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Pathways from pronoun to agreement and their destinations
Popular science descriptionIn almost every language of the world -- Swedish being a rare exception -- verbs agree with the subject. People who have studied French will fondly recall memorizing sequences like this: je suis 'I am', tu es 'you are', il/elle est 'he is', nous sommes 'we are', vous êtes 'you (plural) are', ils/elles sont 'they are'. Subject-verb agreement is a fundamental part of grammar.
The form of the verb generally depends on two properties of the subject: person (first, second, or third), and number (singular or plural). Grammatical gender is another property of the subject that can affect the form of the verb. These three categories -- person, number, and gender -- are the categories that are found on pronouns as well. For example, the pronoun I is first person and singular; the pronoun they is third person and plural. The fact that subject-verb agreement and pronouns exhibit the same three properties is not an accident: Linguists generally believe that pronouns go through a process of attachment to the verb, and that the endings that are found on verbs in languages like French are historically derived from pronouns. For example, the first person plural ending in French is -ons, and the first person plural pronoun is nous. The fact that these both have an "n" sound in them is because they both derive historically from an old first person plural pronoun.
The pronoun-to-agreement process takes place on two levels: Formally, the pronoun gets shorter and shorter and more and more fused to the verb. The pronoun also loses part of its meaning: while a pronoun can refer, verb endings cannot. This much is agreed upon.
The present proposal is to enrich this view of how pronouns become agreement, and to test the hypothesis that pronouns can lose not only their ability to refer, but also their specifications as to person, number, and gender. For example, something that begins its life as a third person singular pronoun could end up as a verb ending that expresses only third person, and not singular. Alternatively, it could lose its person specification, and end up as a marker of singularity. In principle, these feature losses could occur in any order.
This theory predicts a certain set of agreement systems to be possible. Preliminary evidence in favor of the idea that this kind of feature loss is possible comes from the Uralic language family, which has not only subject-verb agreement but also object-verb agreement. In Northern Ostyak, verbs agree with their object only in number. In Eastern Ostyak, verbs agree with their object in number, but only if the object is third person. This situation can be explained if the Northern Ostyak system derives from a system like Eastern Ostyak's through a loss of the third person specification. There are several other languages where verbs agree in number, but not person, or agree in person, but not number. These languages could show that there are more pathways from pronoun to agreement than linguists have previously recognized, and more destinations.
2009. The Logical and Empirical Foundations of Baker's Paradox. Stanford University.
Summary: Proponents of usage-based grammar (e.g. Culicover 1999 in Syntactic Nuts and Goldberg 2006) claim that there are arbitrary lexical idiosyncrasies to be acquired, and that the learner must therefore be attentive to the syntactic patterns in which individual lexical items appear. I address the arbitrary idiosyncrasies that have been claimed to exist with respect to the causative and dative alternations, prepositions, and prenominal and predicative adjectives, and demonstrate for each one that the syntactic behavior of the word in question is predictable on the basis of general principles. This removes the argument for the attentive learner; I propose the explanation-seeking learner instead.
The whole idea started with this paper:
2007. Toward a True Theory of the Periphery: Why Culicover's 'Odd Prepositions' Aren't That Odd. Proceedings BLS 2007.
The chapter on causatives was presented at LSA 2008:
2009. Withering Exceptions: Predicting Participation in the English Causative Alternation (handout). Presented at LSA 2008.
The chapter on datives was presented at Rochester:
2008. No need to memorize arbitrary exceptions! (slides). Presented at the University of Rochester. [printable version]
The chapter on adjectives was presented at SemFest 09 and LSA 2010:
2009. The Predicativity Principle (slides). Presented at the 10th Annual Semantics Fest, 2009.
2010. The Predictability of Predicativity (poster). Presented at LSA 2010 in Baltimore, MA.
2010. The Objective Conjugation in Hungarian: Agreement without Phi Features. Submitted to Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
2010. The Definite Conjugation in Hungarian: What is it and what triggers it? (slides). Presented at LSA 2010 in Baltimore, MA with Stephen Wechsler.
2009. Clitic vs. Agreement in Hungarian (slides). Presented at Texas Linguistics Society XII at the University of Texas at Austin with Stephen Wechsler. [printable version]
2004. Object Agreement in Hungarian. Stanford University Qualifying Paper.
2004. "Object" Agreement in Hungarian (handout). Presented at LFG04, Christchurch, New Zealand.
2003. Sometimes it's hard to be Coherent. Proceedings of LFG03.
2009. With David Baxter. A Translation from Logic to English With Dynamic Semantics. Proceedings of LENLS VI, Tokyo, Japan (to appear in edited post-proceedings volume published by Springer).
If you want to see some really cool slides, look here:
2009. A Translation from Logic to English with Dynamic Semantics (slides). Presented at Logic and Engineering of Natural Language VI, Tokyo, Japan with David Baxter. [printable version]
2001. Gapping: In Defense of Deletion. Proceedings of the 37th annual Chicago Linguistic Society conference (Main session).
Check out Kyle Johnson's response. Working on a comeback...2009. Parallel Grammatical Encoding of Alternative Conceptualizations. Language and Cognitive Processes 25(1): 38-49.
2006. ISIS: It's Not Disfluent, but How Do We Know That? Proceedings of BLS 2006.
2005. Alignment in Syntactic Blending. Presented at "Workshop on Slips of the Tongue: The State of the Art in Speech Error Research" in Boston, MA, July 30th.
2010. With Lauren Hall-Lew and Rebecca Starr. Variation in the 'Iraq' Vowel: Conservatives vs. Liberals. American Speech 85: 91--102.