Typological Hierarchies in Synchrony and Diachrony by Cristofaro Sonia;Zúñiga Fernando; & Fernando Zúñiga

Author:Cristofaro, Sonia;Zúñiga, Fernando; & Fernando Zúñiga [Cristofaro, Sonia & Zúñiga, Fernando]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2018-07-09T16:38:59+00:00

prv = see.3sg.pres

det = man.nom.sg = this

det = woman.acc.sg

‘this man sees the woman’

(23)

in = feri = sa

ad = chíi

in = mnaí

det = man.nom.sg = this

prv = see.3sg.rel

det = woman.acc.sg

‘this man who sees the woman’

The above explanation is predicated on the origin of the 3rd person notae augentes being deictic. The original deictic -sa was eventually replaced by -som ‘the same (one)’, which appears primarily to mark a continuing topic. This replacement does not markedly change the argument for distributional restrictions of 3rd person notae, however. This is because relative pronouns and overt noun phrases would be expected to be incompatible with a word meaning ‘the same’ (or with a continuing topic marker, if the grammaticalization had already taken place). The result of all of this is that there would have been a bias toward non-third person notae in verbs with one local participant and one non-local one, as illustrated in (21). Over time, this statistical bias of local person notae simply became a fixed rule (Griffith 2011: 185–187). One might ask which of the explanations offered above, i.e. the one based on a deictic vs. topic-marking origin of the notae, is primarily responsible for the privileging of local persons over 3rd person. Given that -som, which has clearer topic-marking properties, is a rather late arrival in the notae augentes, an explanation based on the deictic origins is preferable. The deictics have a greater time-depth and thus there is more time for the effects of grammaticalization to have led to an exceptionless hierarchy.

That said, I do not wish to deny that the topic-marking property of the notae can have an affect on distributions. A case in point may be the privileging of animates over inanimates. In Old Irish, it is a synchronic fact that the notae seldom appear with inanimates. For the local persons, this is normal: inanimates very rarely are speakers or addressees. For 3rd persons, however, the tendency is also very strong. To summarize the findings of Griffith (2008: Tables 6, 11 and 15), there are 678 examples of the 3rd person notae augentes in the two largest corpora of Old Irish (Wb. and Ml.), and of these examples, 26 refer to inanimates (approximately 3.8%). It does not appear obvious that deictics should be less prone to mark inanimates than animates. Rather, the preference of the notae for animate reference is related to the fact that they appear to mark continuing topics (Griffith 2013: 67–70), and animates tend to be more topic-worthy. Therefore, it seems likely that the strong preference for animate reference for the 3rd person notae led to them being privileged over inanimates. 17

Before turning to the thorny issue of the ranking of 1st person over 2nd, let us briefly summarize and compare two arguments ranking local persons above non-local. The main argument has been that co-occurrence restrictions on 3rd persons lead to a preponderance of local persons, which tendency is then conventionalized as a rule. A second argument was made more implicitly (see above pages 204-205, Ch. 1 and 4).

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