen first-person plural inclusive has a separate form. Still, this pattern is different from my findings in Mosetén of Covendo, where the transitive marker for a first-person plural inclusive subject resembles the form for second person acting on first person, while the first-person plural exclusive form is marked in another way.18 Another analysis of first-person plural inclusive markers resembling markers for first and second person acting on another is provided by Heath (1991, 1998). He finds that in languages with verbal marking of person, bipersonal markers of first
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan
and second person are often opaque. This is the case in otherwise structurally very different types of paradigms. His explanation is that this has to do with a strategy to avoid direct reference to discourse participants. One way to make these markers opaque is by applying first-person plural inclusive morphology in situations of 1→2 or 2→1. This is, for example, the case in Ngandi (a North Australian Gunwingguan language). For languages in the Americas, Heath mentions the use of a firstperson plural inclusive marker for 2→1 person for Zoque of Francisco León (MixeZoque). In the same way, Surinam (Carib) uses the marker for first-person plural inclusive in the intransitive inflection for both 1→2 and 2→1 in transitive contexts. Furthermore, Southern Sierra Miwok (Penutian) uses first-person plural inclusive morphology in the imperative form of second person acting on first person. Again, my argument for Mosetén of Covendo is that the marker for 2→1 has developed into an inclusive marker rather than the other way around. Apart from this, Heath’s skewing analysis can explain a number of other structures found in combination with first- and second-person marking in Mosetén of Covendo (to be discussed below). I now turn to the analysis of the re-interpretation of the morpheme for the reflexive or 2→1 into an inclusive marker. Table 7 shows the distribution of the markers ‑ti, -ti’, and ‑tikha’ in the transitive and reflexive cross-reference paradigms of Mosetén of Covendo.19 One of the most apparent differences between the forms discussed here is that there are no gender distinctions in 2→1, as opposed to the other forms. This is probably the case because none of the other first- or second-person object markers in the transitive cross-reference paradigm have different gender forms. We can assume that the 2→1 forms probably have appeared due to re-interpretation of the reflexive forms and gender agreement has vanished in 2→1 due to analogy with similar forms in the paradigm. Comparing the forms and functions of the markers in Table 7, we can see that these have a number of traits in common: ‑ti and ‑ti’ are used when the participants are not marked for clear number (apart from the forms with first-person plural inclusive subjects, cf. Table 4). Thus, ‑ti- is used in all cases of non-marked plurality or inclusiveness. The form -tikha’, on the other hand, is used with first and second Table 7. The distribution of the markers –ti, -ti’, and –tikha’
1st plural incl. S/A 2→1 reflexive a
-ti
-ti’
-tikha’
masculine A – masculine Sb
feminine A A and P = singulara feminine Sc
reflexive (1st I) A and/or P = plural 1st I (reflexive)
The feminine is the unmarked gender in Mosetenan (cf. Sakel 2002 and Sakel 2004), therefore this marker ‑ti- is followed by a (feminine) glottal stop. b In all persons apart from the first-person plural inclusive. c In all persons apart from the first-person plural inclusive.
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persons when at least one of the elements is plural. In the case of the reflexive inclusive subjects forms, ‘we inclusive’ is always considered to be plural. More problematic are the reflexive inclusive object forms, which are marked by ‑ti- instead of ‑tikha’ and thus in my definition are never marked for plurality. Concluding, we can broadly say that the difference between ‑ti- and ‑tikha’ has to do with number relations, more precisely the difference between the only-inclusive intransitive paradigm and the inclusive–exclusive transitive paradigm, where plurality is marked in different ways in Mosetenan. Let us now look at how a re-interpretation of a reflexive or 2→1 marker into a first-person plural inclusive marker can have come about: the reflexives are marked by ‑ti‑ and form an intransitive paradigm (cf. Table 4). When the first-person plural inclusive was introduced into Mosetenan, there was a need to extend inclusive subject forms with the marker ‑ja’ in the same way as in the intransitive paradigm. The forms for the reflexive first-person plural inclusive were marked by ‑ja’ as well, forming -tija’ or ‑tikha’. In analogy to the simple reflexive forms, ‑ti‑ was used to mark the simple inclusive subject forms in Mosetén of Covendo. Thus, there was the extended inclusive and reflexive form ‑tija’ or ‑tikha’ and the ‘simple’ inclusive or reflexive form ‑ti-. This development was probably favored by the fact, that the homophonous ‑ti- marked another combination of a first and a second person, namely 2→1. Having explained the possible way of re-interpretation of ‑ti- as an inclusive marker in Mosetén of Covendo, it is still unclear why ‑tikha’ appears as a 2→1 plural marker and a reflexive inclusive marker in all variants of Mosetenan. Heath (1991) mentions number marking in Ngandi as one strategy to make person-marking opaque: ‘in Ngandi, in all 1↔2 combinations, the object marker is formally plural regardless of objective (real-world) number. Furthermore, if the object is objectively plural, the subject-marker takes plural form even if objectively singular.’ (Heath 1991: 84).20 This leads to the structures shown in Tables 8 and 9. Mosetenan has a similar structure in these forms, shown in Tables 10 and 11. Table 8. First person acting on second person in Ngandi (Heath 1991)
1st SG S 1st P S
2nd SG O
2nd P O
ñu-nuña-na-
ña-naña-na-
Table 10. First person acting on second person in Mosetenan
1st SG S 1st P S
2nd SG O
2nd P O
-ye -yak
-yak -yak
Table 9. Second person acting on first person in Ngandi (Heath 1991)
2nd SG S 2nd P S
1st SG O
1st P O
ŋa-nagur-a-
gur-agur-a-
Table 11. Second person acting on first person (exclusive) in Mosetenan
2nd SG S 2nd P S
1st SG O
1st P EX O
-ti’ -tikha’
-tikha’ -tikha’
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan Table 12. Reconstructed forms of 2→1, before introduction of 1st person plural inclusive marker ‑ja’
2nd SG S 2nd P S
1st SG O
1st P EX O
-ti’ *-tik
*-tik *-tik
As in Ngandi, plural marking in Mosetenan is also used as one strategy of pragmatic skewing. The internal morphological build-up of the Mosetenan forms, however, is not entirely clear. The clearest morpheme is ‑k-, which expresses the plural of a second person object.21 Now looking more closely at the form ‑tikha’, we can divide it into the elements ‑ti- ‘reflexive, etc.’, -k- ‘second-person plural object’ and ‑ja’ ‘first-person plural inclusive’. However, ‑tikha’ does not express these meanings in all its occurrences. Rather, the built-up of ‑tikha’ has to be explained by an extension of the form and later analogy: parallel to ‑ye (1→2 singular) and ‑yak (1→2 plural) (cf. Table 10), ‑ti’ (2→1 singular) was marked by ‑k- when at least one element was plural.22 In this way, we can reconstruct the forms for 2→1 (before the introduction of the first-person plural inclusive marker ‑ja’) as shown in Table 12. When -ja’ as a first-person plural inclusive marker was borrowed into Mosetenan, several changes occurred. The marker ‑ja’ was introduced into the reflexive paradigm, parallel to the changes in the general intransitive paradigm. In this way, the ‘nowe’ pattern in the intransitive/reflexive inflection was turned into an ‘only-inclusive’ pattern, with no plural marking apart from a separate form for the inclusive (in terms of Cysouw 2003). In the reflexive, the introduction of ‑ja’ was not as straightforward as with the general intransitive forms, however. Rather than forming ‑tija’ out of the reflexive and the first-person plural inclusive marker, the plurality of the inclusive was acknowledged, in analogy to the plural form *-tik in 2→1 (cf. Table 12). Thus, the reflexive -ti- was first marked by the plural form ‑k- before the inclusive marker ‑ja’ was added, resulting in the form ‑tikha’.23 Due to the close connection between these forms, the inclusive reflexive ‑tikha’ became the ground for an analogy with the 2→1 plural form, turning ‑tik into ‑tikha’. From the view of the speakers of Mosetén, this can be explained by confusion of two structures expressing similar meanings: ‘something that has to do with first- and second-person participants, at the same time involving plurality’.24 These changes due to analogy must also have been supported by the speakers due to another reason, namely favoring semantic skewing of firstand second-person markers, as discussed by Heath (1991, 1998).
4.3. ‑n’ The marker ‑n’ is used only by a minority of families speaking Mosetén of Covendo. It is homophonous with the marker for the general participle in Mosetenan and has
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the same morphophonemics. Probably, the participle has grammaticalized into a first-person plural inclusive marker due to overlapping semantics: (10) Jädyäk-yë-ki-’ katyi’ yoj-ye-n’-dyera’ anik nä’-ë-n’ noise-vy-dk-f.s eh r-vy-1pi.s-mo em get.born-vi-1pi.s ye-ki-’ katyi’ wa-ti-’ käedäej. say-dk-f.s eh cry-vt-f.s baby ‘Suddenly there was a noise, like we say when we are born, so it is said that the baby cried.’ or ‘Suddenly there was a noise, like it sounds when being born, so it is said that the baby cried.’ te/vfj There are two possible translations of this sentence, depending on whether the marker ‑n’ functions as a verbal participle or a marker for the first-person plural inclusive subject. The path of development seems to be clear: since ‑n’ is used as an inclusive marker only by a small subset of speakers of one variant of Mosetén of Covendo, this marker is primarily a general subject or participial marker, which then has extended to covering inclusive meanings. There is also evidence from other languages in which a general subject marker is homophonous with a first-person plural inclusive marker. According to Jensen (1998), in the language Wayampi (Tupí-Guaraní), the marker for the inclusive can be used with generic meaning comparable to ‘one’ in ‘one does it this way’. Rodrigues (1990) also mentions a similar structure in the related language Tupínambá (extinct, Tupí-Guaraní), where the inclusive marker is used with third persons that are out of focus, as well as in impersonal constructions. In the same way, in the Arawakan languages Bare and Tariana from Brazil (Aikhenvald 1999), impersonal forms were reinterpreted with first-person plural inclusive meanings.
4.4. -sin’ and other object forms All first-person plural inclusive subject forms deviate from the other forms in the cross-reference paradigms and can be explained either by being a loan or having arisen through re-interpretation of another morpheme in the language. The inclusive object forms, on the other hand, appear to be rather conform with the paradigms they appear in. Furthermore, it is unclear how these forms have developed. Siewierska & Bakker (this volume) find that object forms are not as frequently marked for first-person plural inclusive as subject forms. This is true for the reflexive object forms (i.e. the forms in which the object is partially included in the subject or vice versa) in Mosetenan, which are not marked for the inclusive, as opposed to the reflexive inclusive subject forms. The marker ‑sin’ ‘third person subject acting on first-person plural inclusive object’, on the other hand, has a separate inclusive form. Still, this marker does not stick out in the way the subject forms do. Since the exclusive object form ‑n is homophonous with the first-person singular object form, one possibly analysis of the development of the inclusive object marker
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan
‑sin’ is the re-interpretation from a general first-person plural marker. Thus, ‑n was the marker for first-person singular objects, while ‑sin’ appeared with first-person plural objects. When the distinction between inclusive and exclusive appeared in Mosetenan, the singular object marker was extended to the exclusive forms, while the former first-person plural object marker turned into a separate inclusive marker. This is parallel to the development of inclusive marking in other languages, such as the Arawakan languages Campa and Terêna (Aikhenvald 1999).25
5. Conclusion When I started this investigation, I was wondering why there are different strategies for ‘we’ marking in Mosetenan. Furthermore, I was surprised by the fact that many inclusive markers deviate from the general pattern in the cross-reference paradigms. When I looked closer at the details, it turned out that these idiosyncrasies appeared due to the introduction of an inclusive–exclusive distinction through borrowing. The morpheme ‑ja’ was borrowed from another language into Mosetenan. The other forms used to mark the inclusive (-sin’, -ti-, and -n’) are (later) re-interpretation of language-internal morphemes, leading to homophonies between different categories in Mosetenan. In the personal pronouns, no inclusive–exclusive distinction appeared, probably for economical reasons, since pronouns are usually dropped. Even if I did not find the direct source for ‑ja’, much evidence points at such a loan-scenario: 1. The marker ‑ja’ does not appear elsewhere in Mosetenan (neither as bound morpheme nor as lexical item). 2. A number of surrounding languages have similar markers with comparable meanings, even if none of these languages seem (at the surface) to be the direct source. 3. ‑ja’ is very different from the cross-reference markers in Mosetenan: while gender agreement is an important element in the Mosetenan verb, ‑ja’ does not mark for gender. I assume that the source language probably has no gender distinctions. 4. Only (intransitive and transitive) subjects are marked by ‑ja’ whereas Mosetenan has generally neutral alignment, with a number of ergative traits in the crossreference paradigms. The source language, on the other hand, has probably nominative–accusative alignment. In order to find out more about this loan scenario, we first need to know more about the languages currently spoken in South America. For many of these languages, there are no accessible materials. Materials older than 200 years only exist for few languages,26 which means that we often have to rely on an analysis of the synchronical facts in order to learn something about the diachronical development.27
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Abbreviations → 1 2 3 an apb co dk e eh ele em ex f hor i in
acting on first person second person third person antipassive applicative marker ‘but’ contrastive marker associated motion marker Spanish loan hearsay evidential elicitation example emphasis marker exclusive feminine hortative inclusive inessive
ir m mo o p r s s/a sele sg ste tr vi vj vm vt vy
modal marker: irrealis masculine modal marker: certainty object (primary) plural relative clause marker subject (intransitive) intransitive/transitive subject spoken text example singular spoken text example transitive verbal stem marker ‑iverbal stem marker ‑joverbal marker verbal stem marker ‑tyiverbal stem marker ‑yi-
Notes 1. I want to thank Elena Filimonova, D. N. S Bhat and two anonymous reviewers for comments on this chapter. Furthermore, I want to thank my Mosetén informants. In the present chapter, I use data from: AT (Adrian Topepe), JH (Juan Huasna), VC (Victoriano Chairique) and vj (Victorina Cualico Josesito). 2. Still, the possibility exists that this development has happened due to language-internal developments. 3. Mosetenan is still considered to be unclassified, even if some attempts have been made to related this small language family to other families in South America (cf. Swadesh 1963, Suarez 1973). The results of these attempts are not entirely convincing — and therefore I consider Mosetenan to be unclassified (Sakel 2004) before further evidence is brought up. 4. The variety Mosetén of Santa Ana is linguistically and geographically located between Chimane and Mosetén of Covendo. All three variants are intelligible to tolerant speakers. 5. The first-person plural inclusive is often referred to as 4th person in descriptions of South American languages (e.g. Hardman 2001: 5). Since the notion of 4th person is used for other structures as well, such as for one type of switch-reference marking in Inuit languages (Payne 1979, Fortescue 1984), I use the generally accepted term first-person plural inclusive for this structure. 6. Usually the first-person singular marker is used in this case. 7. Apart from a general plural marking by in that usually appears somewhere in the clause with third-person plural forms (cf. Sakel 2004) 8. This marker is written -ha’ after a consonant stem. 9. In the table, the gray background marks reflexive forms that appear when the subject element is properly or partially included in the object element or vice versa. These forms will be discussed later.
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan 10. Keep in mind that ‑n’ is exclusively used by a minority of families in Covendo . 11. The final vowel regularly changes to /e/ in this environment. 12. The historical source of this suffix as an intransitively used derivational marker (probably an antipassive marker downplaying the object) can also be seen when ‑ksi- appears in combination with other derivational suffixes, which often follow ‑ksi-: the applicative suffix ‑bi- ‘do an action (to something) against the owner’s will’ appears between the ‘cross-reference markers’ ‑ksi‑ and ‑ja’.
(i) Jeb-a-kse-bi-ja’. eat(tr)-vi-3p.o-apb-1pi.s ‘We are eating them against their will.’ ele/jh
13. In ditransitive verbs, only two elements are marked in the verbal cross-reference ending: these are usually the agent and the beneficiary element, while the patient remains unexpressed. 14. In order to give the reader easier access to these examples, I present the Chimane data in the writing system proposed by Grinevald (1996). This orthography is very similar to the one used for the two Mosetén variants in this chapter. 15. As one anonymous reviewer points out, -ha’/-ja’ could also have been derived from a noun with a meaning such as ‘people’, ‘man’, or ‘group’, which seem to occur in a number of Andean and pre-Andine languages (such as Aymara haqi, Cholón hayu ‘man’, etc.). There is no such noun in Mosetenan, which means that nontheless -ha’/-ja’ is borrowed. 16. For a broader introduction to the functions of the reflexive in Mosetenan cf. Sakel 2004. 17. D. N. S Bhat (p.c.) points out that Marathi (Indo-Aryan) uses the same word (apAN) as reflexive pronoun and the first-person plural inclusive pronoun. 18. One could argue for Mosetén that in the intransitive inflection, the forms of the first-person singular and first-person plural exclusive are similar, while the form of the first-person plural inclusive differs from them. However, ‑ja’ is so substantially different from the rest of the paradigm, that a change of this form from a general first-person plural marker into an inclusive marker is rather unlikely. 19. The elements in small caps refer to the same form. 20. Heath isolates the following Ngandi morphemes: ŋa ‘1st singular’, ña- (r-), ñu- ‘1st plural exclusive’, gur- (or gu-e-) ‘1st plural exclusive’(special allomorph), -nu- ‘2nd singular’ and na‑, -a- ‘2nd plural’. 21. This is supported by the marker for a third person acting on a second-person plural: ‑nak. With a singular second person object it is ‑n, i.e. the -(a)k- element expresses plurality of a second person object. 22. The vowel change from e>a that appears in ‑ye > -yak but not in ‑ti’ > tik is regular in Mosetén and affects all vowels but -i- in certain forms, when followed a marker beginning in ‑k (Sakel 2004: 46–7). The marker ‑ksi (3rd plural object) causes this vowel shift in verbs such as ye- ‘say, transitive’ but not in ti- ‘bring’. Thus, when the marker ‑ksi is added to these verbs, the forms become ya-ksi ‘he says to them’ and ti-ksi ‘he brings (something) to them’ — parallel to the cross-reference forms ‑yak and ‑tik. 23. The form ‑ja’ is written ‑ha’, since it follows another consonant, according to the orthography of Mosetén of Covendo.
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Jeanette Sakel 24. In this way, the first-person plural inclusive marker ‑ja’ was extended to first-person plural exclusive objects, namely 2→1 plural forms. 25. Another possibility, suggested by an anonymous reviewer, is that ‑sin’ is related to the pronoun tsin ‘we, inclusive and exclusive’. 26. The oldest material available for Mosetén is Herrero (1834), which is a collection of old prayers. 27. Furthermore, a closer investigation of other structures that can be borrowed into Mosetenan may give more hints towards (a) possible source language(s).
References Aikhenvald, A. Y. 1999. The Arawak language family. In R. M.W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald (eds), 65–106. Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2002. Language contact in Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cysouw, M. 2003. The paradigmatic structure of person marking. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dixon, R. M. W. & Aikhenvald, A. Y. (eds). 1999. The Amazonian languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fortescue, M. 1984. West Greenlandic. London: Croom Helm. Gill, W. 1999. A pedagogical grammar of the Chimane (Tsimane’) language. Ms, Bolivia: New Tribes Mission. Greenberg, J. H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Greenberg, J. H. 1998. From the first to second person: The history of Amerind *k(i). In D. G. Lockwood, P. H. Fries & J. E. Copeland (eds), Functional approaches to language, culture and cognition: Papers in honor of Sydney M. Lamb, 413–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Grinevald, C. 1996. Propuesta de alfabeto de la lengua Mosetén. Unpublished manuscript from the Taller de alfabetos de las lenguas del Oriente Boliviano, Tumichukua. Gumperz, J. & Wilson, R. 1971. Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian border in India. In D. Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and creolization of languages, 151–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardman, M. J. 2001. Aymara. München: Lincom. Heath, J. 1984. Language contact and language change. Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 367–84. Heath, J. 1991. Pragmatic disguise in pronominal-affix paradigms. In F. Plank (ed.), Paradigms. The economy of inflection, 75–90. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Heath, J. 1998. Pragmatic skewing in 1→2 pronominal combinations in American Indian languages. International Journal of America Linguistics 64: 83–104. Herrero, A. 1834. Doctrina y oraciones cristianas en lengua mosetena compuestas por el P. F. Andrés Herrero Misionero Apostólico y traducidas en español palabra para la mejor inteligencia de los demás misioneros que de nuevo vayan a catequizar en aquella nación. Rome. Jensen, C. 1998. Comparative Tupí-Guaraní morphosyntax. In D. C. Derbyshire & G. K. Pullum (eds), Handbook of Amazonian languages, Volume 4, 487–618. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jensen, C. 1999. Tupí-Guaraní. In R. M.W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald (eds), 125–63.
The development of an inclusive–exclusive distinction in Mosetenan Payne, T. 1979. Who’s kissing who: The fourth Person in Yup’ik Eskimo. In P. Munro (ed.), Studies of switch-reference, 65–88. Los Angeles: UCLA [Papers in Syntax 8]. Rodrigues, A. 1990. You and I = neither you or I. In D. L. Payne (ed.), Amazonian linguistics, 393–406. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sakel, J. 2002. Gender Agreement in Mosetén. In M. Crevels, S. van de Kerke, S. Meira & H. van der Voort (eds), Current studies on South American languages, 287–305. Leiden: CNWS [Indigenous Languages of Latin America (ILLA) 3]. Sakel, J. 2004. A grammar of Mosetén. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Mouton Grammar Library 33]. Siewierska, A. and Bakker, D. This volume. Inclusive and exlusive in free and bound person forms. Suárez, J. A. 1973. Macro-Pano-Tacanan. International Journal of American Linguistics 39(3): 137–54. Swadesh, M. 1963. On aboriginal languages of Latin America. Current Anthropology 4: 317– 18. Thomason, S. & Kaufman, T. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. van de Kerke, S. 1996. Agreement in Quechua: Evidence against distributed morphology. In C. Cremers & M. den Dikken (eds), Linguistics in the Netherlands, 121–32. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. van de Kerke, S. 2000. Case marking in the Leko language. In H. van der Voort & S. van de Kerke (eds), Indigenous languages of Lowland South America, 25–37. Leiden: CNWS [Indigenous Languages of Latin America (ILLA) 1]. Van Wynen, D. & Van Wynen, M. 1962. Tacana y Castellano. Cochabamba: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano and Ministerio de Educación.
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Chapter 14
The inclusive and exclusive in Shuswap A background investigation1 Jan P. van Eijk First Nations University of Canada
Shuwap stands alone among the Salish languages in that it makes a distinction between inclusive and exclusive in the first-person plural. In this chapter we investigate the possible origins of this distinction, i.e., whether it goes back to Proto-Salish or results from either a spontaneous development within Shuswap or from diffusion from a non-Salish language. The available information on the history of Shuswap and its contacts with other languages suggests strongly that the distinction originated within Shuswap, and was not inherited from Proto-Salish or diffused from a non-Salish source. Keywords: inclusive, exclusive, first-person plural, Salish, Shuswap, Proto-Salish, spontaneous development, diffusion
1. Introduction On p. 81 of his introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages, Boas (1911) makes the intriguing remark that “. . . we find in one of the Salish dialects of the Interior the occurrence of an exclusive and inclusive form of the pronoun, which is absent in all the other dialects of the same stock”.2 The “dialect” that Boas refers to is Shuswap, but aside from this positive identification, and the fact that we now class the Salish “dialects” as languages (which do distinguish dialects), Boas is correct in that Shuswap is the only Salish language that makes the exclusive–inclusive distinction. We now have information on the personal paradigms in all the Salish languages, be it of differing quality and attention to detail, and for no other language has this distinction been attested.3 Shuswap itself is the subject of an outstanding study by Kuipers, to which we turn our attention below. In this chapter we will investigate the origin of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in Shuswap. After a survey of the formal expression of the inclusive and exclusive (in Section 2) we turn our attention in Section 3 to the three possible explanations for the occurrence of this distinction. We thus investigate whether it is an inherited feature of Proto-Salish, or a spontaneous development within Shuswap, or the result of diffusion from another (non-Salish) language in the area. In Section 4 we discuss the possible mechanisms of the development of this distinction, while in Section 5 we offer some conclusions.
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2. The Shuswap facts The details of Shuswap personal pronominal inflection are set out in exemplary fashion in Kuipers (1974: 43–8). We extract the following paradigms from Kuipers’s discussion: (1) the possessive paradigm, based on citxw ‘house;’ (2) the intransitive verbal paradigm, based on cut ‘to intend,’ and (3) the transitive active and passive paradigms, based on pic’ ‘to squeeze.’ (In what follows we replace Kuipers’s raised o with the raised w in order to indicate labialization. We also use the plus-symbol, rather than Kuipers’s hyphen, to link the article γ to the noun. The forms for the third person make no gender or number distinctions, so that ‘his,’ ‘he’ and ‘him’ translate as ‘her,’ ‘their,’ etc. as well. Note that the forms that make reference to the firstperson singular possessor, subject or object show so-called consonant reduplication, i.e., repetition of the consonant before the stressed vowel, once more after the stressed vowel. This type of reduplication, which signals the diminutive but is used in these cases as a sign of modesty and humility, is characteristic of some but not all Shuswap dialects.)4 Note that the exclusive forms are based on the third-person forms (with the addition of an element kwəxw ). This is why the exclusive forms are aligned beside the third-person forms in the following paradigms. γ+n-cictxw ‘my house’ γ+’-citxw ‘your house’ γ+citxw-s ‘his house’
γ+citxw-kt ‘our (incl) house’ γ+citxw-mp ‘your (pl.) house’ γ+cítxw-s kwəxw = kwəxw γ+cítxw-s ‘our (excl.) house’
cuct-kn ‘I intend’ cut-k ‘you intend’ cut ‘he intends’5
cut-kt ‘we (incl.) intend’ cut-kp ‘you (pl.) intend’ cút kwəxw ‘we (excl.) intend’6
pípc’-n ‘I squeeze him’7 píc’-n-x ‘you squeeze him’ píc’-nt-m ‘he squeezes him’
píc’-nt-m ‘we (incl.) squeeze him’ píc’-nt-p ‘you (pl.) squeeze him’ píc’-nt-m kwəxw ‘we (excl.) squeeze him’
píc’-n-cm-s ‘he squeezes me’ píc’-nt-l-s ‘he squeezes us (incl.)’ píc’-n-c-s ‘he squeezes you’ píc’-nt-lm-s ‘he squeezes you (pl.)’ píc’-n-s ‘he squeezes him’ píc’-n-s kwəxw ‘he squeezes us (excl.)’ pípc’-n-cl-m ‘I am squeezed’ píc’-nt-l-t ‘we (incl) are squeezed’ píc’-n-c-t ‘you are squeezed’ píc’-nt-lm-t ‘you (pl.) are squeezed’ píc’-nt-m ‘he is squeezed’ píc’-nt-m kwəxw ‘we (excl.) are squeezed’ Note that ‘he squeezes him’ translates both as píc’-n-s and as píc’-nt-m. The former form is used when the subject (agent) is in focus, while the second form is used when the object (patient) is in focus. (We typically would have píc’-n-s in a story where, for example, Fox is going about, sees Coyote, and then, for whatever reason, squeezes Coyote. But we would have píc’-nt-m in a story where we first men-
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tion Coyote and then the fact that he was seen and squeezed by Fox.) The form píc’nt-m is in fact the third person passive form, while it is also used as the ‘we (incl.) act on him’ form, as is shown in the paradigms above. (This is part of a pattern also found in some other Interior Salish languages, in which transitive forms with a firstperson plural subject are identical to passive forms. See, for example, van Eijk 1997: 237–8 on Lillooet.)8 Since the passive third-person form in Shuswap underlies both the inclusive and exclusive ‘we act on him’ forms, the transitive paradigm with ‘him’ as object also presents the only case within the Shuswap macro-paradigm in which the inclusive and exclusive forms are related to each other.
3. Possible explanations As is mentioned above, there are three possible explanations for the origin of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in Shuswap. In the first place, it might go back to ProtoSalish (with loss of this opposition in the other Salish languages). In the second place, it may result from a spontaneous development within Shuswap, and in the third place it may result from diffusion from a non-Salish language in the area. We can dismiss the first possibility right away. We now have comparative-historical studies of the Salish pronominal system by Hoard (1971),9 Newman (1977, 1979a, b, 1980) and Davis (2000), and none of these studies reconstructs the inclusive–exclusive distinction for Proto-Salish. (Newman 1979a, for example, reconstructs the transitive and intransitive first-person subject markers as *-at and *kət respectively, with no distinction for inclusive vs. exclusive in either case.)10 The second possibility is in itself feasible. There are numerous examples of languages creating new personal pronominal distinctions out of existing material. We may think of the creation of the second-person plural forms you all, youse or yins (this last one apparently a contraction of you ones) in a number of English dialects. Another example would be the creation of two or even three levels of formality in the second-person markers, as in French tu vs. vous, Dutch jij vs. u vs. gij, or German du vs. Sie vs. Du. Of particular interest to our discussion is French on, which patterns as a generic first-person marker (singular or plural) in what appears to be a more colloquial register than je or nous. (An example of a first-person singular reading would be on se défend as answer to comment ça va?, and we would have a first-person plural inclusive reading in vite, on est pressés, spoken by a lover to his or her beloved when insisting on a last kiss before the train rolls away.)11 Creation of an inclusive–exclusive distinction is also made likely by the fact that this distinction is attested for a large number of languages, of many different families. The reason for this wide distribution is its usefulness, as it disambiguates potentially confusing situations, and it is easy to see why a language would create this distinction where it is not historically present. As for the possible formal history of the rise of this distinction in Shuswap see the last paragraph of Section 4.
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Before we accept the rise of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in Shuswap as a spontaneous development, we should first investigate whether or not this distinction was borrowed from a neighbouring non-Salish language. We discuss this possibility in Sections 3.1 and 3.2 below.
3.1. Possible diffusion from non-Salish The northwest Native American language area (encompassing both the Northwest Coast and the Plateau) has always been a hotbed of mutual borrowing and diffusion. For example, Boas (1911: 36, 81) mentions the existence of “true” (i.e., sex-based) gender in Chinook (as spoken along the Columbia River) and in Coast Salish languages of Washington and British Columbia, but not in the Interior Salish languages. (Silverstein 1974: 69, 99 provides evidence that Salish was the donor here, in spite of the fact that this category does not occur in Interior Salish.) Mithun (1999: 132– 3) discusses the presence of a demonstrative pronominal system in Blackfoot that is more developed than that of other Algonquian languages. As Mithun observes, “[T]he features distinguished by Blackfoot are strikingly similar to those found in languages of the Wakashan, Salishan, and Chimakuan families on the Northwest coast”. Other recent studies (such as Thompson & Kinkade 1990, Kinkade, Elmendorf, Rigsby & Aoki 1998, and Beck 2000) investigate the northwest language area in great detail, with particular attention to the diffusion of a number of linguistic features. (I also refer the interested reader to these studies for information on migrations, trade routes and bilingualism, factors that play an important part in linguistic diffusion. Finally, Kinkade has drawn my attention to the—admittedly remote—possiblity of early explorers, such as Alexander MacKenzie passing through the Shuswap area in 1793, playing a role here. These explorers usually employed local guides and carriers who may have taken their languages beyond their traditional boundaries.) The spread of the inclusive–exclusive distinction across a number of language families in the northwest language area is tabulated in Table 8 (item 13) of Thompson & Kinkade (1990: 49), and in Table 10 (item 9) of Kinkade et al. (1998: 66).12 It is also the subject of a superb study by William Jacobsen (1980), with a very lucid discussion of Shuswap on p. 220. In this passage, Jacobsen repeats a suggestion made earlier (Jacobsen 1979: 767–8), viz., that the inclusive–exclusive distinction was possibly diffused from Kwakiutl (Kwakwala) at a time when Shuswap and Kwakwala were presumably still contiguous. They are now separated by (Athabaskan) Chilcotin, a language that does not make the inclusive–exclusive distinction. (And Chilcotin would not likely have made this distinction at any point in its history, since it is not a feature of Athabaskan grammatical structure—Leslie Saxon, p.c.) The Kwakwala markers for the inclusive (-ənts) and exclusive (-ənu’xw), which are attached to the first person (singular) marker -ən(tł), do not show any relevant resemblance to the Shuswap inclusive or exclusive markers. However, as Jacobsen (1980: 220) correctly observes, “it is the category that may have diffused here, not at
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all the morphological pattern expressing it”. (See Mithun 1999: 72 for an essentially identical statement.)13 On the other hand, before we accept Jacobsen’s suggestion that Kwakwala is the source of the Shuswap inclusive–exclusive distinction, we must first consider the historic background of the Chilcotin presence in the area. Although various maps (including those in Czaykowska-Higgins & Kinkade 1998: 2, Kroeber 1999: xxxi and Thompson 1979: 694) do show Chilcotin coming down in a sharp wedge separating Shuswap from the coast (and Kwakwala), we should not automatically accept this as proof that the Chilcotin were invaders here, splitting two previously contiguous groups. Teit (1909: 466) argues strongly against the intrusion theory and posits that, although the Shuswap did occupy land west of the Fraser River, according to oral traditions their territory did not extend further west from there on. In other words, these traditions do not support the theory of old contacts between the Shuswap and coastal peoples, including the Kwakiutl. (The Chilcotin presence in the area is relatively recent—see Kinkade 1990: 206—and this then could support the hypothesis of earlier contacts between the Kwakiutl and the Shuswap, except that the Chilcotin apparently moved into an area occupied by neither the Kwakiutl nor the Shuswap. On p. 462 of his book, Teit does mention Chilcotin encroachments upon Shuswap territories but describes these as recent—i.e., more recent than the general Chilcotin presence—and marks them as such on the map on p. 450.) Even if other pieces of evidence would point at Kwakwala as the source of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in Shuswap, we must still consider other possible candidates. Shuswap borders on Kutenai (Ktunaxa), a language isolate, over part of its eastern boundary. Newman (1979a: 218–19) mentions Kutenai as the source of certain pronominal innovations in Okanagan and Kalispel-Spokane (see also Section 4, third last paragraph). He also mentions in a footnote (with reference to Gibson 1973) that “many of the Shuswap men were fluent in Kutenai.” However, since Kutenai apparently lacks an inclusive–exclusive distinction (see Garvin 1948), it must be excused as a possible source for this distinction in Shuswap. There was also a rather short-lived Iroquoian presence among the Shuswap, due to a group of Iroquois that had followed the white furtraders as servants, free trappers and hunters, and had settled in the eastern Shuswap region perhaps as early as 1816 (Teit 1909: 468). The Iroquois maintained their presence in Tete Jaune Creek (in the northeastern part of Shuswap territory), but they seem to have entirely dissolved as a separate group even before Teit’s time (Teit 1909: 451). Although an inclusive–exclusive distinction is, to use Jacobsen’s term, “well installed” in the grammar of the Iroquoian languages (see Mithun 1999: 70 for Mohawk examples), Iroquoian cannot be considered the source of this distinction in Shuswap. First of all, the Iroquois presence among the Shuswap is too recent and too short-lived to be a likely source. Secondly, in spite of a certain amount of intermarriage (Teit 1909: 455), the relations between the Shuswap and Iroquois were probably too hostile to permit the kind of social intercourse that would foster linguistic diffusion. (Ac-
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cording to the Shuswap, as quoted in Teit (1909: 472), the Iroquois were “inclined to be cruel; inclined to thieving, especially to stealing girls”. Teit (1909: 468) also recounts the abduction and murder of a Shuswap girl by the Iroquois.)14 Finally, Teit (1909: 468) observes about the Iroquois that “[T]heir language was not understood” (i.e. by the Shuswap), and while some of the Iroquois spoke Shuswap (p. 468), the Shuswap apparently did not speak the language of the Iroquois.15 There are two more language families in the area that may have been the source of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in Shuswap. One is Siouan, of which Stoney (incorrectly identified as Athabaskan in Teit 1909: 451) touches a small part of the eastern Shuswap border. Siouan does make a distinction between inclusive and exclusive, but with a twist in that it opposes a dual inclusive (“you and me”) to a plural that does not distinguish between inclusive and exclusive (see Mithun 1999: 70 and Rood & Taylor 1996: 465 for Lakhota, and Schudel 1997: 48–9 for Nakoda, both relatives of Stoney).16 The somewhat peculiar structure of the Siouan inclusive–exclusive distinction makes it an unlikely candidate for the Shuswap pattern. Also, the contacts between the Shuswap and the Stoney were certainly too peripheral to allow the Stoney language to exert its influence throughout Shuswap country. Teit (1909: 467) mentions the migration of a small group of eastern Shuswap (the Kinbaskets) into the territory of the Stoney, with whom they formed an alliance. Teit mentions this migration as having taken place about 65 years before he recorded it, and over time the contacts between the migrated Shuswap and their kinfolk had become very infrequent. The other family is Algonquian, which is discussed in Section 3.2.
3.2. Algonquian The most promising candidate for the origin of the Shuswap inclusive/exclusive seems to be Algonquian, represented in its westernmost extension by Cree and Blackfoot. Contacts between the Shuswap and the Blackfoot seem to have been sparse. Teit (1909: 472) observes, “[T]he Blackfeet were not well known, but noted as a tall people, very numerous, warlike, and buffalo-hunters. Otherwise they were supposed to resemble the southern Okanagan”. Contacts with the Cree were certainly much more extensive. Teit (1909: 450) assigns a large portion of the eastern Shuswap border to an area that abuts Cree territory, and on pp. 454–5 he mentions “a great deal” of mixture between the Shuswap of that area and the Cree (and the Iroquois, for that matter). He also mentions what was apparently widespread CreeShuswap bilingualism among the Shuswap whom he had met. The distinction between the inclusive and exclusive first-person plural is hardwired into Algonquian grammar and can be reconstructed for Proto-Algonquian. Aubin (1975) reconstructs Proto-Algonquian ‘we inclusive’ as *ki:lawena:n(aw) (p. 65), and ‘we exclusive’ as *ni:la:na and *ni:lawena:n (p. 113). The fact that the inclusive–exclusive distinction is firmly embedded in Algonquian grammar, and the fact that the contacts between at least the eastern Shuswap and the Cree were strong
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and generally friendly (see Teit 1909: 472), would in themselves be arguments for considering Algonquian, and in particular Cree, as a source for the Shuswap pattern. However, the Cree are apparently relative newcomers to the area (Mandelbaum 1979: 40–6 gives 1820–8 as the period in which they completed their occupation of the western Plains), and this would argue against a spread of the inclusive–exclusive distinction throughout the Shuswap area. On the other hand, as Sarah Thomason has pointed out to me, the shallow time-depth itself is not a problem, since borrowing can take place within a very short period. However, the spread of this feature within a short time throughout what by 1820 would already be a very large area would be a problem. In other words, time is not a problem here, but space is. There is also a third view of this matter. In a recent study, Byram & Lewis (2001) argue for an older Cree presence on the western Plains than Mandelbaum allows. This would make diffusion of the inclusive–exclusive distinction from Cree into Shuswap more likely. Following Snow (1959), the same authors also argue that the word ‘ooligan’ (‘eulachon,’ ‘oolachan,’ etc.), i.e., the name for the ‘candle-fish’ that was prized as a trade item throughout the Northwest Coast area, may have been derived from the Proto-Algonquian term for ‘dish, bowl’ (given as *ola:kani in Aubin 1975: 119). They even suggest a Cree origin for ‘Oregon,’ based on a Western Cree dialect that has replaced Proto-Algonquian *l with r. ‘Oregon’ could then result from the pronunciation with r of ‘ooligan’ (i.e., the name of the fish), eventually becoming the name of the state. I venture no assessment of these etymologies, but I refer the interested reader directly to Byram & Lewis for details, including the role played by Chinook Jargon in this process. (There is a limited but clearly attestable Cree presence in Chinook Jargon, e.g., totoosh ‘[woman’s] breast,’ or mitass ‘leggings’ [Shorey Book Store 1973]. The standard Cree spellings, tohtôs and mitâs, are given in Wolvengrey 2001.) Another possibility would be that the contacts between the Shuswap and the Algonquian peoples are much more ancient than even Byram & Lewis allow. Although Siebert (1967) reconstructs the Algonquian homeland as situated around the eastern Great Lakes (see also the summary of Siebert’s article in Arlotto 1972: 237–41), this does not prevent us from postulating an even older homeland in a much dimmer past. If this homeland were situated in a western area bordering on the Shuswap homeland, it would account for possible diffusion of the exclusive vs. inclusive into Shuswap. Moreover, it would account for the presence of Wiyot and Yurok (related to Algonquian within so-called Algic) in California. (Wiyot and Yurok are often collectively labelled Ritwan, although Berman 1982: 412 mentions that “. . .one might expect that Wiyot and Yurok form a genetic subgroup, but the evidence presented so far is inconclusive”.) The movement of one branch of Algic southward into California and another one eastward to the Great Lakes would be more plausible than a long trek of the Proto-Wiyot and Yurok across western North America. Berman (1982: 419) even suggests that the Wiyot and Yurok may have followed a southward path that was to be used several thousand years later by Athabaskan invaders into California.
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Berman’s argument for a northwestern Algic homeland is based on the similarity between the vowel systems of Proto-Algonquian-Ritwan and Salish, as noted on p. 412 of his study and continued on p. 419 with “[I]f this was the result of language contact rather than coincidence, it would place the Proto-Algonquian-Ritwan homeland near the Proto-Salish homeland. This was probably in the northwest, to the north of the Ritwan languages and to the west of the Proto-Algonquian homeland, which was in the vicinity of the Great Lakes (Siebert 1967)”. Denny (1989: 86–90) also argues for a closer proximity between the Salish and Algonquian (or better, Algic) homelands than would be allowed by Siebert’s reconstruction. Denny’s arguments are mainly based on a number of morphological similarities between both language families, but on p. 88 he adds that “[S]ince archaeologists believe the Wiyot and Yurok migrated fairly recently to the Pacific Coast from the Columbian Plateau, it is likely that the ancestor language of Algonquian and Ritwan (sometimes called Algic) was spoken in that region”.) On p. 90 of his article, Denny even argues for the possibility of a Proto-Algonquian-Salish family, which he then tentatively situates on the Columbian Plateau about 7000 BC (± 1000 years). This possibility must definitely be held in abeyance, although the morphological evidence brought in by Denny is tantalizing. If the inclusive–exclusive distinction was borrowed into Shuswap from (Proto-) Algic, we would expect the Shuswap area at that time to have been small. If it would have been large, the occurrence of this distinction throughout the area would have been problematic, since certain other features, such as diminutive reduplication associated with the first-person singular, are limited to certain dialects only (Kuipers 1974: 39). Indeed, Kinkade (1990) argues persuasively for an intrusion of Interior Salish from a coastal homeland and expansion thereafter. This supports the possibility of a relatively small Proto-Shuswap homeland that could have absorbed the inclusive–exclusive distinction from an Algic neighbour before expanding. (If the Interior would have been the Salish homeland, there would have been a greater chance of Shuswap expansion before contacts with Algic, in which case we would have to account for the somewhat problematic spread of the borrowed feature throughout the Shuswap area.) There is a particularly interesting parallel between Salish and Algonquian in that for both language families we can reconstruct two numerals for ‘one’, which show at least a superficial similarity. Goddard (1979: 106–7) gives both *nekwetwand *pe:šekw- for Proto-Algonquian, while Kuipers (1970: 61 and 1998: 304) gives *nak’ (*nək’-u’) and *pala’ for Proto-Salish. Note the mutual resemblance between the first members of each pair, and the resemblance between the second members. (Kuipers 1970: 61 already notes the resemblance between *nək’-u’ and *n-ekot-wi, the form of *nekwetw- that is given in Bloomfield 1946: 116, although Bloomfield omits the hyphens that occur in the form listed by Kuipers. Bloomfield also provides details on the distribution between the two forms for ‘one’ in Algonquian.) It is quite possible that at an early stage, when Salish and Algonquian were presumably still contiguous, some Salish languages borrowed the Algonquian numeral for
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‘one’ and used it to replace their own, while some Algonquian languages borrowed the Salish numeral.17 Finally, Pentland (p.c.) informs me that there is some evidence that Pre-ProtoAlgonquian may have had glottalized consonants, which might have been the result of diffusion from Salish. (Pentland did present this hypothesis at an annual meeting of the Linguistic Association of America, probably in 1983, and repeated his findings two years later at one of the Algonquian conferences. However, so far his intriguing hypothesis remains unpublished.)
4. Mechanism and semantics If we assume that the inclusive–exclusive distinction was diffused into Shuswap from a non-Salish source, this would still leave us with two possibilities. Either the formal marker for the exclusive (kwəxw, either in this form or an older form) was borrowed as such, or it was merely the semantic distinction that was borrowed, with reanalysis of an existing Shuswap morpheme in order to express the new category. The former solution is highly unlikely, since to the best of my knowledge none of the possible candidate languages has a marker for the exclusive that formally resembles Shuswap kwəxw or can be reconstructed in a form that resembles it. Looking at Algonquian, the most promising candidate so far as the donor of the inclusive–exclusive distinction, and taking Cree as a representative of this family, we find that in this language a pluralizing suffix that combines with a first person prefix indicates the exclusive, while a non-third pluralizing suffix that combines with a second person prefix indicates the inclusive. As an example we give the full possessive inflection of the inanimate noun môhkomân ‘knife.’18 (Prefixes and suffixes are marked in boldface, to set them apart from the stem.) nimôhkomân ‘my knife’ nimôhkomâninân kimôhkomâninaw kimôhkomân ‘your knife’ kimôhkomâniwâw omôhkomân ‘his knife’ omôhkomâniwâw omôhkomâniyiw ‘the other person’s = omôhkomâniyiw knife’
‘our (excl.) knife’ ‘our (incl.) knife’ ‘your (pl.) knife’ ‘their knife’ ‘the other persons’ knife’
The intransitive and transitive verbal paradigms of Cree do not contain any morpheme either that could have been the etymological source of Shuswap kwəxw. We are thus left with the possibility that Shuswap merely borrowed the inclusive– exclusive distinction as a semantic opposition (and used its own morphological material to formally create the distinction). As we have seen in Section 3.1, Jacobsen correctly points out this possiblity, and he uses it in support of his hypothesis that Kwakwala may have been the donor of the Shuswap pattern. This leaves two things to be explained: what is the original form and function of kwəxw, and how can we explain the synchronic structure of the exclusive in semantic terms?
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As for the first issue, kwəxw shows a striking resemblance to kəxw or kaxw, the form that has been reconstructed for the second singular intransitive subject marker in Proto-Salish (Newman 1979a, Davis 2000). However, kəxw has become -k in Shuswap (see the paradigms in Section 2), and the neogrammarian postulate of regularity in sound shifts would require kəxw to have become -k also where it marks the exclusive. It is quite possible, however, that kəxw as the exclusive marker retained full word stress at a time when kəxw as the second singular marker was losing the stress to the verbal stem with which it was associated. (Thus, the differences in stresstreatment could be explained formally in terms of different syntactic positions.) This would allow kəxw as the second singular marker to be reduced to -k, while kəxw as the exclusive marker would subsequently be demoted to (unstressed) particle status but suffer less phonetic attrition. (The attrition would be limited to spreading of the labialization through the ə to k, preceded by reduction of a to ə if one follows Davis 2000 and posits kaxw as the proto-form.) From a semantic point of view one may wonder how a form that combines third person markings with a second-person marker (if kwəxw is indeed derived from the second singular marker) could express the first-person plural exclusive, rather than the second-person plural. (The latter would be the natural semantic function of a form that combines reference to ‘he’ and ‘you.’) Perhaps the solution lies in the fact that personal pronominal systems are notoriously casual about their frames of reference and may undergo various shifts here. One may think of the pedantic or ironic ‘we’ used as a second-person form (teacher to pupil: ‘have we forgotten our books again today?’, or French alors on ne dit plus bonjours aux amis! ‘don’t we say hello to our friends any more?’). Similarly, there is the use of a third-person form to refer to the addressee (the polite address forms in many European languages).19 With these patterns in mind, a shift in reference from second to first person in the case of *kəxw is not in itself impossible. Of course, if this were the case, Shuswap would employ an obvious and logical method of marking the first-person plural exclusive, by using a combination of a third person with a first person. There may be some comparative Salish support for the proposed shift in reference from second to first person in *kəxw. Kroeber and Mattina bring to my attention that Okanagan and Kalispel-Spokane have a first-person singular intransitive marker that is basically of the shape kwu- and arose in competition with the reflexes of Proto-Salish *kən. Newman (1979a: 218–19) suggests Kutenai as the origin of kwu-, but this seems unlikely. There is a remote possibility that kwu- results from a contraction of *kəxw, with a shift in reference from second to first person. (We have such contractions in a number of Interior Salish languages, but not always with a shift in reference from second to first person, see Newman for details.) It is possible then that in Shuswap we have a shift in reference from second to first person, with a minor shift in form (*kəxw > kwəxw). It is also possible that kwəxw goes back to a (hitherto unidentified) Pre-Shuswap or Proto-Salish element with a meaning different from that of second person, possibly an element with a nominal meaning. Michael Cysouw (p.c.) brings to my at-
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tention that this is apparently the situation in Carib, where the combination of the third person with an element amna indicates the first-person plural exclusive. The etymology of amna is obscure, but experts on Carib (Cysouw refers to Spike Gildea and Sergio Meira) assume that it is nominal in origin. In general, as far as the formal expression of the first-person plural exclusive vs. inclusive is concerned, the possibilities are almost boundless (see the catalogue in Jacobsen 1980). Finally, it should be noted that, since the origin of kwəxw seems solidly Salish, the putative formal and semantic histories of this form that are discussed in the preceding paragraphs could also be taken as supporting an internal Shuswap development, rather than the result of semantic diffusion.
5. Conclusions In this article I have tried to trace the origin of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in Shuswap. Of the three possible origins of this distinction (inheritance from ProtoSalish, spontaneous development within Shuswap, or diffusion from a non-Salish source) the first possibility can be safely dismissed. Of the remaining two, we can dismiss neither the spontaneous development nor the diffusion from an outside source. We would have a convincing case for diffusion if we could etymologically trace the Shuswap exclusive marker to a neighbouring non-Salish form with a compatible form and meaning. Although we do not have such an etymological proof, we can still entertain the possibility of a non-Salish source. In that case, it would be the category itself that was diffused, but not the formal markers of the distinction. Of the various language families that Shuswap has been in contact with and that make the inclusive–exclusive distinction, Algonquian seems to be the most likely candidate as a donor. Iroquoian and Siouan are most probably to be dismissed, due to the ephemeral nature of the contacts between these families and Shuswap. The candidacy of Kwakwala, mentioned as a possible donor by Jacobsen (1979, 1980), is also problematic, due to the fact that any areal contact between this language and Shuswap cannot be proven at this point, and Shuswap oral history actually argues against it.20 In the absence of clear formal evidence that the distinction was borrowed from a non-Salish source, and considering how useful and widespread this distinction is (see Section 3 above), it seems most likely that it was created spontaneously within Shuswap.
Notes 1. I wish to express my gratitude to Arok Wolvengrey and David Pentland for giving me their Algonquianist insights during the preparation of this article, and for leading me to Denny (1989). Thanks are also due to Sarah Thomason, Mercedes Hinkson and Paul Kroeber, for their comments after my presentation of the original version of this article at the 7th Work-
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Jan P. van Eijk shop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA), University of Alberta, Edmonton, March 22–4, 2002. I am also very grateful to Dale Kinkade, Aert Kuipers, Tony Mattina, Thom Hess, William Jacobsen Jr., and Michael Cysouw, to whom I sent copies of this article after the workshop and who graciously shared their profound knowledge of Amerindian languages (of various families) with me. The responsibility for this article remains my own. A different version of this article has appeared in the Proceedings of the 7th WSCLA (van Eijk 2002). A brief history of the terms ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ (with many references to Native American languages) is given in Haas (1969a). 2. This page appears as page 68 in the reprint in Holder (1966). 3. For a survey of Salish grammars (and other Salish linguistic studies) up to 1995 see Czay kowska-Higgins & Kinkade (1998). Salish grammars that have appeared since 1995 are Davis & Saunders (1997) on Bella Coola, and van Eijk (1997) on Lillooet. Van Eijk (1997: 157) mentions the presence of what appears to be an inclusive vs. exclusive distinction in an adhortative paradigm in Lillooet. Being limited to only one stem, the distinction is entirely marginal in Lillooet, in contrast to Shuswap. 4. In function this type of reduplication is similar to, for example, Italian mia moglie vs. la sua signora and comparable humility-devices, as quoted in Bloomfield (1933: 402). 5. The third-person forms may be accompanied by an optional particle -əkwe, which we omit here. It seems to be a quotative or reportative, discussed in detail by Kuipers on p. 74. 6. Kuipers does not mention the possibility of kwəxw preceding the main stem, as he does for the possessive paradigm. 7. The basic structure of the transitive forms is as follows: Root-Transitivizer-Object-Subject. The transitivizer in these forms is -nt, as in píc’-nt-lm-s ‘he squeezes you (pl.),’ with -lm for ‘you (pl.) object’ and -s ‘he.’ The object-suffix for the third person is zero, and in such forms the suffix following the transitivizer marks the subject. The transitivizer -nt drops the t in a number of forms, and in the relation ‘I-him’ it contracts with the -n that marks the first singular subject, hence pípc’-n. 8. For an insightful discussion of the double function of the passive in Shuswap see also Jacobsen (1980: 220). One may also argue that the Salish passive is not really a passive, but rather an ‘indefinite actor’ paradigm. This is the venue taken by Thompson & Thompson (1992: 58), as quoted in van Eijk (1997: 264), with further references to the literature there. Newman (1985), on the other hand, argues against the ‘indefinite actor’ (or ‘indefinite subject’) interpretation of the Salish passive. See also note 10. 9. Hoard’s study should be read with great caution, since the author had to work with incomplete and in some cases unreliable material. Nevertheless, Hoard should be saluted for his pioneering effort. (Kinkade also brings to my attention that Newman’s reconstructions have to be reassessed in the light of recent research and because of data that were not yet available to Newman when he conducted his studies.) 10. Newman (1979a: 212) adds that the k in *kət is a separate morpheme that occurs also in combination with other personal markers, or, in his words, “Intransitive subjects are constructed by adding PS *k- Intr to the reduced form of transitive pronouns; this does not apply to the third singular, which is zero rather than the expected **k-əs.” Note that in the Shuswap passive paradigm both the passive (or ‘indefinite actor’) marker -m and the reflex of the first-person plural transitive marker *at appear. Newman (1985: 522)
The inclusive and exclusive in Shuswap spots this problem and defuses it immediately by observing that “[T]hroughout the history of Salish, pronominal forms have spread from one paradigm to another, their ancestral functions becoming blurred or lost”. (See also n. 19 in this connection.) 11. Thanks are due to Patrick Douaud (Faculty of Education, University of Regina), RoseMarie Déchaine (University of British Columbia) and Aert Kuipers for providing me with their insights on the semantics and pragmatics of the use of on. Historically, on comes from Latin homo and appeared as an indefinite pronoun during the transition from Vulgar Latin to Old French, i.e., between 500 and 1000. Its widespread usage in French may have been influenced by Germanic Man, which was introduced into Gaul by the Franks. The information on the historical background of this distinction is due to Douaud, while Kuipers draws my attention to a treatment of this topic in the Larousse étymologique to which I refer the interested reader for further details. 12. This last table erroneously lists the inclusive–exclusive distinction as occurring in Kutenai. 13. The borrowing of personal pronouns is in itself possible, in spite of the fact that such markers are often considered part of the “core vocabulary” and as such supposed to be highly resistant to borrowing. However, as Dixon (1997: 20) makes clear, “any lexeme may be borrowed (and may over time diffuse over a considerable area)”. (In other words, one may question whether “core” vocabularies really exist. See also note 17 for examples of borrowing of numerals across linguistic family lines.) Arlotto (1972: 188) mentions the borrowing of plural pronouns into English from Old Norse, and de Vries (1973: 259–60) mentions the borrowing of the reflexive pronoun zich from German into Dutch. 14. Somewhat incongruously, the Iroquois are also described on p. 472 as “quiet, not aggressive or revengeful”. 15. Teit does not mention what language or languages were spoken by the Iroquois, i.e., whether it was Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, or any of the other extant Iroquoian languages. 16. For a thorough study of the linguistic relations within northern Siouan see Parks & DeMallie (1992). 17. Kuipers informs me that he no longer considers *pala’ to be Proto-Salish, due to the fact that it is historically limited to a number of Central Salish languages, so that its presence in Lillooet and Thompson results from internal Salish borrowing. Accordingly, it is listed under “Central Salish Roots” in Kuipers (2002: 217). In addition to the two Salish forms given here, Bella Coola has s-maw, probably a borrowing from Wakashan (Nater 1977: 14), while Upper Chehalis has ’o .c’s (diminutive of less frequent ’uc’s), besides nač’- and nač’-aw- (both of which are used only in bound forms), Kinkade (1991: 14–15). Kinkade also has directed my attention to two other non-cognate forms for ‘one’ in Salish, viz., Pentlatch łt’áli, and the form that underlies Twana dáqas, Columbian naqs and Colville naqs. There is considerable borrowing of numerals involving Salish and neighbouring languages, as is attested by Bella Coola s-maw mentioned above. Kinkade also brings to my attention that the form for ‘six’ is shared by Chinook and most of the Tsamosan and Central Salish languages, although the direction of borrowing is not entirely clear. We also have intriguing similarities between the Salish and Kutenai numerals for ‘one’ through ‘four,’ as discussed in Kuipers (1970: 68), with reference to Haas (1965) (erroneously listed as Haas 1955 in Kuipers’s article). An example of Amerindian numeral borrowing that does not involve Salish is the Cherokee (Iroquoian) word for ‘seven’ from Muskogean Creek (Haas 1969b: 81).
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Jan P. van Eijk 18. Details of Cree pronominal inflection are given in Ahenakew (1987) and Okimâsis & Ratt (1999). Cree speakers may also add a suffix ‑im to the stem when that is marked with possessive affixes. The suffix ‑im stresses ownership (often translatable as ‘[my, your, his] own’) and as such it is more often used with third person owners (non-participants in the speech event) and it is obligatory in combination with those nouns that signal entities not normally owned in traditional Cree culture. Thus we may have omôhkomânim besides omôhkomân, and we would definitely have nisîsîpim ‘my duck (sîsîp),’ since ducks roamed freely and were not kept on duck farms, where they would be someone’s property. (The word sîsîp is also an example of an animate noun, the inflection of which has special complications due to the obligatory obviative in the case of a third person possessor.) 19. A clear example of how a personal pronominal marker can shift its frame of reference depending on context is provided by the Lillooet object marker -tumuł. The basic meaning of this suffix is ‘us’, as in cun-tumúł-as ‘he (-as) tells (cun) us.’ However, in combination with the first-person singular subject suffix -kan, the suffix -tumuł marks the second-person plural object, as in cun-tumúł-kan ‘I tell you folks’. An extensive catalogue of overlaps between first and second persons in Native American languages is given in Heath (1998). 20. If any Salish languages should have borrowed the inclusive–exclusive distinction from Kwakwala, it should have been Bella Coola and Comox, which have been exposed to influence from Kwakwala (or its close relative Heiltsuk) over a long time. Examples of linguistic diffusion from Kwakwala into Comox include the simplification of word-initial consonant clusters to single consonants (Thompson 1979: 732) and the borrowing of lexical items, such as waχac’i ‘pipe’ from Heiltsuk (Jacobsen 1979a: 773). For examples of Northern Wakashan influence on Bella Coola, see Nater (1977). However, neither Bella Coola nor Comox make the inclusive–exclusive distinction. As for the inclusive–exclusive distinction within Wakashan, Jacobsen (1979: 767) notes that it is made only in Northern Wakashan (“Kwakiutlan”). (The southern branch encompasses Nootka, Ditidaht and Makah.) Jacobsen (1997: 574 [n. 8, referring to p. 571]) argues against Haas’s suggestion that this distinction can be reconstructed for Proto-Wakashan, and that it had been lost in Southern Wakashan. Instead, Jacobsen adduces evidence that this distinction developed only in Northern Wakashan. (Jacobsen also disagrees with a more unlikely suggestion made by Morris Swadesh about Pre-Nootka.)
References Ahenakew, F. 1987. Cree language structures: A Cree approach. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications. Arlotto, A. 1972. Introduction to historical linguistics. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. Aubin, G. F. 1975. A Proto-Algonquian dictionary. Ottawa: National Museum of Man Mercury Series [Canadian Ethnology Service Paper 29]. Beck, D. 2000. Grammatical convergence and the genesis of diversity in the Northwest Coast Sprachbund. Anthropological Linguistics 42: 147–213. Berman, H. 1982. Two phonological innovations in Ritwan. International Journal of American Linguistics 48: 412–20. Bloomfield, L. 1933. Language. London: Allen and Unwin. Bloomfield, L. 1946. Algonquian. In H. Hoijer et al. (eds), Linguistic structures of native America, 85–129. New York: Viking Fund [Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 6].
The inclusive and exclusive in Shuswap Boas, F. 1911. Introduction. In F. Boas (ed.), Handbook of American Indian Languages, Volume I, 1–83. Washington DC: Government Printing Office [Bureau of American Anthropology Bulletin 40]. Byram, S. & Lewis, D. G. 2001. Ourigan: Wealth of the Northwest Coast. Oregon Historical Quarterly 102: 127–57. Campbell, L. & Mithun, M. (eds). 1979. The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment. Austin TX: University of Texas Press. Czaykowska-Higgins, E. & Kinkade, M. D. 1998. Salish languages and linguistics. In E. Czay kowska-Higgins & M. D. Kinkade (eds), Salish languages and linguistics: Theoretical and descriptive perspectives, 1–68. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 107]. Davis, Henry. 2000. Remarks on Proto-Salish subject inflection. International Journal of American Linguistics 66: 499–520. Davis, P. W. & Saunders, R. 1997. A grammar of Bella Coola. Missoula MT: University of Montana [University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguistics 13]. Denny, J. P. 1989. Algonquian connections to Salishan and northeastern archaeology. In Cowan, W (ed.), Actes du Vingtième Congrès des Algonquinistes, 86–107. Ottawa: Carleton University. de Vries, J. 1973. Etymologisch woordenboek: Waar komen onze woorden vandaan? Utrecht: Het Spectrum. Dixon, R. M.W. 1997. The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garvin, P. L. 1948. Kutenai III: Morpheme distributions. International Journal of American Linguistics 14: 171–87. Gibson, J. A. 1973. Shuswap grammatical structure. Honolulu HI: University of Hawaii Ph. D. dissertation [University of Hawaii Working Papers in Linguistics 5]. Goddard, I. 1979. Comparative Algonquian. In L.Campbell & M. Mithun (eds), 70–132. Haas, M. R. 1965. Is Kutenai related to Algonquian? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 10: 77– 92. Haas, M. R. 1969a. ‘Inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’: A look at early usage. International Journal of American Linguistics 35: 1–6. Haas, M. R. 1969b (reprinted 1978). The prehistory of languages. The Hague: Mouton [Janua Linguarum, Series Minor 57]. Heath, J. 1998. Pragmatic skewing in 1→2 pronominal combinations in native American languages. International Journal of American Linguistics 64: 83–104. Hoard, J. E. 1971. Problems in Proto-Salish pronoun reconstruction. In J. E. Hoard, & T. Hess (eds), Studies in northwest Indian languages, 70–90. Sacramento CA: Sacramento State College [Sacramento Anthropological Society Paper 11]. Holder, P. (ed.). 1966. [Reprints of Boas 1911 and Powell 1891.] Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press. Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1979. Wakashan comparative studies. In L. Campbell and M. Mithun (eds), 766–91. Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1980. Inclusive/exclusive: A diffused pronominal category in native western North America. In J. Kreiman & A. E. Ojeda. (eds), Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora, 208–27. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 1997. Mary R. Haas’s contributions to Wakashan linguistics. Anthropological Linguistics 39: 569–77.
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396 Jan P. van Eijk Kinkade, M. D. 1990. Prehistory of Salishan languages. In Papers for the 25th International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages (August 16–18, 1990), 197–208. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. Kinkade, M. D. 1991. Upper Chehalis dictionary. Missoula MT: University of Montana [University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguistics 7]. Kinkade, M. D., Elmendorf, W. W., Rigsby, B. & Aoki, H. 1998. Languages. In D. E. Walker Jr. (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians 12: Plateau, 49–72. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. Kroeber, P. D. 1999. The Salish language family: Reconstructing syntax. Lincoln NE: The University of Nebraska Press. Kuipers, A. H. 1970. Towards a Salish etymological dictionary. Lingua 26: 46–72. Kuipers, A. H. 1974. The Shuswap language: grammar, texts, dictionary. The Hague: Mouton [Janua Linguarum, Series Practica 225]. Kuipers, A. H. 1998. Towards a Salish etymological dictionary V. In Papers for the 33rd International Conference on Salish and Neighboring Languages (August 5–7, 1998), 296–306. Seattle WA: University of Washington. Kuipers, A. H. 2002. Salish etymological dictionary. Missoula MT: University of Montana [University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguistics 16]. Mandelbaum, D. G. 1979. The Plains Cree: An ethnographic, historical, and comparative study. Regina, Saskatchewan: Canadian Plains Research Center [Canadian Plains Studies 9]. Mithun, M. 1999. The languages of native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nater, H. F. 1977. Stem list of the Bella Coola language. Lisse: de Ridder. Newman, S. 1977. The Salish independent pronoun system. International Journal of American Linguistics 43: 302–14. Newman, S. 1979a. A history of the Salish possessive and subject forms. International Journal of American Linguistics 45: 207–23. Newman, S. 1979b. The Salish object forms. International Journal of American Linguistics 45: 299–308. Newman, S. 1980. Functional changes in the Salish pronominal system. International Journal of American Linguistics 46: 155–67. Newman, S. 1985. Reinterpreting the data: The Salish passive. International Journal of American Linguistics 51: 521–3. Okimâsis, J. L. & Ratt, S. 1999. Cree: Language of the Plains. Regina, Saskatchewan: Canadian Plains Research Center. Parks, D. R. & DeMallie, R. J. 1992. Sioux, Assinibone, and Stoney dialects: A classification. Anthropological Linguistics 34: 233–55. Powell, J. W. 1891. Indian linguistic families of America north of Mexico. In Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report 7, 1–142. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Rood, D. S. & Taylor, A. R. 1996. Sketch of Lakhota, a Siouan language. In I. Goddard (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians 17: Languages, 440–82. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. Schudel, E. K. 1997. Elicitation and analysis of Nakoda texts from southern Saskatchewan. M. A. thesis, Regina, Saskatchewan: University of Regina. [Shorey Book Store.] 1973. Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon or Indian trade language of the North Pacific. Seattle, Washington: The Shorey book store [Facsimile reprint of an anonymous pamflet].
The inclusive and exclusive in Shuswap Siebert, F. T. Jr. 1967. The original home of the Proto-Algonquian people. In Contributions to Anthropology: Linguistics I, 13–47. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada [National Museum of Canada Bulletin 214]. Silverstein, M. 1974. Dialectal developments in Chinookan tense-aspect systems: An areal– historical analysis. International Journal of American Linguistics 40: 45–99 [Memoir 29]. Snow, V. 1959. From Ouragon to Oregon. Oregon Historical Quarterly 60: 445–7. Teit, J. A. 1909 (Reprinted by AMS Press, 1975). The Shuswap. New York: G. E. Stechert [The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Volume 2, Part 5. Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History, New York]. Thompson, L. C. 1979. Salishan and the Northwest. In L. Campbel & M. Mithun (eds), 692– 765. Thompson, L. C. & Kinkade, M. D. 1990. Languages. In W. Suttles (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians 7: Northwest Coast, 30–51. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. Thompson, L. C. & Thompson, M. T. 1992. The Thompson language. Missoula MT: University of Montana [University of Montana Occasional Papers in Linguistics 8]. van Eijk, J. P. 1997. The Lillooet language: Phonology, morphology, syntax. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. van Eijk, J. P. 2002. On the origin of the inclusive vs. exclusive in Shuswap. In L. Bar-el, L. Tamburri Watt & I. Wilson (eds), Proceedings of WSCLA 7, 137–54. Vancouver, B. C. [University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 10]. Wolvengrey, A. 2001. nêhiyawêwin: itwêwina (Cree: Words). Regina, Saskatchewan: Canadian Plains Research Center [Dictionary compiled by Wolvengrey with the assistance of the Cree Editing Council].
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Chapter 15
Clusivity cross-linguistically Common trends and possible patterns1 Elena Filimonova University of Konstanz
This concluding chapter summarizes the results of the volume as well as the observations of the earlier typological literature, particularly emphasizing cross-linguistically valid generalizations implicating the distinction of inclusive and exclusive. It also points out typologically rare patterns of clusivity. Keywords: clusivity, cross-linguistic generalizations, counter-examples
1. Introduction The aim of this concluding chapter is to provide an overview of the phenomenon of clusivity, summarizing the findings of preceding chapters as well as the generalizations on this topic extracted from earlier typological literature. The primary goal of each typological study is to describe the range of cross-linguistic variation for the phenomenon in question and to outline the limits of this variation, emphasizing not only the regularities but also the anomalies (or ‘nonsuch’2) of the studied topic. In our case, this would indicate the (im)possible constellations of grammatical and semantic features characterizing the opposition of inclusive–exclusive as well as its distribution. I intentionally avoid calling these language rules ‘universals’, in order not to be drawn into the discussion about the purposefulness and statistical plausibility of the listed claims and instead prefer the neutral terms ‘generalization’ (hence G) or ‘tendency’. In what follows, I will present a list of significant tendencies that usually hold true in the languages where the clusivity is claimed to exist. Quoting the generalizations I standardize (if possible) the corresponding original texts in an IF . . . THEN fashion — a procedure also carried out in The Universals Archive, a searchable collection of universals available online at http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/proj/sprachbau.htm — also avoiding sometimes very complex metalanguages used by the authors in their specific contributions. This makes the cited tendencies uniform and, hopefully, easier to process. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 summarizes the main findings about the structure of pronominal paradigms with inclusive–exclusive contrast. They mainly concern the status of inclusive and exclusive counterparts inside the
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opposition, the relation between the opposition and the number contrast, possible restrictions on clusivity forms to be homonym to the other members of the paradigm. Section 3 considers the main conclusions about the clusivity opposition in free vs. bound pronouns, followed by results about the contrast in imperative paradigms (section 4). Section 5 sums up the findings on additional functions of inclusive–exclusive forms. Section 6 summarizes the contributions on the origin of the opposition and its historical stability. Section 7 offers a summary of the atypical uses of the terms inclusive and exclusive attested in the preceding chapters and linguistic literature in general. Section 8 discusses possible typological correlates of the opposition. Finally, section 9 rounds off the chapter.
2. Clusivity in the pronominal paradigm 2.1. General In a pronominal paradigm, the inclusive–exclusive contrast has often been considered as an additional two-way distinction within a first-person plural category. Such an alignment might indeed suit some languages but it is far from being universal. In the last half century there were a number of contributions arguing against this presumption and introducing other arrangements of the contrast in the paradigm. Particularly in this volume, there are a few chapters presenting different classifications of the systems with an inclusive–exclusive distinction. Thus, surveying South American languages, Crevels & Muysken pay special attention to the so-called four person systems where inclusive is coordinate with first, second and third person categories. In his theoretically oriented chapter, Daniel convincingly argues for the inclusive always being a separate person rather than a subcategory of the first person. A fresh look at the typology of clusivity systems is presented by Bickel & Nichols. They propose a classification based on the structural geometry of pronominal paradigm considering in particular whether the roots or stems of inclusive and exclusive forms are shared by any other person or number and whether there are any gaps in the paradigm at the intersection of clusivity and person/number categories. Siewierska & Bakker introduce a further elaboration of the first person complex suggested by Cysouw (2003) adding two further patterns — occasionally attested also by Cysouw and earlier by Greenberg (1988) but more numerous in Sieweierska & Bakker’s sample. All these findings clearly highlight the clusivity contrast as an intriguing and by no means trivial distinction in the pronominal paradigm. Notwithstanding its typological diversity there are quite a few features that commonly occur.
2.2. Two poles of opposition In this section, I consider the internal structure of the distinction with a particular focus on the status of inclusive and exclusive counterparts. Traditionally the dis-
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tinction between inclusive and exclusive forms is treated as an opposition, whereby the set of participants referring to the speaker and including the addressee(s) is said to contrast the set excluding the latter. At first glance, such a definition presupposes an equipotential existence of both parts of the dichotomy, i.e. if in a language an opposition of inclusive and exclusive is registered, there are two pronominal forms, one with an inclusive meaning and another with an exclusive one; so that the presence of one form would imply the presence of another, and vice versa. However, this claim is true for the majority of languages, but not all of them. There are languages where only the inclusive gets a dedicated morphological form, like for example in Aymara (Aymaran). In (1) you can see the four basic pronominal forms and the corresponding referential sets (adapted from Hardman-de-Bautista, Vásquez & Yapita Moya 1974: 209). The exclusive meaning ‘speaker and others’ is associated with the ‘I’ form, while an inclusive group of speaker and addressee gets a dedicated encoding. The forms are unspecified for number but can optionally take a plural marker ‑naka.
(1) naya/na jiwasa juma jupa
{S}, {S + N +… + N}3 {S + A}, {S + A+ …+ N …} {A}, {A + A…+ A}, {A + N +…+ N} {N}, {N + N +…+ N}
Structurally the Aymara inclusive has nothing to do with the first person and would better be recognized as a separate (fourth) person (more on the topic in Filimonova 2002). Crevels & Muysken (this volume) give further examples from central–western South America where pronominal systems can be analyzed likewise as four person systems. In their areal sample of 65 languages, 12.3 % reveal this pattern. In the world-wide perspective, according to Siewierska & Bakker (this volume), this type of systems is registered less often: in 2.3% of 394 sampled languages within free personal pronouns and in up to 5% within bound markers. These data allow us to suggest that whenever there is a dedicated form4 for an exclusive, there is a dedicated form for an inclusive as well, but not the reverse. G1
Excl ⇒ Incl
This particular claim was also stated earlier by Sokolovskaya:5 IF there is a special form with the meaning ‘speaker + non-participant(s)’ (i.e. “we exclusive”) THEN there is a special form with the meaning ‘speaker + addressee(s)’ and/or ‘speaker + addressee(s) + non-participant(s)’ (i.e. “we inclusive”). (Sokolov skaya 1980: 95, U 43) [UA #1484; cf. also Cysouw 2003: 96–7].6
A logical inference from this generalization would be to question whether inclusive and exclusive present a straightforward opposition referring to each other as a plus/minus of a single grammatical category. This particular problem is faced in the chapter by Lichtenberk who claims that inclusive–exclusive is an opposition of unequals. Of the two members of the opposition, inclusive seems to possess a special
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status. He supports his claim with the data documenting two findings. Firstly, he registers significantly more additional functions besides clusivity proper of the inclusive than of the exclusive. Secondly, he finds the usual survival of the inclusive form while the opposition falls (see also Section 6). The study of clusivity counterparts in terms of markedness was carried out by LaPolla (this volume). He treats markedness as overt coding, not as a cluster of correlating properties (as a classical notion of markedness in the way of the Prague linguistic school would suggest). According to this approach, the unmarked category is more simply marked (or not marked at all) and the marked item gets a special morphological marking. LaPolla presents a detailed morphological survey of inclusive–exclusive contrast in Tibeto-Burman languages and finds out that in this language family it is pre-eminently the inclusive that appears to be more marked, often signaled by a separate marker attached to the exclusive form. This tendency is, however, violated by Kiranti languages where the exclusive is the more marked form. The Kiranti group is the only one where the clusivity contrast can be reconstructed to the proto level. In the other groups this contrast is a later development introduced by diffusion through the neighbouring languages or innovated within a single language or low level groupings. The rise of any opposition involves a reanalysis of morphemes already existing in a language and for some reason it was a general plural form that in this particular case was reanalysed as an exclusive, whereas the inclusive became encoded by a special marker. At the moment we do not have the data as to whether this grammaticalization path is common within other language families as well. In Jacobsen’s (1980) brief survey, there are examples of both derivational paths: inclusive based on exclusive (like in Washo (Hokan)) and exclusive based on inclusive forms (e.g. Wiradyuri (Pama-Nyungan), Tzeltal (Mayan), Tübatulabal (Uto-Aztecan)). All these findings suggest that the generalizations about morphological structure based on synchronic patterns only should be treated with great caution. For instance, the morphological models of inclusive and exclusive forms can differ considerably in inherited and innovated oppositions.
2.3. Clusivity and number Referentially inclusive and exclusive are non-singular forms. Their sets of referents typically include two or more persons: a Speaker and somebody else (Addresse(s) and/or Non-locutor(s)). Apparently because of this feature the inclusive–exclusive distinction has long been considered to be the opposition within the (first person) plural. In some languages, however, the ordering of pronominal paradigm in accordance with this traditional view appears to be non-economical and hardly convincing. A more satisfactory solution for such languages is to align a ‘thou and I’ form together with the singular pronominal forms thus yielding a set of participants with “minimal” membership, as opposed to the “augmented” one. In this subsection, however, I confine my attention to the languages distinguish-
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ing number in a traditional, i.e. singular vs. non-singular sense. The question is: are there any rules predicting the distribution of the opposition in the languages with more than two numbers? If a language distinguishes singular, dual and plural, for example, do we know whether inclusive and exclusive are present in both nonsingular numbers? In The Universals Archive the following claim can be found: G2
IF there is an opposition inclusive vs. exclusive in dual, THEN usually there is such opposition in plural. (Sokolovskaya 1980: 98, U 49) [UA #1490]
Sokolovskaya mentions two counter-examples having inclusive–exclusive opposition in dual but not in plural: Coos (Kusan) illustrated in (2) and Lhota (Baric, Sino-Tibetan).
(2) Coos (Frachtenberg 1922: 395) Sg Du 1Incl îsnE’xkan 1Excl nE’xkan xwînnE’xkan 2 e’xkan îce’xkan 3 xä’kä ûxxä’kä
Pl łînnE’xkan cîne’xkan îłxä’kä
The same pattern is found in Nomad (Trans-New Guinea) (Voorhove 1975: 392, Franklin 1973; credited to Wolfgang Schellinger) and Wik-Munkan (Pama-Nyungan) (Godfrey 1964: 76). Siewierska & Bakker (this volume) cite Tanimbili (Oceanic) subject prefixes as distinguishing the inclusive–exclusive contrast in dual but not in plural.7 Sokolovskaya suggests a similar statement for trial: G3
IF there is an opposition inclusive vs. exclusive in trial, THEN there is such an opposition in dual and plural. (Sokolovskaya 1980: 98, U 48) [UA #1489]
The statements G2 and G3 consider the clusivity contrast within the non-singular numbers. It is possible, however, to tackle the problem from the opposite angle and to look for the number distinctions within the inclusive and exclusive forms. Moravcsik and Greenberg follow the latter path in their generalizations: G4
IF a dual and a plural are distinguished in the first-person exclusive form of a pronoun, THEN they are also distinguished in the inclusive. (Moravcsik 1978: 352) [UA #578]
Greenberg formulated the same generalization for dual only: G4′ IF there is a first-person exclusive dual, THEN there is also a first-person inclusive dual. (Greenberg 1988: 2, 1993: 17) [UA #1876] Greenberg (1988: 2) mentions Savo (East Papuan) having dual with first-person exclusive but not with first-person inclusive. Ngankikurrungkurr (Daly, Australian)
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(Hoddinott & Kofod 1988: 94; credited to Michael Cysouw) and Yagua (Peba-Yaguan) in (3) reveal the same pattern.8
(3) Yagua (Payne & Payne 1990: 370) Sg Du Pl 1Incl vú̜ ú̜ y 1Excl ray nááy núúy 2 jiy sá̜ á̜ da jiryéy 3 níí naada riy
In other words, generalizations G2–G4′ suggest that if a language has more than one non-singular number, the clusivity opposition is most likely to be found in a number value that occupies a higher position in the number hierarchy: (singular) > plural > dual > trial (Corbett 2000: 38). And of the two forms, inclusive and exclusive, if one of them has a number contrast, it is almost always the inclusive, not the exclusive. This might be due to the main principle of the opposition (mentioned in G1) that classifies inclusive as a primary member of the distinction.
2.4. Clusivity and the structure of pronominal paradigm 2.4.1. Clusivity forms unter sich
As we know, the clusivity opposition is generally about in- or ex-cluding the Addressee into/from the group of the Speaker. In this definition, however, nothing is said about the situation where all three persons (S, A, and N) are involved. A separate form that refers to the full set of persons as opposed to the other two cases: S+As (limited inclusive) and S+Ns (exclusive) is conceivable. Cross-linguistically, however, such a distinction between three different ‘we’ forms is unattested. Boas was possibly the first one to point this out: A true first-person plural is impossible, because there can never be more than one self. This logical laxity is avoided by many languages, in which a sharp distinction is made between the two combinations self and person or persons spoken to, or self and person or persons spoken of. I do not know of any language expressing in a separate form the combination of the three persons, probably because this idea readily coalesces with the idea of self and persons spoken to. (Boas 1911: 39–40; my emphasis, EF)
In other words, he believed that this particular meaning referring to all three persons (or super-inclusive) is generally covered by the so-called limited inclusive form: G5
IF some form denotes ‘speaker+addressee(s)’, THEN it must also denote ‘speaker + addressee(s) + non-participant(s)’. (Boas 1911: 39–40; Soko lovskaya 1980: 93, U 22) [UA #1464]
An essential point here is that both Boas and Sokolovskaya were definitely thinking of the inclusive of more than minor (i.e. dual) number,9 i.e. they were concerned
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with the case in which the form denotes a speaker joined by more than one addressee (cf. Boas is speaking about persons spoken to, not person in the singular). Otherwise, all languages distinguishing between dual and plural inclusive and with minimal/augmented opposition would violate this truth. Furthermore, we know for sure that both of them were aware of a lot of languages with a dual inclusive as opposed to the plural one. The fact that G5 was intentionally suggested for plural inclusive is demonstrated once more by the following two examples. Reviewing the grammar of Gooniyandi by McGregor, Testelec (1995: 582) mentions that it would be at odds with Sokolvskaya’s statement in G5. Gooniyandi (Bunuban, Australian) distinguishes between two forms that in traditional terms can be described as the following: ngidi is used to refer to 1DuIncl, 1DuExcl, and 1PlExcl, and yaadi refers to 1PlIncl (cf. (4)). If we try to apply G5 to all inclusives, including dual ones (as probably Testelec did), ngidi turns out to be a counter-example. If we, however, exclude dual inclusives from the implicans, Gooniyandi remains completely in line with this claim: yaadi encompasses S+As as well as S+A(s)+N(s) meanings.
(4) Gooniyandi free pronouns arranged according to traditional categories (McGregor 1996: 159): Sg Du Pl 1Excl nganyi ngidi (yoorroo) ngidi (yarndi) 1Incl ngidi (yoorroo) yaadi (yarndi) 2 nginyji gidi (yoorroo) gidi (yarndi) 3 niyi bidi (yoorroo) bidi (yarndi)
Further, one can think of one another type of languages violating G5. It would unite the reference to S+A(s)+N(s) and S+N(s) and oppose them to S+As. Cysouw (2003) and Siewierska & Bakker (this volume) bring a couple of languages that (using their terms) have one form to refer to 1+2+3 and 1+3 and another to refer to 1+2 — what at first glance indeed looks like a possible candidate for the combination mentioned above. However, the metalanguage they use is not sensitive to the number of persons involved. In reality, the form they encode as 1+2 is a dual inclusive. In these languages, an inclusive of more than dual number and a super-inclusive are covered by another — and what is important — single form. So these languages present no problems for G5 either. This particular feature of the inclusive form to not differentiate S+A+A and S+A+N sets of participants is coherent with another property of pronominal systems — carefully studied by Simon (this volume) — to not distinguish between different sets of hearers: multiple addressees A+A+A… and addressee plus non-locutors A+N+N… (see also Section 7.2). Both these facts are stipulated by the inherent singular status of the addressee, first claimed by Benveniste (1966) and later much discussed by Greenberg (1989) and McGregor (1989, especially 1996). The singularity of the addressee here does not refer to the scenario of the real world communication between humans but describes pronominal systems and “how they are
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organized in human languages” (McGregor 1996: 167). Here the main argument is “that pronominal system constructs one of the addressees as the addressee, the other as an other, added as an augmented to the former” (McGregor 1996: 168, n.7). And this very feature excludes then the possibility to distinguish morphologically between limited and super-inclusive, as well as between two forms in the second-person plural. Sokolovskaya makes also the reverse claim to G5:10 G5′ In an overwhelming majority of languages, IF some form denotes ‘speaker + addressee(s) + non-participant(s)’, THEN it denotes also ‘speaker + addressee(s)’. (Sokolovskaya 1980: 94, U 36) [UA #1477]
2.4.2. Clusivity vs. other pronominal forms
Looking further for any regularities or restrictions in the paradigmatic structure of pronominal systems with an inclusive–exclusive distinction let’s consider the possibility of certain pronominal forms becoming homophonous. In paradigms with a clusivity distinction, the shape merger of the forms happens by no means arbitrarily. Thus according to Cysouw (2002: 51), in these paradigms we would never find homophonous singular forms (“no singular homophony”, in his terms): G6
IF there is an inclusive–exclusive contrast THEN there is no singular homophony in the pronominal paradigm.
He also registers a tendency to have three times less vertical homophony in the paradigms with the inclusive–exclusive opposition, i.e. cases with fused marking of first-person plural with second- and/or third-person plural) than in the paradigms without this contrast: G7
IF there is an inclusive–exclusive contrast THEN there is less vertical homophony in the pronominal paradigm.
Suggesting G6 and G7, Cysouw surveyed the paradigms of both free and bound pronouns. Sokolovskaya, having focused her study on free pronouns only, came to more specific results. Thus regarding the possibility of clusivity forms being homophonous with any other pronominal form she states: G8
In an overwhelming majority of languages, IF some form denotes ‘speaker+addressee(s)’ and/or ‘speaker+non-participant(s)’, THEN it cannot include among its meanings the following: (a) ‘speaker’; (b) ‘addressee’ in singular; (c) ‘addressee’ in non-singular (d) ‘addressee(s) + non-participant(s)’. (Sokolovskaya 1980: 93, U 25) [UA #1467] Sokolovskaya was aware of only three languages violating the claim in G8(a): Kawi (Old Javanese), Javanese (Sundic, West Malayo-Polynesian), and Nimboran (Trans-
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New Guinea). Meanwhile it became obvious that this statement is violated by far more languages. In the first place, these are languages with four person pronominal systems where the meanings ‘speaker’ and ‘speaker + non-participant(s)’ appear to be associated with a single form (recall Aymara in (1); for further examples from the South American stock see Crevels & Muysken (this volume)). In Cysouw’s collection of syncretism cases (this volume), there are numerous examples within the bound pronouns as well. All this evidence clearly negates the generalization in G8(a). The cases (b)–(d) in G8 consider the homophony between clusivity forms and the second person: (b) in singular and (c) and (d) in plural. Among the independent pronouns the syncretism between inclusive vs. exclusive and 2Sg appears to be extremely rare. Sokolovskaya, referring to d’Ans (1968), mentions Haitian (Creole, French-based) as the only counter-example. The syncretism between independent clusivity and 2Pl forms occurs in a few other cases, but also very infrequently. This might be due to the rarely registered {Addressee>Speaker} hierarchy that according to Daniel (this volume) is responsible for inclusive being syncretic with the second-person plurals. In a group including both the addressee and the speaker, the {Addressee>Speaker} hierarchy focuses on the addressee and therefore requires the second-person pronoun to be used in referring to this group. Sokolovskaya cites Haitian, Navaho (Athabaskan) (referring to Sapir & Hoijer 1967), and Marathi (Indic, Indo-European) (see below) as being at odds with her generalization. Sanuma (Yanomam) — its description was published years later after Sokolovskaya’s chapter (Borgman 1990) — is another famous example. Cysouw (Cysouw on syncretisms, this volume) also mentions Itonama (isolate; also discussed by Crevels & Muysken, this volume) as having homophonous inclusive and 2Pl forms, and Nehan (West Oceanic) as having homophonous exclusive and 2Pl forms. Within the bound pronominal forms, however, these types of syncretism appear to be much more numerous (Cysouw on syncretisms, this volume). The next observation considers syncretism between clusivity and third-person forms: G9
IF some form denotes ‘speaker+addressee(s)’ and/or ‘speaker+nonparticipant(s)’, THEN it cannot denote ‘non-participant’. (Sokolovskaya 1980: 93, U 24) [UA #1466]
For independent personal pronouns this claim appears to be almost absolute, with just a few counter-examples known. Sokolovskaya, following the description by Katenina (1963),11 mentions Marathi where an inclusive pronoun a:pan is used in polite address to ‘addressee’ and ‘non-participant’. Cysouw (Cysouw on syncretisms, this volume) also mentions Tupínambá (Tupí) having syncretic exclusive and third person independent pronouns. The Tupínambá case, however, significantly differs from Marathi. In contrast to Marathi, where there are separate second- and third-person forms and the inclusive form additionally functions for referring to addressee and non-participant, in Tupínambá, inclusive and third-person forms appear to be homonym, i.e. sharing the same shape. I would therefore prefer to
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clearly differentiate between additional meanings of clusivity forms (see Section 5) and paradigmatic syncretism. In doing this only Tupínambá can be regarded as a violation of G9. As for the syncretism between clusivity and third person within the bound pronominal forms, Cysouw mentions quite a number of cases from different language families exhibiting exactly this pattern.
3. Clusivity in free vs. bound pronominal forms It has long been assumed that in a single language any grammatical distinction would have the same appearance in all instances where it comes to light. Thus for example, it has been claimed that if there is any opposition in number for nouns, there is the same number opposition for pronouns. This might be true (with a few exceptions) for singular/plural number distinction, but it does not hold for ‘minor’ numbers like dual, paucal and others, which tend to be limited to nouns (Plank 1989; Corbett 1996; UA #255). This means that having studied the phenomenon in one manifestation only, it is impossible to make any conclusions about the others. Theoretically the clusivity distinction may equally occur in independent and bound personal pronouns. The latter may be verbal agreement and nominal possessive markers. Siewierska & Bakker (this volume) carefully studied the inclusive–exclusive opposition in all three instances in the sample of 394 languages, concentrating especially on the languages that have the contrast within both free and bound pronouns. They present unique calculations of the frequency of the clusivity distinction within all types of pronominal markers, particularly differentiating between intransitive subject and transitive agent and patient markers. Free personal pronouns distinguish the opposition most commonly of all pronominal markers (42% of languages in their sample with clusivity opposition), whereas the patient markers are the least likely to code the contrast (34%). Their survey, however, did not reveal any significant tendencies as to the occurrence of the opposition, its pattern and how it is encoded within independent pronominal forms as compared to the bound ones. I would also add that any generalization about clusivity opposition that is explicitly done on the basis of either free or bound pronouns only, cannot be transferred to the opposition as a whole. G8 and G9 above visibly illustrate this point: within the independent personal pronouns, clusivity and second- vs. thirdperson forms are almost never homophonous, whereas these types of homophony do occur — and not occasionally — within the bound pronouns.
4. Clusivity in the imperative paradigm All studies of the inclusive–exclusive contrast that explicitly consider personal verbal markers are typically limited to the indicative paradigm. Extending the analysis
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beyond the indicative mood, i.e. considering in particular the imperative paradigm, might give interesting deeper insights into the studied matter. The typology of imperative constructions has once been the topic of a collective volume by the Leningrad typological school (Xrakovskij (ed.) 1992). The clusivity distinction, however, was not focused on there. Dobrushina & Goussev (this volume) did specific research as to clusivity contrast in the imperative paradigm and came to the following conclusion: G10 IF there is no inclusive–exclusive opposition in the imperative THEN it will not be present elsewhere in the language either, e.g. in independent personal pronouns or indicative verbal markers. It might be useful to know that the Leningrad team came to the similar conclusion regarding the person/number distinction. They argue that although there are languages like Nivkh (isolate), Klamath (Klamath-Modoc (=Lutuamian)), Lezgian (East Caucasian), Mongolian (Altaic), Japanese (Japanese-Ryukyuan) where person/number are distinguished in the imperative but not in the indicative, there are no languages that would have person/number distinction in the indicative but not in the imperative (Xrakovskij & Volodin 1986: 87, also cited in Birjulin & Xrakovskij 1992: 31; UA # 676). Interestingly, in languages with clusivity distinction in the imperative paradigm, its pattern is often different from inclusive–exclusive correlate in the indicative or within the free pronominal forms.12 Moreover, the way this particular pattern gets encoded can differ as well. Thus as Dobrushina & Goussev found out, in the imperative, the minimal/augmented opposition does not necessarily presuppose a dedicated exclusive form. In their collection, there are just a few languages that possess a dedicated exclusive form in the imperative. Moreover, in some languages, none of the existing imperative forms can be used in exclusive contexts. According to Cysouw (2003: 97), however, who based his conclusion on the survey of free personal pronouns and personal verb markers in the indicative, the exclusive appears to be an implicatum of the minimal/augmented distinction. This difference in minimal/ augmented pattern in the indicative vs. imperative paradigm is due to the fact that the imperative “prefers inclusive semantics” (Dobrushina & Goussev, this volume). An Addressee is a prototypical causee of any imperative construction or he/ she is supposed to cause somebody else to do something (like in third person imperatives). It is therefore extremely difficult to get a reading of the imperative which does not involve the Adressee, so that morphologically dedicated exclusive imperatives rarely occur. All in all, taking the data in Sections 3 and 4 into consideration, it would be reasonable to conclude that in all its manifestations, clusivity — being motivated by a similar semantic distinction — morphosyntactically follows, at least in part, quite different patterns. Even within the verb markers, any ad hoc generalization being based on indicative or non-indicative forms only, may reveal itself as unsound.
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5. Additional functions of inclusive and exclusive forms 5.1. Inclusive used in I and You contexts In interpersonal communication, personal pronouns appear to be among the most commonly used lexical items. Moreover, in languages, especially with well-developed stylistic differentiation, personal pronouns (free and bound ones) are often used not in their primary sense, but with a certain conceptual displacement. Such transformations generally concern the usage of first- and second-person forms with a different, non-proper reference, as well as referring to the speech act participants with lexical items other than pronouns of the first- and second-person singular. The former can be exemplified, for instance, by editorial we or royal we, also known as ‘pluralis majestatis’, when the plural pronoun is used to refer to oneself. The reference to SAPs not by first- and second-person pronouns occurs frequently in non-standard language, like speaking to a patient or a baby, when I and You forms appear to be replaced by a noun or a we-form. Similar substitutions also occur in the adult-adult speech. Cf. examples from Wills (1977: 274–5):
(5) The president is not a criminal (spoken by a president)
(6) Let’s quiet down, so I can start the meeting (where us refers to the addressee’s group excluding the speaker)
Likewise, in languages with a clusivity distinction, inclusive and exclusive forms can have additional functions besides clusivity proper. In this volume, this issue is explicitly studied in chapters by Cysouw and Lichtenberk. Cysouw presents a detailed study of clusivity forms used with deferential and humble connotations in different language families. Lichtenberk surveys the inclusive–exclusive contrast in Austronesian languages and pays particular attention to possible additional functions of clusivity forms in general. Regarding the honorific usages, he observes that inclusive forms are often used instead of first- and second-person pronouns motivated by integrative strategies of politeness and personal closeness. In the first case, using inclusive, the speaker refers to him/herself, while in the latter case, he/she considers the addressee to be a member of his/her group. Interestingly, according to Lichtenberk, the exclusives are rarely used in any other functions, i.e. with the reference other than genuine exclusivity. As for the inclusives, in languages where they are used as an addressing form, inclusive definitely has some cultural and social connotation. Head (1978: 194, UA #658) suggested that G11 In languages in which categories of proximity, inclusiveness and definiteness are employed to convey social meaning, non-proximate, exclusive, and indefinite or impersonal usually indicate greater respect or social distance than do the opposing ones; inanimate and non-human typically indicate less respect than do their counterparts, when used with social meaning.
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He illustrated his claim with only two examples: the usage of 1ExDu or 1ExPl in self-reference as honorific in Auca (unclassified language of Ecuador) and ‘pluralis majestatis’ in European languages whereby plural is supposed to be exclusive. Though Head admits that his conclusion is not universal and he is aware of languages where inclusive is used in polite address, a detailed survey by Cysouw reveals that it was very uncautious and precipitate to generalize on such a poor basis. In Cysouw’s and Lichtenberk’s chapters, the reader may find numerous examples where inclusive encodes greater respect and social distance. What do in fact occur rarely are clusivity forms used in reference to the non-participant. Above (Section 2.4.2) I mentioned Marathi, where inclusive form is used to denote respect referring to the non-locutor. Up to date it seems to be the only example known. Cysouw (Cysouw on honorific uses, this volume) registers no further instances either. Therefore I would tentatively suggest the next generalization: G12 If clusivity forms have any other additional meanings, they are almost never used in reference to third person.
5.2. Inclusive used in impersonal contexts Another frequent non-direct function of inclusive is its impersonal usage. In some languages, third-person pronouns are used with indefinite or generalized reference, e.g. man in German, one, they in English. Being used in statements of general truth and having no definite referent, these forms actually refer to the group comprising all three persons S, A, and N. The same referential set has an extended inclusive. This feature enables its usage in the same contexts in languages with an inclusive–exclusive distinction. However, this acquired non-referential function of the inclusive does not bleach out its proper referential meaning. Lichtenberk (this volume) states that if an inclusive pronoun is used impersonally, it still has its prior inclusive meaning.
6. The rise and fall of the opposition The clusivity opposition is one that can easily be innovated either by borrowing or by spontaneous internal development within a language/family. There are various sources documenting the spread of the contrast by diffusion (e.g. Jacobsen (1980) for native western North American languages, Èdel’man (1980: 27) and Masica (2001: 252–4) for Indo-Aryan languages, Ross (1988) for Oceanic languages, and others). A few chapters in this volume contribute to the problem of the origin of the opposition in a particular language/language family. Bickel & Nichols (this volume) consider independent innovations of the opposition to be uncommon. Accounting for the patterns in geographical distribution of inclusive–exclusive contrast they argue generally for the diffusion scenario. Among others, they discuss, for instance, diffusion of the opposition into the Caucasian
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area. According to their observations, this intrusion might have happened independently into three language families: pre-Svan in the southwest, Proto-Nakh in the southeast, and Proto-Daghestanian in the east. The ancient Himalayas likewise appear to be another area innovating the opposition. In particular, for Tibeto-Burman languages (LaPolla, this volume) the inclusive–exclusive distinction cannot be reconstructed for a proto language, i.e. in the language groups and single languages where the contrast is attested it appears to be an innovation. LaPolla, however, is not seeking the possible donors of the contrast (there should be multiple independent developments in various branches, similar to the process which happened in the Caucasus), concentrating mainly on the morphological pattern of the opposition. Crevels & Muysken (this volume) are also interested in the morphological structure of clusivity forms in central-western South American languages. They classify the forms into (morphologically) underived vs. derived ones and conclude whether the inclusive category is basic for the family or it is a later innovation. Sakel and van Eijk (both this volume) describe possible scenarios of how and why this contrast could have developed in Mosetenan, an unclassified language family from Lowland Bolivia, and Shuswap, an isolated member of the Salish family. Though in none of the studies a donor language could be clearly suggested, Sakel argues for a loan-hypothesis, whereby an opposition itself and the marker could diffuse into Mosetén from a language that does not exist any longer. Van Eijk, on the contrary, is more inclined to a spontaneous development of this distinction in Shuswap, though not fully dismissing the possible origin from a non-Salish source, most likely Algonquian. Diachronically an inclusive–exclusive opposition appears to be quite stable, its retention being favoured by areal consistency (Nichols 1992). Bickel & Nichols (this volume) add that language isolation and contact only to close sisters favour the inheritance of the opposition even more strongly. The high retention rate, however, does not exclude the possibility of the contrast still getting lost or being reduced. Investigating Austronesian languages Lichtenberk (this volume) found out that in almost all languages, if an opposition disappears, it is an inclusive, not an exclusive member of the original opposition that continues as the general first-person non-singular. He also refers to Ross (1988) for a similar development path in the languages of northern New Guinea. The same tendency is mentioned for Uto-Aztecan by Anderson (1975, 1977) as referred to by Jacobsen (1980: 222). The data on South Mande presented in Vydrin (2005) seem to corroborate this tendency as well. These data suggest the next cross-linguistic generalization: G13 Whenever an inclusive–exclusive contrast disappears from a language, it is almost always an inclusive, not an exclusive, form that remains to take over the combined first-person plural reference. Lichtenberk provides an extensive discussion of this developmental path emphasizing that it is mainly predetermined by the overwhelming referential status
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of the inclusive. The general inclusive (i.e. not a limited one) referring to S, A and N encompasses, so to say, the group referred to by exclusive: S+N. This means that by the fall of the clusivity opposition the semantics of the inclusive form needs less reanalysis than would be required if the exclusive were retained. There are, however, a few languages that go against this tendency. In some North Caucasian languages, it was an exclusive *ži form that superseded the inclusive form, e.g. in Lak, Ubykh, some Lezgic languages and Dargi dialects. In the other North Caucasian languages, like Nakh and Tzesic, the merging of the contrast occurred in line with the tendency mentioned in G13 (Nikolaev & Starostin 1994: 1089).
7. Some special cases of clusivity 7.1. What can get included and excluded? The clusivity distinction came into general linguistic use — and is actually traditionally perceived — as a dichotomy of two referential sets: including vs. excluding the addressee into/from the group of the speaker. Occasionally, however, the terms “inclusive” and “exclusive” appear to be used in quite different contexts. In this section, I try to summarize these uncommon usages. First, I would like the reader to recall Gooniyandi in (4). There the form ngidi can refer to the group of the speaker plus either the addressee or non-participant(s). In traditional terms, this form covers the meanings of 1DuIncl, 1DuExcl, and 1PlExcl. The yaadi form corresponds to traditional 1PlIncl. In terms of S, A, and N these forms have the following referential sets: ngidi can refer to S+A, S+N, S+N+. . .+N and yaadi to S+A+A, S+A+N, S+A+N+…+N, S+A+…+A+N, S+A+…+A+N+. . .+N. In his final analysis of Gooniyandi system, McGregor (1996) suggests that the difference between the two forms is the membership of the addressees in the group of the speaker, with stress on a plurality of addressees, which he understands as “the addressee and one or more others” (1996: 165).13 He puts it this way: What is different from the traditional or classical inclusive–exclusive system lies in the nature to the thing that is included or excluded: in the traditional system it is the hearer or addressee; in the Bunuban system it is the hearers, an augmented group of addressee. In the traditional inclusive–exclusive system you-singular is the “pivot”; in the Bunuban system it is you-non-singular, or you-augmented: gidi. (McGregor 1996: 166).
According to this approach, ngidi turns out to be an exclusive and yaadi an inclusive form, with the essential proviso that Bunuban clusivity is about multiple addressees. Another special case of clusivity is documented in American Sign Language (ASL). As Cormier (this volume) claims, the ASL-exclusive form is characterized as having an extended meaning: the referent excluded from the group of the signer is not necessarily the addressee but can be “any referent [i.e. also Non-participant, EF] that is salient in the discourse”.
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If we forget for a while McGregor’s elegant analysis of Gooniyandi system and try to think of other possible interpretations of ngidi and yaadi forms, we might end in defining ngidi as an inclusive that includes either the addressee or nonparticipant(s). From this perspective ASL-exclusive might look similar in excluding either an addressee or non-participant. At any rate, whatever the analysis of ASL or Gooniyandi-type systems one personally prefers, it is obvious that both systems are different from the traditional clusivity opposition. However, the wish to see the pertinent systems related to other pronominal systems seem to pre-define the choice of inclusive–exclusive terms in their analyses, though with a special caveat.
7.2. Clusivity in the second person Another case concerning the uncommon usage of “clusivity” terms is typically referred to as ‘second-person inclusive–exclusive’, where the inclusive form would refer to a set comprising addressee(s) and non-participant(s) and the exclusive would refer to addressees only. Simon (this volume) presents a thorough study of this phenomenon carefully checking all the languages where two forms in the second-person plural have been allegedly documented. He argues that none of these languages has an inclusive–exclusive contrast in the second person and the pertinent “reports have most probably been misguided”. He argues, however, that this opposition is uniquely marked in the verbal inflection and free pronouns of Bavarian German, though interwoven with the category of respect.14 Simon reasons that an inclusive–exclusive distinction in the second person does not exist universally, thus supporting the fact claimed independently (though purely theoretically and without extensive language surveys) by a number of scholars (for references see Simon, this volume). Here it is cited from Sokolovskaya: G14 In no language is there a special form to denote ‘addressee’ in non-singular. (Sokolovskaya 1980: 91, U 11) [UA #1453] (see also Section 2.4.1, above); IF some form denotes ‘addressee’ in the non-singular THEN it also denotes ‘addressee(s)+non-participant(s)’. (Sokolovskaya 1980: 91, U 12) [UA #1454]. Nevskaya (this volume) makes a further interesting addition to the topic. She documents turcological tradition in using the terms inclusive–exclusive. In firstand second-person plural, many Turkic languages have two free pronominal forms where both pairs are constructed according to the same model: ± -lAr. Some scholars consider the distinction between the two forms in one person as being of the inclusive–exclusive type. Curiously enough, none of the scholars who extend the clusivity interpretation also to the second person seem to be aware of the oddity of this phenomenon. Nevskaya also surveys other analyses of the opposition and concludes that this contrast has nothing to do with clusivity. The plural pronominal
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forms with a ‑lAr affix (multi-plural in her terms) “denote either a group of persons opposed to the rest of society, or individualized plurality, otherwise they are used for mere stylistic purposes”. The forms without -lAr seem to be neutral to such a differentiation. Yet another interpretation of the clusivity contrast in the second person (also mentioned by Simon, this volume) is applied for instance by Harley & Ritter (2002: 504–5) and Bhat (2004: 101). They refer to the morphological analysis of pronominal forms in languages where the form referring to Speaker and Addressee is derived from a second person morpheme. They call this form ‘second-person inclusive’ indicating that the pivot of clusivity opposition is the Speaker (not the Addressee as is traditionally assumed for the inclusive–exclusive contrast and not the Non-participant as in the approach advocated by Simon for the clusivity in the second person). Accordingly, this ‘inclusive’ form contrasts the second-person form excluding the Speaker from its reference group. This is the form traditionally labeled as second-person non-singular. Compare two analyses of Ojibwa personal pronouns with different pivots of clusivity distinction in Table 1 (adapted from Harley & Ritter 2002 and Bhat 2004). (I refer the reader to Simon’s chapter (this volume) for a detailed discussion of Algonquian pronominal morphology.) Table 1. Two analyses of Ojibwa pronominal forms SPEAKER is the pivot of the clusivity opposition
Ojibwa pronominal ADDRESSEE is the pivot of the clusivity opposition forms
1 person 2 person 3 person 1 person plural (inclusive)a 2 person plural inclusive 2 person plural exclusive 3 person plural (exclusive)
niin kiin wiin niinawint kiinawint kiinawaa wiinawaa
1 person 2 person 3 person 1 person plural exclusive 1 person plural inclusive 2 person plural 3 person plural
a The clusivity specification given in brackets for the 1st and 3rd person plural is used by Bhat only. Harley & Ritter refer to these forms as to just 1st and 3rd person plural respectively.
8. Clusivity and its (non-)correlates An inclusive–exclusive contrast appears to be one of the central features characterizing the pronominal system in a particular language. Though uncommon within the “European” languages, this opposition occurs frequently in the other parts of the world (e.g. Siewierska & Bakker (this volume) register this opposition in 46% of their sample, Bickel & Nichols (this volume) in about 40% of the languages). This fact poses a question as to why some languages have this opposition, while others lack it. What is the difference among them? Are there any linguistic features that appear to be favourable or unfavourable for the presence of this opposition?
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In her extensive and comprehensive study, Nichols (1992) rejects any correlations between significant typological factors and the inclusive–exclusive distinction. There she argues against Klimov (1977) who saw this opposition to be characteristic of languages in their active-stative stage. Nichols, however, found his correlation “artifactual”. She claims that “…most of the stative-active languages come from the New World and Pacific, where inclusive–exclusive oppositions are relatively frequent in languages of all alignment types” (1992: 123). Still other results regarding possible correlates of the inclusive–exclusive distinction were obtained by Plank (2003) and Filimonova (1997, 1999). Plank suggests “a good statistical correlation” (2003: 258), based on three samples of Forchheimer (1953) as adapted in Ingram (1978) (69 languages), Perkins (1980) (50 languages) and 205 languages from the Dual Database (University of Konstanz): G15 IF only pronouns have a dual THEN they will very likely also have inclusive–exclusive (valid in 71.6 % of languages15); IF only nouns have a dual THEN personal pronouns are very likely to lack inclusive–exclusive (valid in 90.9 % of languages). If, however, dual is used in both nouns and pronouns, no significant correlation can be drawn. Here Plank makes a significant caveat to the claims by Wundt (1904) and Schmidt (1926) who saw the coincidence of the inclusive–exclusive distinction and dual as irrespective of the nominal vs. pronominal domain of a dual (Plank 2003: 254–5). In the same vein as Plank, though on a considerably smaller basis, Watkins (1969: 46–8) suggested a similar dependency between the nominal dual and clusivity contrast. He hypothesized the inclusive–exclusive distinction for Proto-IndoEuropean. In the first step, being motivated by the fact that dual is absent in the Hittite, Italic and Celtic verbs, he assumed that an Indo-European (IE) verb did not possess a well-developed category of dual. Further, he mentioned that the socalled dual endings in the other languages are clearly derived from the plural endings. He argued then that three basic IE forms in first- and second-person dual and plural: *-u̯ e, *‑me, *-te and the corresponding personal pronouns *u̯ e-, *ne(me‑), *i̯ū˘- had originally functioned as first-person inclusive, exclusive and second-person plural forms. They received a new semantic distribution in different languages later, after the fall of the inclusive–exclusive distinction and the development of dual (which began first with nouns). Another implication involving the inclusive–exclusive dichotomy was suggested by Filimonova (1997, 1999). There I analyse languages from different families characterized for {Addressee > Speaker} person hierarchy (e.g. Algonquian, Siouan, Aymaran, Wik-Munkan, and others) and find that all of them also have an inclusive–exclusive contrast. G16 IF in the reference hierarchy an Addressee is ranked higher than the Speaker THEN there is a category of inclusive.
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I claim that this correlation between the addressee’s salience and the clusivity opposition is semantically motivated. The prominent status of the second person — being typically marked morphosyntactically — appears to be additionally accentuated via the dichotomy in question. Every time there is a possibility for an addressee (who is the most salient person in these cultures) to be involved or not in the situation, this is clearly signaled by using an appropriate pronominal form. This implication is again unidirectional. The reverse does not hold. Daniel (this volume) elaborating the argument of Plank (1985) even claims that the mere presence of the inclusive category may be explained as an effect of the person (locutive in his terms) hierarchy, other than {Speaker > Addressee}, i.e. {Addressee > Speaker} or {Addressee = Speaker}. What is particularly interesting about these generalizations (G16, G17) is that clusivity contrast always appears as an implicatum, never as an implicans. These generalizations give us a clue as to where one can expect the presence of the opposition, however, there seems to be no parameter that would necessarily follow from this distinction. Generalizations G6 and G7 (Section 2.4.2) set certain restrictions on the structure of the pronominal paradigm, but they do not involve any significant typological parameter. A possible corollary for the clusivity contrast was mentioned, however, in discussion at the workshop ‘Truths about pronouns and how true they are’, held in Konstanz in December 2000. The clusivity opposition generally tends not to intersect with gender distinction, i.e. if there is clusivity contrast, there is no gender marking in the first and second person. There is, however, no convincing explanation of why this might happen (but see the recent discussion in Cysouw 2002: 58–9 and Siewierska 2004: 110–12). The observation about the non-cooccurrence of clusivity and gender contrast within the same person represents a strong cross-linguistic tendency. It is, however, not absolute. For instance, some Khoisan languages violate this statement having inclusive–exclusive distinction and gender contrast in the first and second person in all non-singular numbers, i.e. dual and plural. Touo (East Papuan), as reported by Lynch (1998: 167–8),16 distinguishes masculine and feminine forms for inclusive and exclusive in dual and trial,17 but has no gender differentiation in clusivity forms in plural. Cysouw (2003) and Siewierska (2004) mention a few other problematic cases, namely, Vanimo (Sko), the Australian languages Ndjébbana, Nunggubuyu and Kalaw Kalaw Ya, a Chadic language (Kera) and an isolate Itonama. Such patterns need to be accounted for and definitely more research is required in this respect.18 In sum, the clusivity opposition — albeit one of the key features of the pronominal system — has little influence on shaping the language structure and sets no limits on linguistic variation.
9. Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to summarize the main findings and cross-linguistically valid generalizations about the inclusive–exclusive opposition. I hope that I have
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not misread any conclusions, nor enhanced them with additional meanings. The aim of this summary was not to initiate a search for languages that corroborate or violate the mentioned generalizations. Rather, a list of such generalizations helps to realize that clusivity is not just an additional distinction within a pronominal paradigm but a well-organized category in its own right. It may have different appearances in various languages; however, this variation is clearly motivated and follows predetermined tendencies. The rare counter-examples make the common trends even more obvious. In brief, the most essential facts about clusivity can be summarized as follows. First, of the two members of the opposition, the inclusive reveals itself as the primary one. In a pronominal paradigm, the presence of the exclusive implies the presence of the inclusive, but not vice versa (G1); similarly, if there is a number contrast, it will almost always appear in the inclusive, but not necessarily in the exclusive (G4, G4′). When the opposition is neutralized, with a few exceptions, it is an inclusive, not an exclusive, form that supersedes and takes over the combined firstperson plural reference (G13). Second, an important feature that predetermines the structure of pronominal paradigm is the inherent singularity of the addressee. Because of this feature, pronominal systems do not differentiate between limited inclusive and super-inclusive groups of participants on the one hand (G5) and different sets of hearers (addressees only vs. addressees and non-participants) on the other (G15). These sets are generally covered by a single form, correspondingly. Third, clusivity has a considerable impact on the morphology of the pronominal systems. For instance, paradigms with clusivity opposition tend not to have homophonous singular forms (G6) and in contrast to paradigms without clusivity are less prone to have a shape merger of the first-person plural and second- and/ or third-person plural forms (G7). Also, homophony between clusivity forms and other personal forms appears much more frequently within the bound pronouns than within the free ones. Fourth, there are no corollaries for clusivity features between free vs. bound forms (Siewierska & Bakker, this volume). However, there is a rule regulating the presence of the inclusive–exclusive distinction in imperatives: clusivity cannot be absent in imperatives but present elsewhere, e.g. in independent personal pronouns or indicative verbal markers (G10). Further, clusivity has variously been claimed to have or to lack typological significance, failing to correlate or correlating with other features. Concerning the latter it has been observed that clusivity is very likely to be absent if a dual is found within the nouns only. If, however, only pronouns have a dual, then they are very likely to have a clusivity distinction, as well (G16). The clusivity contrast also seems to correlate with {Addressee > Speaker} and {Addressee = Speaker} reference hierarchies (G17 and Daniel (this volume)). Finally, clusivity allegedly tends not to intersect with a gender contrast in first and second person. The empirical validity of this dependency and its functional motivations remain to be investigated.
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Notes 1. I am grateful to Michael Cysouw and especially to Misha Daniel for their comments on the earlier versions of the chapter. Naturally, remaining errors are my own. 2. The term is borrowed from the lexicon developed by Frans Plank for “Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett” available under http://ling.uni-konstanz.de:591/universals/introrara. html. 3. From here on I will use the following abbreviations: S for Speaker, A for Addressee, N for Non-locutor, or Non-participant of the speech act. 4. An interesting situation is found in Urubu-Kaapor (Tupí). In this language, there are no special pronominal forms distinguishing exclusive and inclusive. The exclusive form, and therefore the distinction, has been lost. However, there is a periphrastic way of expressing the idea of exclusive, namely, when the numeral follows a first-person plural pronoun it gives an exclusive meaning to that pronoun (Kakumasu 1986: 374, 380). Urubu-Kaapor has then an explicit way — though not a special form — to express the exclusive, not the inclusive. 5. A considerable part of the generalizations cited in this chapter were suggested by Natalia K. Sokolovskaya (1980) in a study on semantics of personal pronouns — a paper well acknowledged in Russian-reading circles but unfortunately almost unknown to western academics. In this contribution done on the basis of systems of independent personal pronouns in 400 languages distributed world wide, Sokolovskaya formulated 50 semantic universals that should hold true in pronominal systems of different languages. To describe pronominal systems in terms relevant for all languages Sokolovskaya elaborated a special meta-language, the System for the Description of Semantics [Russian: Sistema opisanija semantiki (SOS)]. Quoting her generalizations, however, I transferred them into ordinary language. The only thing the reader should keep in mind is that she differentiates between seven basic meanings (meta-persons in her terms) that can be encoded in the pronominal systems: ‘speaker’, ‘addressee’, ‘non-participant’, ‘speaker + addressee(s)’, ‘speaker + non-participant(s)’, ‘addressee(s) + non-participant(s)’, and ‘speaker + addressee(s) + non-participant(s)’. 6. In square brackets, I give the running number of the entry from The Universals Archive, hence UA. 7. Guató (Macro-Ge) (Pimentel Palácio 1986) is possibly another language that has clusivity distinction in Dual but not in Plural (credited to Wolfgang Schellinger). 8. Tübatulabal (Uto-Aztecan) could be a further candidate to violate this generalization. At least according to the grammatical description of Voegelin (1935), it has a dual with firstperson exclusive, but not with first-person inclusive. The accompanying collection of texts, however, tells a different story (caveat credited to Michael Cysouw). 9. This amendment is not applicable to the languages having only a plural inclusive, without a dual inclusive. 10. Interestingly, Sokolovskaya registers Kele (NW Bantu, Niger-Congo) as a counterexample to this statement. Kele has three different ‘we’ forms: dedicated inclusive and exclusive forms and a neutral form that can refer to either set of referents including the speaker, i.e. an inclusive–exclusive opposition is optional there. On the one hand, this neutral form referring to super-inclusive set of participants can also denote limited inclusive — which is exactly what is suggested by G5′. Why then does she treat Kele as a violation? Unfortunately, we are unable to reconstruct her logic here with any surety. Probably, Sokolovskaya
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420 Elena Filimonova was thinking of the fact that in a dedicated inclusive context, a special inclusive form will be used, not a neutral one. And this would split both the meanings, S+A(s) and S+A(s)+N(s), between two separate forms. I am aware of the fact that not everybody would agree with this motivation. In any case, Kele’s pattern is not unique. A similar tripartite opposition is also registered in Lele (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic) (U. Wiesemann, p.c), Dan (Mande) (mentioned in Cysouw 2003), Koh (Adamawa) (mentioned in Siewierska & Bakker, this volume), Miriwoong (Miriwungic, Djeragan) (McGregor 2004), and possibly some other languages. 11. The sources are equivocal in this respect. Bernsten & Nimbkar (1975) for example register the honorific use of a:pan as referring to the second person only. 12. Recall that the possible change of the inclusive–exclusive pattern in different paradigms within a single language is also stressed in Siewierska & Bakker’s chapter. 13. There are other analyses of Gooniyandi-type system, e.g. McGregor (1989), Rumsey (1996), Roberts (1996). In this volume, this particular analysis is critisized by Cysouw (Cysouw on syncretisms). 14. In the interim I have found another candidate to distinguish between two different addressee groups. Though it might well be another case that will be discounted after a closer look, I have decided to mention it here to complete our knowledge up to date. For the BorčKhinov dialect (spoken in the settlements Borč, Khinov, and Šin) of Rutul (Lezgic, NorthEast Caucasian), Ibragimov (1978: 258–9) documents two forms in 2Pl labeling them as inclusive and exclusive: vuqInär < vɨ-qIun-är ‘2Pl-Kinship.Pl-Pl’ (inclusive) and vɨI (exclusive). These forms correspond to the 1Pl forms: yän-ur < yi‑ur ‘1Sg-Pl’ (inclusive) and yuqInär < yi-qIun-är (exclusive). Ibragimov emphasizes that Borč-Khinov is the only dialect preserving the archaic pronominal system. The other dialects have some morphological traces of the former clusivity distinction, but none of them has preserved the semantic contrast. Unfortunately Ibragimov gives no examples differentiating the two forms and the subsequent descriptions of Rutul (e.g Alexeev 1994; Makhmudova 2001) bring no further insights to the problem. I would therefore explicitly warn the reader to quote Borč-Khinov as a counterexample, since no additional information has so far been gained about these data, either corroborating or dismissing them. At this point it would be worth mentioning that for some colleagues (e.g. Gulyga 1979) Ibragimov’s data on Borč-Khinov pronouns appeared to be a piece of synchronic evidence in reconstructing two forms — ‘second person limited’ and ‘second person neutral’ — for Proto-Daghestanian pronominal system as a whole. This opinion is, however, not shared by Nikolaev & Starostin (1994). 15. Plank, however, tends to count languages with minimal/augmented system as having dual, as Michael Cysouw pointed out to me. Some scholars have misgivings in agreeing to this approach. So if one excludes the minimal/augmented cases from Plank’s sample, the percentage of languages where this implication is valid is reduced leaving fewer chances to be considered a good statistical correlation. 16. Actually, Lynch refers to Touo as Baniata. However, as Michael Dunn pointed out to me, Touo is a more appropriate name for this language. Touo is the native ethnonym, whereas Baniata is just the name of the first village where the first anthropologist worked. 17. According to Michael Dunn (p.c.), the so-called ‘trial’ does not really mean “three”. The current hypothesis is that it refers to a known, bounded number of entities, whereas the so-
Clusivity cross-linguistically called ‘plural’ refers to unknown, unbounded number. The ‘trial’ is thus obligatory with any numeral. Hopefully, the ongoing field research will clarify the situation. 18. Thai (Daic, Austroasiatic) could be another candidate for distinguishing between inclusive and exclusive sets of participants and having masculine and feminine pronominal forms to refer to the speaker. In Thai, however, many of the lexical items functioning as personal pronouns are of nominal origin and cannot therefore be considered real pronouns.
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424 Elena Filimonova Voorhove, C. L. 1975. Central and Western Trans-New Guinea phylum languages. In S. A. Wurm (ed.), New Guinea area languages and language study. Volume 1: Papuan languages and the New Guinea linguistic scene, 345–460. Canberra: Australian National University. Vydrin, V. 2005. Ličnye mestoimenija v južnyx jazykax mande (Personal pronouns in southern Mande languages). In Acta linguistica petropolitana. Trudy Instituta lingvističeskix issledovanij. Tom II, Jazyki mande. Mandeica Petropolitana, 322–403. St. Peterburg: Nauka. Watkins, C. 1969. Indogermanische Grammatik. Teil 1: Geschichte der Indogermanischen Verbalflexion. Heidelberg: Winter. Wills, D. D. 1977. Participant deixis in English and baby talk. In C. E. Snow & C. A. Ferguson (eds), Talking to children: Language input and acquisition, 271–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wundt, W. 1904. Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte. Erster Band: Die Sprache. Zweiter Teil. 2nd edition. Leipzig: Engelmann. Xrakovskij, V. S. & Volodin, A. P. 1986. Semantika i tipologija imperativa. Russkij imperativ (Semantics and typology of imperative. Russian imperative). Leningrad: Nauka. Xrakovskij, V. S. (ed.). 1992. Tipologija imperativnyx konstrukcij (Typology of imperative constructions). St. Peterburg: Nauka.
Author index Abbi, A. 68 Adelaar, W. F. H. 313, 314 Aikhenvald, A. Y. 319, 359, 360, 370, 374, 375, 377 Andersen, S. R. 170 Anderson, G. 65 Austerlitz, R. 56 Baker-Shenk, C. & Cokely, D. 236–7, 238, 241, 246, 249, 254 Barulin, A. 11, 38 Baskakov, N. A. 343, 344, 345, 346, 349, 350 Beffa, M.-L. & Hamayon, R. 130 Benveniste, E. 8, 232, 432 Bhat, D. N. S. 130, 415 Bickel, B. & Nichols, J. 49, 55, 56, 175, 415 Bloomfield, L. 24, 143 Blust, R. A. 61, 262, 274 Boas, F. 381, 384, 404 Borgman, D. N. 126 Bradley, D. 294, 295, 296, 307 Bresnan, J. 158 Bresnan, J. & Mchombo, S. A. 151 Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. 135, 214, 224, 226ff, 263, 265, 275 Bubenik, V. 143 Burling, R. 300 Bybee, J., Perkins, R. & Pagliuca, W. 179 Chafe, W. L. 99 Chang Hongen 294, 295 Charpentier, J.-M. 124, 143 Chen Kang & Wu Da 294 Chen Shilin, Bian Shiming & Li Xiuqing 294 Chirikba, V. A. 122, 124 Chung, S. & Timberlake, A. 179 Clark, L. 345 Comrie, B. 115, 116, 117, 118 Comrie, B. & Smith, N. 113 Corbett, G. G. 8, 10, 40, 141, 170, 175, 404 Crevels, M. & Muysken, P. 368, 401 Croft, W. 233 Crowley, T. 119, 120, 121, 141, 142, 143 Crowley, T. & Dixon, R. M. W. 68 Cysouw, M. 10, 11, 22, 27, 34, 41, 50, 52, 69, 115, 129, 144, 146, 152, 155, 157, 159, 175, 189, 194, 208, 214, 250, 255, 271, 274, 275, 277, 286, 315, 361, 362, 363, 370, 373, 406–7, 410–11, 420
Dai Qingxia 292, 293 Daniel, M. 11, 18, 38, 39, 83, 144, 275, 286, 350, 407, 417 Daniel, M. & Moravcsik, E. 10, 11, 38 Das Gupta, K. 299 DeLancey, S. 297 Diffloth, G. 65 Dirr, A. 122 Dumézil, G. 123 Duranti, A. 266 Ebert, K. 302 Elšík, V. xii, 141 Filimonova, E. 32, 33, 44, 45, 233, 416 Filimonova, E. & Plank, F. 233, 235 Forchheimer, P. 5, 69, 233, 234, 236, 250 Genetti, C. E. 304 Georgian Academy of Science 123 Gill, W. 362, 366 Giridhar, P. P. 130, 298 Givón, T. 151, 170 Glover, W. W. 298 Gong Hwang-cherng 292 Greenberg, J. H. 14, 15, 76, 94, 114, 115, 135, 155, 233, 248, 275, 277, 306, 368, 370, 405 Grierson, Sir G. A. 301 Grönbech, K. 343, 348 Güldemann, T. 85, 164 Gumperz, J. & Wilson, R. 359 Gurubasave Gowda, K. S. 298 Haas, M. R. ix, 313 Hagège, C. 124, 143 Hakulinen, L. 205 Hanks, W. F. 262 Hansson, I.-L. 294 Hardmann-de-Bautista, M. ix, 313, 376 Harley H. & Ritter, E. 114, 117, 118, 125–6, 128, 141, 143, 146, 415 Harris, A. C. 64, 69 He Jiren & Jiang Zhuyi 306 Head, B. F. 213, 223, 225, 410 Heath, J. 359, 370, 372, 373, 377, 394 Henderson, E. J. A. 114 Henderson, T. S. T. 298 Hewitt, B. G. 116, 122, 124, 142, 143 Hewson, J. 73, 81, 144
426 Author index Hoard, J. E. 383, 392 Hodgson, B. H. 302 Hollenbach, B. E. 17, 33 Hutton, J. H. 300 Hymes, D. 313 Ingram, D. 115, 117, 233 Isxakov, F. G. & Pal’mbax, A. A. 343, 349 Ivanov, V. Vs. ix Jacobsen, W. H., Jr. 56, 65, 77, 164, 235, 384, 385, 391, 394, 402, 412 Jakobson, R. O. 56, 135, 139 Jensen, C. 89, 367, 374, 377 Jespersen, O. 8, 39 Jeyapaul, V. Y. 298 Jin Peng 297 Johanson, L. 349 Jordan, Father M. M. E. P. 298, 299 Jørgensen, H. 304 Kibrik, A. E. 32, 209 Klimov, G. A. 122, 416 Kornfilt, J. 348, 349 Koshal, S. 297 Krishan, S. 301 LaPolla, R. J. 254, 299, 306, 402 Lehmann, Ch. 151, 169, 170, 172 Li Yongsui 296 Li Yongsui & Wang Ersong 295 Lichtenberk, F. 401, 410, 412 Lomtatidze, K. 122, 123 Lyons, J. 115, 141, 239, 251 Ma Xueliang 294 Malchukov, A. 182 Mannheim, M. 313 Matisoff, J. A. 295 McGregor, W. B. 14, 100, 114, 146, 405–6, 413 McKay, G. 52, 69, 159 Meier, R. P. 237, 238, 249, 250, 251, 254 Merkle, L. 145 Michailovsky, B. 302 Mithun, M. 23, 384 Mixajlova, N. I. 345 Moravcsik, E. 11, 18, 38, 170 Mostaert, A. 130 Mu Yuzhang & Duan Liang 295 Mühlhäusler, P. & Harré, R. 276, 285 Nagano Yasuhiko 292 Newman, S. 392 Nichols, J. ix, 55–6, 62, 64, 65–6, 77, 122, 164, 175, 233, 411, 412, 416 Nichols, J. & Bickel, B. 56 Noonan, M. 297, 298
Noyer, R. 73, 81, 114, 117 Palmer, F. R. 179, 181 Parker, G. J. 118, 120, 141, 142 Paton, W. F. 119 Pawley, A. K. & Ross, M. D. 61 Pentland, D. 389 Peterson D. A. 299, 307 Plank, F. ix, 4, 17, 20, 21, 33, 34, 36, 45, 74, 81, 115–16, 117, 118, 126, 143, 342, 416, 419 Plank, F. & Schellinger, W. 76 Podlesskaya, V. 184 Pulu, J. 300 Rangan, K. 297 Ray, S. H. 119 Rodrigues, A. 89, 100, 374 Ross, M. D. 61, 281, 411, 412 Sakel, J. 164, 366, 376, 377 Saxena, A. 301 Scheuringer, H. 145 Schmidt, P. W. ix, 416 Schönig, C. 348 Sharma, D. D. 301 Sharma, S. R. 301 Siewierska, A. 151, 152, 417 Siewierska, A. & Bakker, D. 361, 362, 374, 401, 408, 417 Silverstein, M. 117, 384 Simon, H. J. 39, 140, 145, 146, 405, 414 Sokolovskaya, N. K. 114, 233, 401, 403, 404, 406–7, 414, 419 Soulié, M. G. 130 Spriggs, M. J. T. 61 Steever, S. B. 64, 65 Stern, T. 298 Suarez, J. A. 376 Sukala, H. & Karjalainen, M. 205 Sun, J. T.-S. 294, 297, 300 Sun Hongkai 292, 296, 304 Sun Hongkai, Huang Chenglong & Zhou Maocao 296 Swadesh, M. 376, 394 Takahashi, Y. 307 Testelec, Y. 405 Thomason, S. & Kaufman, T. 360 Tian Desheng & He Tianzhen 296, 306 Toba, S. 302 Torero, A. 314 Tryon, D. T. 119, 120, 142, 143 Tybykova, A. T. 350 Ubrjatova, E. I. 343, 345, 349, 353 van Driem, G. 302
Author index van der Auwera, J. & Ammann, A. 179 van der Voort, H. 328 von Eckert, R. 122
Wiesemann, U. 128 Wilbur, R. B. & Patschke, C. 244, 255 Wundt, W. 416
Walsh, D. S. & Biggs, B. 270 Wang Feng 296 Wasow, T. 117 Watkins, C. 416 Wheatley, J. 293 Wiersma, G. 296
Xrakovskij, V. S. 180, 209, 409 Xrakovskij, V. S. & Volodin, A. P. 409 Xu Xijian & Zhao Yansum 296 Zimmerschied, S. 132 Zwicky, A. M. 17, 20, 21, 33, 42–4, 73, 81, 114, 253
427
Language index Terms for groups and families of languages are given in italic. Abaza 122, 123, 143 Abkhaz 115–16, 121–4, 137, 142, 143 Acehnese 82, 273, 278 Achang 294 Acoma 157 Adamawa 155, 164 Adzera 165 Afrikaans 142 Aghul 188, 191, 192–3 Ainu 216 Akawaio 90 Akha 61, 294, 295, 306 Aleut 22 Algic 370, 387, 388 Algonquian 22–4, 28, 42, 43–4, 73, 78, 81, 85, 87, 91, 125, 136, 143, 234, 384, 386–9, 391, 416 Ali 281 Altay 196, 342–3, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351–3 Amanab 80 Ambong, Malayu 280–1, 284 Ambrym, South-East 115, 118–21, 136, 141 Amercian Sign Language 231–56, 413 Anal 298 Andamanese, Great 68 Angami 298 Anong 304 Ao 298 Apalai 102 Arabela 329 Arawakan 79, 319–22, 326–7, 330, 331, 360, 367, 370, 374, 375 Arekuna 90 Ashéninca 79, 320, 321, 327 Assiniboine 94 Atchin 88 Athabaskan 32, 85, 384, 407 Athpare 89, 303 Atlantic 82 Auca 227, 411, see also Waorani Australian Sign Language 250 Austro-Asiatic 64, 65, 67, 221 Austronesian 61, 67, 80, 82, 85, 156, 165, 166, 214– 16, 218–19, 222–3, 232, 234, 261–87, 412 Awa Pit 194, 199–200, 203, 316 Aymara 7, 32–3, 45, 79, 313, 319, 367, 368–9, 401 Aymaran 79, 316, 319, 323, 330, 331, 369, 401, 416
Bagirmi 205, 206 Bagvalal 204 Bahing 302, 303 Bai 296–7 Baima 297 Bajau 215 Bajo 272 Bakairí 90 Balkar 183, 190, 191, 204 Balti 61, 234, 297 Bamana 183 Bamileke 129 Banggai 215–16, 282 Bantawa 303 Bantoid 197 Barasano 20 Bardi 95, 102 Bare 360, 374 Batak Karo 268, 272–3 Batak Toba 216, 218, 268, 273 Bavarian 39, 116, 117, 132–5, 137, 139, 140, 145, 146, 414 Belhare 51, 61, 292, 303, 304 Bella Coola 394 Bimanese 216, 274 Binandere 77, 91 Bislama 266 Bisu 294 Blackfoot 81, 384, 386 Bodish 291, 297 Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw 299 Bola 294 Bora 324, 328 Boran 323–4, 330, 331 Border 67, 80 British Sign Language 250 Buang, Central 86 Buduma 91 Bugis 215–16, 220 Buma 86, 88 Bunan 301 Bunuba 93, 156 Burarra 87, 95 Buriat 204 Burmese 294 Byangsi 301 Caddoan 67, 78 Cahuapanan 318, 324, 330, 331 Camling 89, 303
Language index 429 Campa 79, 319, 320, 360 Campa 360, 370, 375 Campa Caquinte 320 Canela-Kraho 80 Cantonese 11 Caodeng rGyalrong 292 Caquinte 79 Carib 6, 67, 90, 102, 170, 370, 371, 391 Cariyona 90 Caucasian, North 413 Caucasian, North-East 50, 64, 69–70, 188, 204, 205, 420 Caucasian, North-West 200 Cayubaba 317, 326, 329, 330, 331 Chayahuita 318 Chadic 91, 93, 164, 188, 417 Chalkan (Kuu) 344, 347, 355, 356 Chang 300 Chantyal 297 Chapacuran 330, 331 Chaudangsi 301 Chechen 50 Chepang 162, 168, 302, 361 Chibchan 96 Chilcotin 384–5 Chimakuan 384 Chimane 360, 362, 366, 367 Chin 175, 292 Chin, Cho 298, 302 Chin, Sizang 298 Chinantec, Lealao 5 Chinese, Mandarin 8–9, 223, 234, 236, 238 Chinook 384 Chipaya 79 Chiquitano 326, 330, 331 Chiru 298 Chitkuli 234 Chocho 79 Chol 42 Chrau 80 Chulym 343, 347, 348 Chuvash 189, 191, 197–8, 209 Circassian 122, 201 Comox 394 Coos 102, 167, 254, 403 Cree 78, 81, 386–7, 389, 394 Cree, Plains 5, 23 Dagbani 153 Dan 93, 420 Danish Sign Language 250, 254 Daofu 292 Darma 301 Daur 162 Dawanese 85 Dekwana 90 Diola-Fogny 82, 91, 101
Dogon 192, 200, 202, 203 Dolgan 342–3 Dravidian 64–5, 188, 217, 221–3, 234, 254 Dulong 304, 307 Dulong-Rawang 303, 304, 306 Dumi 7, 89, 302 Duri 216, 218 Dutch 121, 142, 143, 171, 383, 393 English 18, 23, 28, 73, 75, 92, 115, 121, 140, 153, 179, 180, 189, 195, 201, 222, 226, 232, 234, 239, 271, 361, 383, 393 Ersu 292 Eskimo-Aleut 85, 185, 203, 234 Even 41, 181–2, 191 Éwé 199, 234 Fijian 203, 268 Finnish 205 Finno-Ugric 187, 204, 205 Fox 23 French and its varieties 69, 121, 187, 222, 249, 277, 383, 390, 393 Fula 127, 128, 136 Galela 220 Garawa 50 Garo 6, 234, 300 Gazhuo 294 Gé, Macro-Gé 67, 80, 96 German and its varieties 121, 135, 142, 145, 146, 179, 383, 393 German Sign Language 250 Ghomala’ 116, 128–9, 131, 136, 139, 146 Goilalan 77, 91, 94 Gong 294 Gooniyandi 7, 93, 250, 405, 413 Guaraní 168 Guaraní, Bolivian 368–9 Guaraní-Chiriguano 325 Guató 96, 419 Guayabero 314 Gugu-Yalanji 102 Guhu-Samane 102 Guiqiong 61, 292 Gumawana 170 Gunwingguan 371 Gur 153 Gurung 298 Haitian 407 Hani 295 Hatam 89, 91, 96, 163 Hawaiian 216 Hayu 302 Hdi 188 Hebrew 193, 197–8
430 Language index Heiltsuk 394 Himalayan, Eastern 302, 306 Himalayan, Western 301, 306 Hixkaryana 90 Ho 223 Hocak, see Winnebago Huave 79, 89 Hungarian 187, 191, 209 Hunzib 205 Hyow 298, 307 Icelandic Sign Language 250 Idu 301 Idu-Taraon 291, 300 Imonda 7, 80 Inanwatan 82, 87 Indo-Aryan 411 Indo-European ix, 56, 67, 234, 407, 416 Indonesian 203, 267 Ioway-Oto 94 Iquito 329 Iroquoian 85, 234, 385–6, 391, 393 Israeli Sign Language 250 Italian and its dialects 121, 392 Itonama 82, 87, 327, 330, 331, 407, 417 Japanese 187, 191, 204, 234, 409 Japanese Sign Language 250 Jaqaru 79, 316–17, 322 Jarawa 68 Javanese 268, 406 Javanese, Old 216, 274, 406 Jebero 318 Jiarong 102 Jinghpaw 291 Jinuo 296 Johari 301 Kabardian 200–1, 203 Kabui 298 Kachari 299 Kalaw Kawaw Ya 417 Kalispel-Spokane 91, 385, 390 Kaman 291, 300 Kannada 188, 191 Kannada, Kupwar 359 Kanoê 316, 330, 331 Kanuri 197 Kapau 156 Kapón 90 Karakalpak 349 Karbi 298, 302 Karen 291 Kariña 90 Karo 317, 326 Kartvelian 64, 69–70, 80 Kashuyana 90
Kayabí 367 Kazakh 349 Kelabit 287 Kele 234, 250, 255, 419 Kéo 267 Kera 417 Khakas 182–3, 184–5, 191, 194, 196, 203, 342–3, 345–6, 347, 348, 355 Khaling 302 Khalkha 130, 144 Kham 302 Kharia 223 Khoe 84, 101 Khoekhoe, see Nama Khoekhoe 164 Khoirao 298 Khoisan 5, 6, 25–7, 84–5, 125, 164, 417 Kinnauri 301, 307 Kiowa 42, 82, 91, 168, 234 Kipeá Kiriri 51 Kiranti 7, 82, 89, 175, 217, 254, 302, 402 Kiranti/Rai 302–3 Kirghiz 349 Kiribatese 281 Kisar 85 Klamath 409 Kobon 202 Koh 155, 164, 420 Koiali, Mountain 165 Kokama 325 Kokborok 299 Kola 86 Konjo 30, 215 Korafe 77, 91, 102 Korean 236 Koromfe 22 Kudukh 254 Kuikúro 90 Kulung 7, 82, 90 Kumandy 342, 344, 356 Kunimaipa 94, 96, 250, 256 Kutenai (Ktunaxa) 385, 390, 393 Kwa 199 Kwakiutl (Kwakwala) 384, 385, 391, 394 Kwamera 80, 88 Kwaza 168, 326, 328, 330, 331 Ladakhi 297 Lahu 6, 294, 295 Lai 298 Lak 413 Lak(h)ota 94, 234, 386 Lamalera 85 Langsu 294 Lavukavele 82 Leko 330, 331, 369 Lele 164, 419
Language index Lenakel 80, 88 Lepcha 298 Leqi 294 Lezgian 8–9, 409 Lezgic 188, 413 Lhota 403 Lillooet 383, 392, 393, 394 Limbu 6, 7, 188, 217, 303 Lipo 295 Lisu 295 Lohorung 303 Lolo-Burmese 294, 307 Lonwolwol 141 Looma, Northern 93 Lotha 298 Luo 199, 203 Luvale 197 Lyusu 292 Maba 183 Machiguenga 320 Macushi 6, 7, 170 Mae 219 Magar 302 Maká 80 Makah 200, 203 Makassarese 215 Makushi 90 Malagasy 216, 222 Malay 222, 234 Malay, Sulawesi 216 Malayalam 221 Mandan 78 Mande 93, 183 Mande, South 412 Mangarayi 159 Manhad 301 Mapuche 314 Maranao 52 Maranungku 164, 166 Marathi 359, 407, 411 Margi 59 Marind 11 Mataco-Guaicuruan 80 Maya, Yucatec 314 Mayan 42, 219 Maybrat 41–2, 83–4 Mbay 157 Meitei 298 Mekens 325 Mekeo 86 Melanesian 158 Menba 306 Menomini 78, 81 Micronesian 86, 280, 281 Mikir 306 Minangkabau 222, 265, 284
Mindari 22 Miraña 324, 328 Miriwoong 420 Mixe-Zoque 67, 79, 234, 250, 371 Mixtec, Chalcatongo 154 Mixtecan 78–9 Mizo (Lushai) 298 Mizo-Kuki-Chin 298 Mojo 369 Mokilese Mongolian 130–1, 409 Mongolian, Ordos 116, 130, 137, 234 Mongolic 64, 67, 162, 342, 347, 355 Mon-Khmer 65, 80 Monpa 297 Moré 329 Mosetén 327–8, 360, 362, 363–6, 367, 370, 371–2, 373–4 Mosetenan 328, 330, 331, 359–8, 412 Movima 327, 330, 331 Mru 298 Muna 83, 89, 215, 273, 276 Munda 221, 223 Mundani 129 Muya 292 Na-Dene 234 Naga, Mao 130, 131–2, 137, 144 Naga, Tangkhul 298, 307 Nahuatl 314 Nakh 64, 413 Nakh-Daghestanian, see Caucasian, North-East Nakoda 386 Nalik 88 Nama 5, 6, 25–7, 84–5, 101, 125, 164 Namizi 292 Nanai 186 Nar-Phu 298 Navaho 32, 407 Naxi 296, 306 Ndjébanna 87, 95, 417 Negidal 188–9 Nehan 86, 87, 407 New Zealand Sign Language 250 Newar 302, 304 Nganasan 189–90, 191 Ngandi 371–2 Ngankikurrungkurr 403 Ngiti 80 Niger-Congo 164, 183, 197, 199, 234, 250 Nilo-Saharan 50, 80, 93, 154, 157, 183, 199, 205, 206 Nilotic 199 Nimboran 80, 406 Niuafo’ou 219 Niue(an) 41, 270 Nivkh 409
431
432
Language index Nocte 299 Nogugu 234 Nomad 403 Nomatsiguenga 79, 320 Nukuoro 219 Nunggubuyu 417 Nusu 294, 295 Nyulnyul 80, 95–6, 167 Nyulnyulan 80, 95, 167 Oceanic 86, 88, 159, 160, 170, 203, 403, 407, 411 Ojibwa 5, 32, 116, 126, 136 Ojibwa, Eastern 22, 78, 415 Ojibwe, Southwestern 78, 125 Okanagan 91, 385, 390 Onge 68 Orejón 324 Orokaiva 77, 91 Oto-Manguean 5, 24–5, 79, 153, 234 Otomi 5, 6, 24–5, 27, 29, 234 Paama 119, 141 Palu 216, 218 Panare 90 Papuan 82, 156, 159, 165, 254 Papuan, East 78, 82, 403, 417 Papuan, West 67, 83, 89, 91, 163, 220 Passamaquoddy 5, 23 Passamaquoddy-Maliseet 78, 81 Pattani 301 Pawnee 78 Peba-Yaguan 160, 324, 330, 331, 404 Pech 96 Pemón 90 Phunoi 294 Pirahã 153, 315 Pitjantjatjara 5, 6 Polish Sign Language 250, 254 Polynesian 266, 268, 270–1, 274, 286 Ponapean 160 Popolocan 79 Port-Sandwich 116, 124–5, 131, 137 Potawatomi 23, 42, 143 Prinmi 292 Printintín 367 Pukapukan 270–1 Puragi 101 Purik 234 Qiangic 292, 306 Quechua 367, 369 Quechua, Ayacucho 323 Quechua, Cuzco 217 Quechua, Huallaga 79 Quechua, Huánuco 323 Quechua, Tarma 79, 322–3 Quechua, Pacaraos 322
Quechuan 79, 83, 313–14, 322–3, 327, 329, 330, 331 Queye 292, 306 Quiang 292 Raji 301 Rangkhol 298 Rawang 304, 307 Rembarrnga 52 Rengma 298 Resígaro 322, 327 rGyalrong 293, 306 Ritwan 387–8 Rongpo 301 Roti 85 Rotuman 234, 279 Rouruo 294, 296 Russian 8–9, 28, 183–4, 188, 193–4, 195, 198, 201, 209 Rutul 420 Sa’dan 215 Saharan 197 Salamãi 328 Salish 85, 90, 381–94 Salish, Coast 384 Salish, Interior 388, 390 Saluan, Coastal 216, 274 Samo 102 Samoan 219, 266, 268 Samoyedic 189 Sangkong 296 Santali 221 Sanuma 29, 81, 87, 126–7, 128, 407 Sar 93 Savo 403 Savosavo 82 Sawu 218, 267 Sema 298 Sentinel Island, language of 68 Serak 281 Shixing 292 Shor 196, 203, 342–3, 345, 347–8, 355 Shuswap 90, 102, 381–94, 412 Sierra Miwok, Southern 371 Sierra Popoluca 52, 79, 234, 250 Sika 85 Siouan 78, 88, 95, 234, 386, 391, 393, 416 Sirionó 325 Sissano 281 Sixing 61 Sko 417 Slave 32 So 50, 154 Sobei 86 Sopvomā 144 Spanish 121, 186–7, 191 Stoney 386
Language index Sudanic, Central 205, 206 Sunwar 302 Surinam 371 Svan 64, 69, 80, 412 Taba 282, 284 Tagalog 232, 234, 277 Taiwan Sign Language 254 Takana 367, 369 Tamambo 279 Tamang 298 Tamil 217, 220, 222, 223–4, 234 Tangkic 67 Tangsa 299 Tangut 292 Tani 291 Tanimbili 159, 403 Tanna 80, 88 Tanoan 42, 82, 168, 234 Tariana 360, 374 Tasmanian 68 Telugu 234 Terêna 360, 370, 375 Tetun 216 Tetun, Fehan 265, 272, 278 Thado 298 Thai 421 Thulung 302, 303 Tibetan 297 Tibeto-Burman 6–7, 61, 64, 65, 82, 89, 90, 162, 175, 189, 217, 234, 254, 291–307, 402, 412 Tiddim 292, 298 Tikopian 271 Timor 85, 87, 265 Tinani 301 Tiriyó (Trio) 90, 102 Tiwa, Southern 82, 91 Tiwi 68, 80, 82, 87, 95, 163 Tofan 342–3, 348 Tokelau 270 Tok-Pisin 6, 83, 89, 236, 238 Tongan 219, 269, 279 Toqabaqita 262, 264, 265, 274, 275 Touo 417 Trans-New Guinea 202, 234, 250, 403, 406 Trukese 86 Trumai 165 Tshangla 306 Tuaripi 102 Tuba 342–3, 356 Tübatulabal 235, 402, 419 Tucanoan 324, 330, 331 Tujia 297 Tukang Besi 216, 282–3 Tumak 93 Tumleo 281 Tungusic 64, 86, 181, 188, 342, 347, 355
Tupían 89, 324–6, 330, 331, 407, 419 Tupí-Guaraní 367, 369 Tupínambá 89, 374, 407 Turkic 182, 184–5, 190, 194, 196, 341–57, 414 Turkic, Siberian 346–7 Turkic, West 346 Turkish 346, 348–9, 350–1, 354–5 Turkmen 196, 203, 342–3, 345, 348, 349 Tuvalu(an) 219, 266, 270, 274, 275 Tuvan 196, 202, 203, 342–3, 347, 348, 349 Txikão 90 Tzeltal 219–20, 402 Ubykh 122, 413 Udihe 86 Udmurt 204 Ulau-Suain 281 Ulithian 86 Uma 156 Ura 88 Urdu, Kupwar 359 Uru 79 Urubu-Kaapor 419 Uru-Chipayan 322, 326, 329, 330, 331 Chipaya 322 Uru 322 Uto-Aztecan 234, 235, 402, 412, 419 !Ui-Taa 85, 164 Vanimo 417 Veddas, language of the 68 Vietnamese 222, 223 Wai Wai 90 Waimiri-Atroari 90 Wakashan 200, 384, 393, 394 Waorani 326, see also Auca Warembori 203 Wari’ 315 Warrwa 80, 95 Washo 402 Wayampi 374 Wayana 90 Weri 15, 41, 94 West Greenlandic 185–6, 191, 234 Whitesands 80, 88 Wichita 78 Wik-Munkan 403, 416 Winnebago 52, 78, 101, 234 Wiradyuri 402 Wiyot 387 Woleaian 158 Wolio 215 Yabem 86 Yagua 160, 318, 404 Yakut 196, 203, 342–3, 348, 353–4, 355, 356
433
434 Language index Yanesha’ 320 Yanomam 29, 81, 126, 407 Yaouré 93, 250 Yapese 166 Yava 159 Yi, Nasu 294, 295 Yi, Nuosu 294 Yi, Sani 294, 295 Yi, Xide 294 Yokuts 116, 125, 127, 128, 136, 234, 235
Yuchi 5 Yuki 324–5 Yupik 203 Yurakare 330, 331, 369 Yurok 387 Zaiwa 61, 294 Záparo 326 Zaparoan 326, 330, 331 Zhaba 292 Zoque 371
Subject index 1st person hierarchy see hierarchy, first person 2nd person 22–32, 41–2, 45, 73–5, 81–7, 99, 113–46, 188, 190, 194, 195, 196–202, 414 accusative alignment 367, 375 additive plurals 8, 38 addressee 179, 180–1, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 195 addressees, number of 180, 182, 192, 203, 206, 413 addressee, singularity of the 405, 418 affective 266, 270, 274 affix 152, 158, 169, 171, 172 agreement ambiguous 170, 171, 172 multiple verb 56 pronominal 170, 171, 172 syntactic 170, 171, 172 verb affixes 53 (see also cross-reference markers) ambiguity 76 Americas, settlement of 55, 56, 57 Ancient Sunda area 55–6, 57, 60, 61, 62, 68 areal typology 50, 55–7, 62, 327–9, 331, 367–75, 384–9 Assiniboine-type 94, 175 associative plurals 11, 131, 141, 223 Australia 49, 53, 55–6, 58, 60, 63, 66, 68 authorial (=editorial) we 226, 410 Autotyp database 49, 69 bipartite stems 56 body leans 243, 252, 255 borrowing of material 65, 164, 359–60, 362, 367, 368, 389 (see also diffusion, transfer of pattern) bound pronominal forms 53, 151–75, 179–209, 361, 408, 418 (see also cross-reference markers) Caucasus 53, 56, 58, 62–5 causative 200, 201 causee 195, 409 choric we 9–10, 139, 253 Circum-Pacific area 55–60 clitic 75, 84, 86, 91, 152, 158, 169, 171, 172 comitative 351, 352, 354 coordinative 351, 352 cross-reference markers 360, 361, 362, 363, 364, 366, 367, 368–9, 370–1, 374–5 (see also bound pronominal forms)
deference 271, 273, 275, 281, 410 (see also respect) deliberative questions 182 derived/underived clusivity forms 323, 331, 412 development of the opposition 61, 63–5, 292, 300, 304, 305, 329–05, 346–7, 355, 358–7, 412 development, spontaneous 381–94, 411 dialect 132 dialect mixture 120 diffusion 55, 64, 65, 359–7, 381–94, 411, 412 disambiguation 76 doctor’s we 31, 226, 410 donor language see source language Dual Database 416 dual nominal vs pronominal 416, 418 dual/plural 159–60, 202–3, 292–305, 343, 353, 403, 405 dual-collective pronouns 353 dyad 276, 277 enclave 56–8, 60, 62–5 ergative alignment 62, 367, 375 Eurasian area 49, 56–7, 65 Eurasian steppe zone 57, 62 exclusive as a dedicated form 235, 243, 248–9, 401, 403, 409 exclusive imperative 180, 181–9, 345 exclusive reference 186–91, 351, 353, 355, 413 extended pronouns 121 free personal pronouns 53, 55, 151–75, 348, 361, 362, 367, 368, 408, 418 gender 362, 363, 364–6, 367, 368, 371, 375, 384, 417, 418 genealogical stability 65–8 general inclusive see super-inclusive glaciation 55 grammaticalisation/grammaticalize 139, 140, 151, 163, 166, 169, 174, 299, 329, 332, 355, 361, 362, 374 Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett 116, 130, 419 hierarchy first person 155, 157, 315, 329 locutive 4, 17–22, 32, 34, 42 (see also person and reference hierarchies 30–1, 32 42–3, 350, 405, 414–5, 416) of morphosyntactic persons 34, 42 (see also personal hierarchy 18) number 233, 404
436 Subject index Himalayas 56, 58, 62–5 homophony 74–5, 367–75, 406–7, 418 (see also syncretism) honorific 31, 213–27, 272, 274, 275, 410–11 hybrid inclusives 23, 27 imperative 179–209, 341, 343, 408 impersonal inclusives 277–80, 411 indexic pronouns 235–6, 249 indexicals 262, 264, 266, 274 integration/integrative 264–77, 278, 279, 285 intention 182, 183 lexical plurals 239–41, 242–8 limited inclusive 250, 255, 404, 406 linguistic geography 57–60 loan see diffusion loss of the opposition 165, 169–71, 235, 280–3, 412–13 markedness as a cluster of properties 233–5, 248–9, 254 morphological 51, 254, 301, 302, 305, 402 merger 76 minimal/augmented 14, 51–3, 59, 61, 63, 68, 69, 92–7, 153, 155, 157, 158, 161, 163, 166, 192, 194, 196–203, 277, 285, 343, 344–5, 347, 348, 402, 405, 409, 420 modality differences 231, 250 morphological feature 118 morphological reanalysis 120 morpho-phonological form 169 morphosyntactic features 117, 126 multi-plural pronouns 341, 349, 350, 355 Neolitic 56 neutral alignment 375 New Guinea 56, 58, 61, 62–3, 66 nonmanual signals 239, 242, 252 number 50–2, 62, 69, 402–4 number hierarchy see hierarchy, number number, neutralization of 349 ostensive pronouns 241–2, 243 [±other] 115, 126, 134, 137, 141, 144
Pacific Rim 55–6, 57 parallel path hypothesis 172 ‘ pluralis majestatis’ 222, 410, 411 politeness 31, 121, 132, 135, 137, 140, 145, 213– 27, 263, 264–6, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275, 277, 279, 349, 410 negative 214, 217, 218–19 positive 214, 219–21, 265, 275 population movement 55, 56, 62, 65 possession, obligatory marking of 56 possessive inflection 53, 389 possessive pronouns 361, 362, 369 pragmatics 129 privative 354 referential range 181, 183, 184, 195, 263, 275, 282–3, 284, 286 reflexive 365–6, 370, 371, 372–3, 379 representative plurals 11, 39 request for permission 182, 183 respect 132, 144, 214, 216, 217, 223, 411 (see also deference) role deixis 20, 34, 115, 126, 137, 144 royal (=kingly) we see ‘pluralis majestatis’ signed languages 231, 249–50 solidarity 264, 266, 268, 272, 286 source language 64, 65, 359, 360, 367, 368, 375, 384, 389, 412 spatial displacement of pronouns 242–8 super-inclusive 250, 404, 406 syncretism 73–104 (see also homophony) synthesis, verbal 56, 62 transfer of pattern 65, 359–60, 389–91 (see also diffusion; borrowing of material) two-person system 238–9, 254 type shift 60–1, 329–30 unidirectional development 329, 332 unit-augmented 51, 94 Universal Grammar 117, 139 The Universals Archive 116, 233, 235, 399–408, 410, 414 weak pronoun 152, 158, 169, 171, 172
In the series Typological Studies in Language the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 65 TSUNODA, Tasaku and Taro KAGEYAMA (eds.): Voice and Grammatical Relations. In honor of Masayoshi Shibatani. xviii, 366 pp. + index. Expected March 2006 64 VOELTZ, F. K. Erhard (ed.): Studies in African Linguistic Typology. xiv, 417 pp. + index. Expected February 2006 63 FILIMONOVA, Elena (ed.): Clusivity. Typology and case studies of the inclusive–exclusive distinction. 2005. xii, 436 pp. 62 COUPER-KUHLEN, Elizabeth and Cecilia E. FORD (eds.): Sound Patterns in Interaction. Cross-linguistic studies from conversation. 2004. viii, 406 pp. 61 BHASKARARAO, Peri and Karumuri Venkata SUBBARAO (eds.): Non-nominative Subjects. Volume 2. 2004. xii, 319 pp. 60 BHASKARARAO, Peri and Karumuri Venkata SUBBARAO (eds.): Non-nominative Subjects. Volume 1. 2004. xii, 325 pp. 59 FISCHER, Olga, Muriel NORDE and Harry PERRIDON (eds.): Up and down the Cline – The Nature of Grammaticalization. 2004. viii, 406 pp. 58 HASPELMATH, Martin (ed.): Coordinating Constructions. 2004. xcv, 578 pp. 57 MATTISSEN, Johanna: Dependent-Head Synthesis in Nivkh. A contribution to a typology of polysynthesis. 2003. x, 350 pp. 56 SHAY, Erin and Uwe SEIBERT (eds.): Motion, Direction and Location in Languages. In honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier. 2003. xvi, 305 pp. 55 FRAJZYNGIER, Zygmunt and Erin SHAY: Explaining Language Structure through Systems Interaction. 2003. xviii, 309 pp. 54 AIKHENVALD, Alexandra Y. and R.M.W. DIXON (eds.): Studies in Evidentiality. 2003. xiv, 349 pp. 53 GIVÓN, T. and Bertram F. MALLE (eds.): The Evolution of Language out of Pre-language. 2002. x, 394 pp. 52 GÜLDEMANN, Tom and Manfred von RONCADOR (eds.): Reported Discourse. A meeting ground for different linguistic domains. 2002. xii, 425 pp. 51 NEWMAN, John (ed.): The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying. 2002. xii, 409 pp. 50 FEIGENBAUM, Susanne and Dennis KURZON (eds.): Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context. 2002. vi, 304 pp. 49 WISCHER, Ilse and Gabriele DIEWALD (eds.): New Reflections on Grammaticalization. 2002. xiv, 437 pp. 48 SHIBATANI, Masayoshi (ed.): The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation. 2002. xviii, 551 pp. 47 BARON, Irène, Michael HERSLUND and Finn SØRENSEN (eds.): Dimensions of Possession. 2001. vi, 337 pp. 46 AIKHENVALD, Alexandra Y., R.M.W. DIXON and Masayuki ONISHI (eds.): Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects. 2001. xii, 364 pp. 45 BYBEE, Joan and Paul J. HOPPER (eds.): Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. 2001. vii, 492 pp. 44 VOELTZ, F. K. Erhard and Christa KILIAN-HATZ (eds.): Ideophones. 2001. x, 436 pp. 43 GILDEA, Spike (ed.): Reconstructing Grammar. Comparative Linguistics and Grammaticalization. 2000. xiv, 269 pp. 42 DIESSEL, Holger: Demonstratives. Form, function and grammaticalization. 1999. xii, 205 pp. 41 FRAJZYNGIER, Zygmunt and Traci S. CURL (eds.): Reciprocals. Forms and functions. Volume 2. 2000. xii, 201 pp. 40 FRAJZYNGIER, Zygmunt and Traci S. CURL (eds.): Reflexives. Forms and functions. Volume 1. 2000. xiv, 286 pp. 39 PAYNE, Doris L. and Immanuel BARSHI (eds.): External Possession. 1999. ix, 573 pp. 38 SIEWIERSKA, Anna and Jae Jung SONG (eds.): Case, Typology and Grammar. In honor of Barry J. Blake. 1998. 395 pp. 37 GIACALONE-RAMAT, Anna and Paul J. HOPPER (eds.): The Limits of Grammaticalization. 1998. vi, 307 pp. 36 NEWMAN, John (ed.): The Linguistics of Giving. 1998. xv, 373 pp. 35 GIVÓN, T. (ed.): Grammatical Relations. A functionalist perspective. 1997. viii, 350 pp. 34 GIVÓN, T. (ed.): Conversation. Cognitive, communicative and social perspectives. 1997. viii, 302 pp. 33 FOX, Barbara A. (ed.): Studies in Anaphora. 1996. xii, 518 pp. 32 BYBEE, Joan and Suzanne FLEISCHMAN (eds.): Modality in Grammar and Discourse. 1995. viii, 575 pp. 31 GERNSBACHER, Morton Ann and T. GIVÓN (eds.): Coherence in Spontaneous Text. 1995. x, 267 pp.
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21
DOWNING, Pamela A. and Michael NOONAN (eds.): Word Order in Discourse. 1995. x, 595 pp. KAHREL, Peter and René van den BERG (eds.): Typological Studies in Negation. 1994. x, 385 pp. GIVÓN, T. (ed.): Voice and Inversion. 1994. viii, 402 pp. FOX, Barbara A. and Paul J. HOPPER (eds.): Voice: Form and Function. 1994. xiii, 377 pp. LORD, Carol: Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions. 1993. x, 273 pp. SVOROU, Soteria: The Grammar of Space. 1994. xiv, 290 pp. PERKINS, Revere D.: Deixis, Grammar, and Culture. 1992. x, 245 pp. KEMMER, Suzanne: The Middle Voice. 1993. xii, 300 pp. PAYNE, Doris L. (ed.): Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility. 1992. viii, 320 pp. DOWNING, Pamela A., Susan D. LIMA and Michael NOONAN (eds.): The Linguistics of Literacy. 1992. xx, 334 pp. 20 CROFT, William, Suzanne KEMMER and Keith DENNING (eds.): Studies in Typology and Diachrony. Papers presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on his 75th birthday. 1990. xxxiv, 243 pp. 19:2 TRAUGOTT, Elizabeth Closs and Bernd HEINE (eds.): Approaches to Grammaticalization. Volume 2: Types of grammatical markers. 1991. xii, 558 pp. 19:1 TRAUGOTT, Elizabeth Closs and Bernd HEINE (eds.): Approaches to Grammaticalization. Volume 1: Theoretical and methodological issues. 1991. xii, 360 pp. 18 HAIMAN, John and Sandra A. THOMPSON (eds.): Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. 1988. xiii, 428 pp. 17 HAMMOND, Michael, Edith A. MORAVCSIK and Jessica WIRTH (eds.): Studies in Syntactic Typology. 1988. xiv, 380 pp. 16 SHIBATANI, Masayoshi (ed.): Passive and Voice. 1988. x, 706 pp. 15 AUSTIN, Peter (ed.): Complex Sentence Constructions in Australian Languages. 1988. vii, 289 pp. 14 HINDS, John, Shoichi IWASAKI and Senko K. MAYNARD (eds.): Perspectives on Topicalization. The case of Japanese WA. 1987. xi, 307 pp. 13 Never published. 12 NEDJALKOV, Vladimir P. (ed.): Typology of Resultative Constructions. Translated from the original Russian edition (1983). Translation edited by Bernard Comrie. 1988. xx, 573 pp. 11 TOMLIN, Russell S.: Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Outcome of a Symposium, Eugene, Oregon, June 1984. 1987. viii, 512 pp. 10 RANSOM, Evelyn N.: Complementation: its Meaning and Forms. 1986. xii, 226 pp. 9 BYBEE, Joan: Morphology. A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. 1985. xii, 235 pp. 8 SLOBIN, Dan I. and Karl ZIMMER (eds.): Studies in Turkish Linguistics. 1986. vi, 294 pp. 7 CRAIG, Colette G. (ed.): Noun Classes and Categorization. Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. 1986. vii, 481 pp. 6 HAIMAN, John (ed.): Iconicity in Syntax. Proceedings of a symposium on iconicity in syntax, Stanford, June 24–26, 1983. 1985. vi, 402 pp. 5 RUTHERFORD, William E. (ed.): Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition. 1984. ix, 264 pp. 4 CHISHOLM, William, Louis T. MILIC and John A.C. GREPPIN (eds.): Interrogativity. A colloquium on the grammar, typology and pragmatics of questions in seven diverse languages, Cleveland, Ohio, October 5th 1981May 3rd 1982. 1984. v, 302 pp. 3 GIVÓN, T.: Topic Continuity in Discourse. A quantitative cross-language study. 1983. vi, 492 pp. 2 HAIMAN, John and Pamela MUNRO (eds.): Switch Reference and Universal Grammar. Proceedings of a symposium on switch reference and universal grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981. 1983. xv, 337 pp. 1 HOPPER, Paul J. (ed.): Tense-Aspect. Between semantics & pragmatics. 1982. x, 350 pp.