Summary
My postdoctoral research project, entitled Pathways from pronoun to agreement and their destinations, is funded by the Swedish Research Council, and hosted by Lund University between July 2010 an July 2012. My sponsor is Professor Marit Julien of the Scandinavian languages department.
Related papers
Coppock, Elizabeth and Stephen Wechsler (to appear). The objective conjugation in Hungarian: Agreement without phi features. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
Coppock, Elizabeth and Stephen Wechsler (2010). Less-travelled paths from pronoun to agreement: The case of the Uralic objective conjugations. In Miriam Butt and Tracy King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG '10 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Popular science description
In most languages of the world -- Swedish being a relatively 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 黎es '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.