Givon 1971 ’today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax ...
The Subject Cycle: Linguistic Change and Cognitive Principles
Elly van Gelderen
20 August 2007
Abstract
In this paper, I provide examples of subject pronouns changing to agreement markers, agreement markers disappearing, and pronominal subjects being renewed again. This phenomenon is well-known from the linguistic literature of the 19th century and part of the Linguistic Cycle as e.g. Hodge (1970) calls it. This particular cycle involves the subject, and I therefore refer to it as the Subject Cycle.
I provide a classification for the stages of the cycle using specific criteria as well as ways in which these stages change. The main languages I discuss (in order of appearance in the paper) are Urdu/Hindi, Japanese, Modern English, Standard and Colloquial French, stages of Egyptian, Welsh, Navajo, Spanish, varieties of Italian, Warlbiri, Old and Middle English, O'odham, and varieties of Dutch. One type of language I discuss is the Pronominal Argument (PAL) one. I show that, even though PALs are relevant to the Subject Cycle, they represent a special stage.
I argue the changes are brought about by certain cognitive principles (or third factor principles as in Chomsky 2005; 2006), in particular by Economy Principles. Language change is therefore not so much triggered by new data as by new reanalyses of the linguistic data (that are then accepted).
Emphatic (non-argument) pronouns can be reanalyzed as subject pronouns which in turn can be reanalyzed as agreement and then be lost. I refer to this series of changes as the Subject Cycle. Givón's (1971; 1978) views that agreement markers arise from pronouns that are adjacent to the verb are well-known: "agreement and pronominalization ... are fundamentally one and the same phenomenon" (1978: 151). Subjects aren't the only arguments involved in this cycle since object pronouns can become agreement markers too but I will leave that unexplored here.
There are many examples of the various cross-linguistic stages synchronically and diachronically. Lambrecht (1981) and others show that the Modern French pronoun is really an agreement marker accompanied by an optional topic. Jelinek (1984; 2001) has argued for Athabaskan, Arabic, and Australian languages, to name but a few, that the agreement morphemes are the arguments. Katz (1996) has considered the status of the subject pronoun in diachronic stages of Hebrew and Turkish. In this article, I classify the stages in terms of positions in the phrase structure and provide instances of all of the stages. I also suggest some reasons why one stage is reanalyzed as the next.
In section one, I provide some background on the Subject Cycle as well as on Minimimalism, the framework used in this paper, and list criteria to distinguish arguments from agreement. The section discusses Economy Principles such as feature Economy and Specifier to Head and closes with a precise formulation of the Subject Cycle's stages. In section two, one stage of the cycle is examined in Hindi/Urdu and Japanese and another in English and French. In Hindi/Urdu and Japanese, the subject pronoun is a real argument but in English and French, subject pronouns are becoming agreement markers. Section three examines the stage where the agreement marker is the argument and section four considers the change from this stage to one the agreement loses argument status. Section five examines where the cycle `starts' and how renewal takes place. Section six is more speculative and considers mechanisms by which pronouns are reanalyzed as prefixes or suffixes and section seven is a conclusion.
In general, when I discuss `change', I mean it as a reanalysis by the language learner (in the sense of Andersen 1973 and Lightfoot 1979), i.e. as the incorporation of something in the grammar of the learner. I avoid the term grammaticalization in this paper since for many linguists this terms has become too general to be helpful.
1 The Subject Cycle
Arguments can be expressed synthetically (through agreement) or analytically (through pronouns). This has been recognized for a long time, e.g. in Hodge (1970) for the stages of Egyptian. Subject agreement arises through incorporation of subject pronouns into the verb and this can be done through varying mechanisms resulting in either prefixes or suffixes. There are other cycles, e.g. Jespersen's Negative Cycle, using the same mechanisms but this paper is restricted to the Subject-Agreement Cycle.
1.1 What is the Subject Cycle?
Givón (1984) provides the stages in (1a). In (1b), I have added first and second person pronouns. The latter two derive from emphatic pronouns, often from oblique ones :
(1) a. demonstrative > third person pronoun > clitic > agreement > zero
b. oblique > emphatic > first/second pronoun > clitic > agreement > zero
For instance, the Latin demonstrative ille `that' was reanalyzed as the French article le `the', the third person subject pronoun il `he', and the third person object pronoun le `him'. As we'll see below, the French pronominal il is on its way to becoming an agreement marker. The originally oblique emphatic pronouns moi `me' and toi `you' are becoming first and second pronoun subjects respectively. As Bresnan & Mchombo (1987) argue, many languages have two sets of pronouns for new and old discourse information. In English, the former would be more stressed than the latter. One can use (1) and say that the newer information is always expressed by an element more on the left-hand side.
The changes in (1) are very common and I will mention just a few here. Proto Indo-European verbal endings -mi, si, -ti are seen as early as the 19th century to arise from pronouns (e.g. Bopp 1816). According to Tauli (1958: 99, based on Gavel & Henri-Lacombe 1929-37), the Basque verbal prefixes n-, g-, z- are identical to the pronouns ni ‘I’, gu ‘we’, and zu ‘you’. Givón (1978: 157) says that Bantu agreement markers derive from pronouns. Hale (1973) argues that in Pama-Nyungan, inflectional markers are derived from independent pronouns. Likewise, Mithun (1991) claims that Iroquoian agreement markers derive from Proto-Iroquoian pronouns and Haugen (2004: 319) argues the same for Nahuatl. Wolfart (1973: 15; 38) shows that in Cree, the verbal singular person markers are ni-, ki-, o-/ø and that the full sets of pronouns are based on these, namely niya, kiya, wiya. Fuß (2005) cites many additional examples.
1.2 Agreement versus arguments
Distinguishing an argument from an agreement marker is notoriously difficult. An argument is assigned a theta-role by the verb or through entering a particular construction (e.g. Hale & Keyser 2002) when they first merge. Agreement, on the other hand, shows the relationship between a displaced element and the verb. Nominals that lack a theta-role cannot be quantified or focussed; they are topics, i.e. adjuncts. In this case, either the agreement can be linked to a theta-role or there can be a empty element, pro, that bears the theta-role.
Agreement markers are always heads and nominal arguments are typically phrases but pronouns can be either. Agreement markers cannot be coordinated but full pronouns can be. Thus, coordination forces the appearance of full pronouns, as shown by the difference between (2) and (3) in Malagasy (from Pearson 2001), where a `weak' pronoun is shown in (2) and a full pronoun in the coordinated nominal in (3):
(2) Hita-ny tany an-tokotany i-Koto Malagasy
see-3 there AN-garden Koto
`S/he/they saw Koto in the garden'
(3) Hitan' izy sy ny zaza tany an-tokotany i-Koto Malagasy
see 3S and DET child there AN-garden Koto
`S/he and the child saw Koto in the garden'. (Pearson 2001: 43)
Agreement is represented in a Minimalist framework as having uninterpretable person and number features on a probe, e.g. T, that need to find an element with interpretable ones to agree with. The feature status will be important when we consider change. The characteristics of the different elements are given in Table 1 below.
As to the phrase structure status, pronouns are ambiguous between heads and phrases. According to Cardinaletti & Starke (1996: 36), pronouns can be `deficient heads', or `deficient XPs', or `non-deficient XPs' (XPs being full phrases). Phrases can be coordinated and modified; they bear theta-roles and occur in specifier positions. Pronominal heads bear theta-roles but cannot be modified or coordinated since that would render them into non-heads. Finally, what look like agreement morphemes may or may not bear theta-roles but they are definitely heads. Zwicky & Pullum's (1983) criteria to distinguish agreement from non-agreement (a pronominal head in our terms) are well-known and include the fact that agreement is obligatory and has a fixed position. The differences I use to distinguish the stages are summarized in Table 1 regarding argument-status, morphology, and syntax.
| Theta-role XP or X fixed position phi language |
|i Full pronoun yes XP no yes Hindi/Urdu, Japanese |
|ii Head pronoun yes X no yes French, (English) |
|iii Agreement (=PAL) yes X yes yes Navajo, Old English |
|iv Agreement no X yes no Hindi/Urdu, etc |
Table 1: Differences between pronouns and agreement
In Table 1, three syntactic/historical stages are represented since (i) and (iv) occur simultaneously. The PAL stage (abbreviation of Pronominal Argument Language, as in Jelinek 1984) is one where the agreement affix bears the theta-role. I will argue in section three that this stage is special and may have a cycle of its own. I'll now turn to some factors that may be involved in the changes.
1.3 Minimalism and Economy Principles
Chomsky (2006: 2) identifies three factors that are crucial in the development of language in the individual "(1) genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; (2) external data, converted to the experience that selects one or another language within a narrow range; (3) principles not specific to FL. Some of the third factor principles have the flavor of the constraints that enter into all facets of growth and evolution, [...] Among these are principles of efficient computation".
Van Gelderen (2004) identifies two principles of efficient computation that also account for language change, the Head Preference and Late Merge Principles. The former can be formulated as (4), and this could be a more general cognitive principle, a third factor principle, `analyze something as small as possible':
(4) Head Preference Principle (HPP):
Be a head, rather than a phrase.
This means that a speaker will build structures such as (5a) rather than (5b) if given evidence that is in principle compatible with either. The FP stands for any functional category and a pronoun (but categories such as adverb or preposition could occur too) is merged in the head position in (5a), but occupies the specifier position in (5b):
(5) a. FP b. FP
F’ F ...
F ...
Hawkins' (2004) efficiency principle has a Minimize Forms, a much less specific principle than the HPP. Besides, Minimize Forms is a performance principle. Optimality Theory has constraints as well, e.g. STAY (`do not move') and TELEGRAPH (`do not spell out FCs). These constraints are ordered differently cross-linguistically, however, unlike the Head Preference and Late Merge ones.
The Head Preference Principle is relevant to a number of historical changes, as listed in Table 2: whenever possible, a word triggers a head status rather than a phrase one.
|Spec > Head Spec > Head |
|Demonstrative pronoun that to complementizer Demonstrative pronoun to article |
|Negative adverb to negation marker Adverb to aspect marker |
|Adverb to complementizer (e.g. till) Full pronoun to agreement |
Table 2: Examples of the Head Preference Principle
In this way, pronouns change from emphatic full phrases to clitic pronouns to agreement markers, and negatives from full DPs to negative adverb phrases to heads. This change is, however, slow since a child learning the language will continue to have input of a pronoun as both a phrase and a head. For instance, coordinated pronouns are phrases and so are emphatic pronouns. If they remain in the input, phrases will continue to be triggered in the child's grammar. Lightfoot (e.g. 2006) develops an approach as to how much input a child needs before it resets a parameter, e.g. from OV to VO. In the case of pronouns changing to agreement markers, the child will initially assume the unmarked head option, unless there is a substantial input of structures that provides evidence to the child that the pronoun is a full phrase.
Within early Minimalism, there is a second economy principle (see e.g. Chomsky 1995: 348). To construct a sentence, we need to select lexical items from the lexicon, put them together, or Merge them, and Move them. In Early Minimalism, Merge "comes `free' in that it is required in some form for any recursive system" (Chomsky 2001: 3) and is "inescapable" (Chomsky 1995: 316; 378) but Move requires additional assumptions. This means that it is less economical to merge early and then move than to wait as long as possible before merging. This is expressed in (6):
(6) Late Merge Principle (LMP):
Merge as late as possible
Principle (6) works most clearly in the case of heads. Thus, under Late Merge, the preferred structure would be (7a) with the auxiliary base generated in T, rather than (7b) with the auxiliary base generated in a lower position and moving to T. The LMP accounts for the change from lexical to functional head or from functional to higher functional head so frequently described in the grammaticalization literature (e.g. Heine & Kuteva 2002):
(7) a. TP b. TP
T vP T vP
might v' v'
v ... v ...
might
Late Merge also accounts for lexical phrases becoming base generated in the functional domain, e.g. the adverb fortunately. When it is first introduced into the English language from French in 1386, it is as adjective, as in (8), meaning 'happy, successful, favored by fortune'. In (9), it still has that meaning but is preposed, and ambiguous in structure. In (10), it has been reanalyzed as a higher adverbial:
(8) Whan a man..clymbeth vp and wexeth fortunat. (OED, 1386, Chaucer)
(9) Most fortunately: he hath atchieu'd a Maid That paragons description, and wilde Fame: One that excels the quirkes of Blazoning pens (Shakespeare, Othello)
(10) Fortunately, Lord De la War..met them the day after they had sailed (OED, 1796).
Structure (11a) shows the more recent structural representation and (11b) the earlier one. The prefered one under the LMP is (11a):
(11) a. CP b. CP
AP C' C'
Fortunately C TP C TP
... .... VP
... AP
fortunately
The question can be asked which lexical items are `prone' to a reanalysis under the LMP? If non-theta-marked elements can wait to merge outside the VP (Chomsky 1995: 314-5), they will do so. I will therefore argue that if, for instance, a preposition can be analyzed as having fewer semantic features and the PP of which it is the head is less relevant to the argument structure (e.g. to, for, and of in ModE), it will tend to merge higher (in TP or CP) rather than merge early (in VP) and then move. How does he LMP work in practice? Assuming a lexicalist hypothesis in which a lexical entry "contains three collections of features: phonological ... semantic ..., and formal" (Chomsky 1995: 230), a Lexical Item such as the light verb go might have semantic features of [motion, future, location]. If go occurs in the numeration with another verb, e.g. bring, one of the semantic features of go can be activated, in this case [future] rather than all. In that case, a biclausal structure can be avoided as well. Other examples are listed in Table 3.
|On, from P to ASP VP Adverbials > TP/CP Adverbials |
|Like, from P > C (like I said) Negative objects to negative markers |
|Modals: v > ASP > T Negative verbs to auxiliaries |
|To: P > ASP > M > C PP > C (for him to do that ...) |
Table 3: Examples of the Late Merge Principle
Pronouns fit this picture completely. When they are full pronouns, they are relevant to theta-marking in the lower domain as well as to checking the person and number features of the higher T. After they are reanalyzed as higher heads, a new element for theta-marking is assumed (could be null) and the higher head no longer moves.
It is also possible to think of syntax as inert, and reformulate Late Merge in terms of feature change and loss. From Chomsky (1995) on, features are divided in interpretable (relevant at Logical Form) and uninterpretable (only relevant to move elements to certain positions). Interpretable features are acquired before uninterpretable ones, as argued in Radford (2000), but are later reinterpreted as uninterpretable ones, triggering the functional/grammatical system. The same reanalysis happens in language change. For instance, changes in negatives can be accounted for by arguing that their (initially) semantic features are reanalyzed as interpretable ones and then as uninterpretable ones, as in (12). Changes connected to the Subject Cycle occur because the interpretable person (and gender) features of a full pronoun are reanalyzed as uninterpretable when they become agreement, as will be shown in (13) below:
(12) Feature Economy (to be expanded)
Minimize the semantic and interpretable features in the derivation
This is of course not responsible for the entire cycle, and I return to this Principle below.
I will use the Minimalist insight that "language is a perfect solution to interface conditions" (Chomsky 2006: 3) and I will argue that Economy Principles are responsible for the various stages of the cycle. Computational efficiency is different for the LF component (Logical Form, but also called Conceptual Intentional Interface) than for the PF one (Phonological Form, or Sensorimotor Interface). Chomsky argues that “the conflict between computational efficiency and ease of communication” is resolved “to satisfy the CI interface” (2006: 9). This would mean a preference for interpretable features. Evidence from language change shows that computational efficiency can sometimes favor the CI-side (by renewal of the forms) and sometimes the SM one (by (12)).
1.4 The Mechanisms behind the Cycle
Another way to see the stages of Table 1 is as in Figure 1. In stage (a), the nominal and pronominal (abbreviated as pron to avoid confusion with pro in pro-drop) are both in the specifier position. In (b), the pronoun is optionally placed in the head position. In (c), the nominal and (emphatic) pronoun in the specifier position are optional and the pronoun must be represented on the verb (=polysynthetic or pronominal argument) . The next stage is for the agreement to start becoming less relevant and for the material in the specifier to become obligatory again. Then we are back at stage (a).
|a. TP b. TP (=HPP) |
|DP T’ DP T’ |
|pron T VP pron pron-T VP (English, Urdu/Hindi, Japanese) (Non Standard French) |
| |
|c. TP |
|[DP] T’ (=LMP) |
|[pron] pron-T VP |
|(Navajo, Old English) |
Figure 1: Stages of the Subject Cycle
([...] indicates and optional adjunct)
In terms of the principles formulated in section 1.3, the reanalysis from stage (a) to (b) is expected under the Head Preference Principle, and that from (b) to (c) under the Late Merge Principle or under Feature Economy, if we think of agreement now merged as a separate entity, e.g. through uninterpretable phi-features in T. Though these stages seem to make sense logically, I show in section three that the one from (b) to (c) doesn't occur this way. Instead, there is a direct reanalysis from (b) to (a). Stage (c) is a possible stage but an optional one.
As mentioned, one can also see the cycle purely in terms of feature change: topic/emphatic pronouns have interpretable phi-features but regular pronouns can be reanalyzed, starting with the most definite first and second person features, as not having interpretable person features. The reason for the reanalysis first of the most definite this way is that they are most often preposed as subjects. The reanalysis as an agreement head means the phi-features are reanalyzed from interpretable on the (pro)noun to uninterpretable on the agreement, as in (13), expanded from (12) above:
(13) Feature Economy (expanded)
Adjunct Specifier Head affix
emphatic > full pronoun > head pronoun > agreement
[i-phi] [i-phi] [u-1/2] [i-3] [u-phi]
As far as theta-roles are concerned, emphatic pronouns have none, pronouns have them and agreement does not. Theta-checking/probing differences have not been added here.
An important consideration in the agreement cycle is the occurrence of pro-drop, or null subjects (and objects). When the pronoun is optional, it is not clear if the agreement is tied to the theta-role (and an argument is superfluous) or if an empty argument pronoun is present. The occurrence of pro-drop is therefore not decisive even though the question is relevant to consider. Rizzi (1982: 154) ties the occurrence of pro-drop to rich agreement in languages such as Italian, so that pro is licensed by agreement. This is still accepted as one way that pro-drop is licensed. To account for pro-drop in languages such as Chinese that lack agreement, Huang (1984) suggests that pro-drop can be licensed in a language that completely lacks agreement (Chinese), but not in one that has partial agreement (Standard English). The latter is not a `natural' stage where agreement is concerned but kept alive prescriptively.
Since the 1980s, many other analyses have been proposed. Most recently, Neeleman & Szendroi (to appear) have suggested it is the morphological shape of the pronoun that determines if the pronoun can be left out or not (though they still allow context-sensitive spell-out rules where full agreement licenses a zero spell-out). If the pronoun has agglutinative morphology and different parts of a pronoun are spelled out by different spell-out rules, there is pro-drop. Thus, a Japanese pronoun watasi-ga 'I-NOM' has a very identifiable Case morpheme -ga and this allows the top layer of the pronoun to be spelled out as -ga whereas the NP part can be spelled out as watasi. If it is the morphological shape of the pronoun and not the type of agreement that determines if pro-drop occurs or not, pro-drop is expected to occur at any stage in the cycle. This is indeed the case.
2 Full pronouns to heads
In this section, I look at examples from stage (a) in Figure 1 and the transition to stage (b). Section 2.1 shows that Hindi/Urdu and Japanese are languages where pronouns and nouns have the same status, i.e. stage (a). In 2.2 and 2.3, English and Colloquial French are discussed respectively. English is a language where first (and second) person pronouns are moving towards a loss of independence, i.e. stage (b). In Colloquial French, stage (b) has already been reached for most speakers. In Egyptian and Celtic, as discussed in section 2.4, there is a complementarity between pronouns and agreement. I argue that this could be reanalyzed two different ways.
2.1 Stage (a): Hindi/Urdu and Japanese
A clear example of stage (a) is Urdu/Hindi where the pronoun is phonologically not reduced, as in (14), and can easily be modified, as in (15):
(14) mẽ `I', tum `thou', woo `s/he', ham 'we', aap `you', and woo `they'
(15) a. ham log `we people',
b. aap log `you people',
c. mẽ hii `I-FOC'
The pronouns get similar Case endings as full nominals, as (16a) and (16b) show, and are in similar positions vis-avis the verb, as (17a) and (17b) show, i.e. they need not to be adjacent to the verb:
(16) a. mẽ nee us ko dekha Urdu/Hindi
I ERG him DAT saw
`I saw him'.
b. aadmii nee kitaab ko peRha Urdu/Hindi
man ERG book DAT read
`The man read the book'.
(17) a. mẽ kahaanii likhtii hũ Urdu/Hindi
I-NOM story writing am
‘I am writing a story’.
b. woo aadmii kahaanii likhtii hẽ Urdu/Hindi
that man-NOM story writing is
`That man is writing a story'.
Pronouns are also coordinated, as in (18), and keep the same shape as when they are not coordinated:
(18) mẽ or merii behn doonõ dilii mẽy rehtee hẽ
I and my sister both Delhi in living are
`My sister and I are both living in Delhi'.
The agreement on the verbs is full and pro-drop occurs. Urdu/Hindi also shows a relatively free word order and rarely uses expletives, compatible with its pro-drop character.
Could Hindi/Urdu be a language where agreement bears the theta-role and the subject (pro)noun is the topic? Butt & King (1997) have argued that nominative subjects are focussed. This means subjects are not in topic positions. An example of a focus marker is too, as in (19):
(19) Mẽ too us see kahũuga Urdu/Hindi
I FOC he to tell-FUT-3SM
`I'll certainly tell him'. (Barker 1975, I, 213)
Japanese is a language with pronouns that are very nominal (Noguchi 1997). Kuno (1973: 17) notes that Japanese "lacks authentic third person pronouns". Instead, it uses pro-drop or nouns. These pronouns can be modified, as in (20), and vary for politeness level:
(20) tiisai kare Japanese
small he
Their case marking and topic suffixes are identical to those of full nouns as well, as shown in (21), and they can both be separated from the verb, as shown in (22):
(21) a. watakusi wa / Yoko wa Japanese
1S TOP Yoko TOP
`As for me/Yoko, ...'
b. watakusi ga / Yoko ga Japanese
1S NOM Yoko NOM
`I/Yoko ...'
(22) watashi-wa kuruma-o unten-suru kara. Japanese
I-TOP car-ACC drive-NONPST PRT
`I will drive the car'. (Yoko Matsuzaki p.c.)
Could the Japanese pronominal subjects be topics? Like full nominals, they can sometimes occur in topic position and be marked for it, as in (22), but they need not be, as e.g. (23) shows where another element is in topic position, or (24) where more than one are:
(23) kondo-wa watashi-ga kuruma-o unten-suru kara. Japanese
this time-TOP I-NOM car-ACC drive-NONPST PRT
`This time, I will drive the car'. (Yoko Matsuzaki p.c.)
(24) kondo-wa kuruma-wa watashi-ga unten-suru kara. Japanese
this time-TOP car-TOP I-NOM drive-NONPST PRT
`This time, as for the car, I will drive'. (Yoko Matsuzaki p.c.)
Typically, as we'll see for French, pronoun heads cannot be code switched. Japanese pronouns, as in (25), can do so (in many cases) showing they are not regular heads:
(25) watashi-wa drove the car Japanese-English
I-TOP
`I drove the car' (Yoko Matsuzaki p.c.).
Thus, Urdu/Hindi and Japanese are languages where the subject pronoun is a specifier. This represents stage (a) of Figure 1.
2.2 Stage (a) going on (b)
In English, a difference between (nominative) pronouns and full nominals (and non-nominative pronouns) is starting to appear. I argue that the nominative (I, s/he, etc) marks the head and the accusative (me, her/him, etc) the phrasal variant. I show how the modification and coordination of the head and fully nominal variants differ and also how first and second person pronouns are often repeated if separated from the verb.
English nominal subjects, like subjects in general in Urdu/Hindi, are definitely phrasal and positioned in the specifier position since they can be modified and coordinated quite extensively:
(26) that book's rejection by ten publishers (he had still not heard from The Applecote Press, Chewton Mendip) had made him a little nervous of putting pen to paper (BNC - ASS 2596).
(27) To pay for these new weapons, the Pentagon and the Office of Management and Budget have proposed a number of cuts in other accounts ().
English pronouns on their own are less clearly phrasal since they are not that often modified and coordinated. In the British National Corpus (abbreviated as BNC), the coordinated she and he occurs 8 times and he and she, as in (28), 19 times whereas these pronouns are very numerous (640736 instances of he and 352872 of she):
(28) while he and she went across the hall, Jasper appeared, running ... (BNC - EV1 2028).
The reason that sentences such as (28) are rare may have to do with Case. When pronouns are coordinated, they get an accusative/oblique case in colloquial speech, as in (29):
(29) Kitty and me were to spend the day there ... (by the bye, Mrs. Forster and me are such friends!) (Austen, Pride & Prejudice II 16)
Pronouns on their own are marked as nominative, I, she, he, they, we; coordinated and modified phrasal pronouns show accusative/oblique Case, me, her, him, them, us. The latter are in topic position.
English has examples where the nominative pronoun is repeated, because this nominative subject is preferably adjoined to the head in T when possible, as in (30) to (32). This means the language is between stages (a) and (b) in Figure 1. (30) is from a piece of creative writing, (31) is spoken text, and (32) from a sports TV broadcast:
(30) She’s very good, though I perhaps I shouldn’t say so (BNC HDC)
(31) if I had seen her, er prints I maybe I would of approached this erm differently (BNC F71).
(32) I actually I'd like to see that again (BNC-HMN 901).
The same occurs with second person, as in (33) to (35), and infrequently with third (in the BNC) as in (36) which is the only one for the three adverbs with s/he:
(33) then it does give you maybe you know a few problems. (BNC - J3Y 72)
(34) You maybe you've done it but have forgotten. (BNC - FUH 1047)
(35) Erm you actually you know you don't have to say I'm . (BNC - JYM 79)
(36) Erm he perhaps he remembered who he was talking to and what it was all about. (BNC - JYM 1176)
Subject pronouns are not repeated after VP adverbs such as quickly, at least in the BNC, as expected if pronouns are in the T position:
(37) %I quickly I ...
(38) %I completely I ...
Another sign that nominative pronouns are moving towards agreement is that there is an emphatic in English. It is in the accusative/oblique form of the pronoun, e.g. me in (39) and (40), occupying a topicalized position:
(39) Me, I've been a night person longer than I can remember (BNC-GVL 335).
(40) Me, I was flying economy, but the plane, … was guzzling gas (BNC – H0M 36)
In English, the emphatic is most acceptable with first person, e.g. as in (39) and (40), and second person, as in (41), but with third person or an indefinite, they are unattested, as (42) to (44) indicate. This shows that the emphatic is still a topic in third person:
(41) You, you didn’t know she was er here (BNC – KC3 3064)
(42) %Him, he .... (not attested in the BNC)
(43) %Her, she shouldn’t do that (not attested in the BNC)
(44) %As for a ..., it ... (not attested in the BNC)
If the subject is being renalyzed as agreement, how does this work when the auxiliary inverts in questions, i.e. when it moves to C. There are a number of varieties of English where this movement is not taking place, e.g. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as in Green (1998: 98-9):
(45) What I'm go'n do? AAVE
`What am I going to do'
(46) How she's doing? AAVE
`How is she doing'
There may be a few indications that this pattern occurs in relatively standard English. So, though third person pronouns and full nouns occur on their own when the modal moves to C, as in (47) to (49), first and second do not appear this way in copora searches, as in indicated by (50):
(47) What else could possibly he be?
()
(48) Might possibly the human race now achieve its broader destiny? ('s_Eye1.html).
(49) Could possibly the third set numbers stand for letters, characters, rather than words? ()
(50) % might/could/will possibly I (not attested on a google search or on the BNC)
This shows that third person is more syntactically independent, i.e. in a specifier position.
In section five, on the basis of more languages, I will suggest that first and second person pronouns are always the first to be adjacent to the verb, as in (30) to (35), and to be accompanied by additional topics, as in (39) to (41), and that a third person is later. I now turn to Colloquial French.
2.3 Stage (b)
French is one of the Romance languages to have lost pro-drop, some verbal agreement, and to have developed clitic subjects. The development we saw starting with English pronouns has gone further in French, as is well-known since e.g. Lambrecht (1981). Below, I provide evidence that the (non-standard) French pronoun is often analyzed as agreement marker. As before, I will examine modification, coordination, and position vis a vis the verb. The pronoun is also frequently accompanied by a full nominal or emphatic pronominal in topicalized position. Modern written French is very different from the spoken language. I will therefore discuss different varieties and use terms such as colloquial and standard French, while French is used when all varieties are included.
Modification and coordination are rare in general with pronouns. Pronouns refer to already known information so are not often modified. I examined 1000 occurrences of je in the spoken Corpus d'entretiens spontanés, hence CdES, and found not a single instance of a pronoun that was modified by a PP or other word, or was coordinated. This latter fact is well-known, and shown in (51):
(51) *Je et tu ... French
I and you
This is not true e.g. for third person feminine, as (52) shows:
(52) et c'est elle qui a eu la place. French
and it was her who has had the place (CdES)
The regular pronoun is never independent from the verb, as shown in (53) and by the ungrammaticality of (54). In (53), écris must be preceded by a subject pronoun and the same is true in (55) and (56). As Tesnière (1932) already put it, French is a synthetic language with an analytic orthography:
(53) Je lis et j'écris Colloquial French
I read and I-write
(54) *Je lis et écris Colloquial French
`I read and write'.
`I read and write'.
(55) J’ai vu ça. French
I-have seen that
(56) *Je probablement ai vu ça French
I probably have seen that
Lambrecht (1981: 6) mentions the elimination of clitic-verb inversion, as in (57). Instead, one hears (58) and (59):
(57) Où vas-tu Standard French
where go-2S
(58) tu vas où Colloquial French
2S go where
`Where are you going?'
(59) que tu vas Colloquial French
that you go
`Are you going?'
Auger (1994: 67) agrees with that for Quebec Colloquial French, saying that only second person clitics ever appear postverbally. De Cat (2005: 1199) disputes the claim that inversion no longer occurs but her data from Belgian, Canadian, and French French show that inversion is infrequent (e.g. in Belgian French, only 2% of Yes/No questions are of the kind in (57) and only 21% in Canadian Yes/No questions).
If the subjects are being reanalyzed as agreement markers, how can this happen with the other clitics in Standard French, such as the negative and object in (60)?
(60) mais je ne l'ai pas encore démontré Standard French
but I NEG it-have NEG yet proven
`but I haven't yet proven that'.
(Annales de l'institut Henri Poincaré, 1932, p. 284; from a google search)
It turns out that these are very rare in Colloquial French. As is well-known, the negative ne is fast disappearing and object clitics are being replaced by ça, as in (61):
(61) j'ai pas encore démontré ça Colloquial French
I-have NEG yet proven that
` I haven't yet proven that'.
Fonseca-Greber (2000: 127) in her study of Swiss Spoken French shows that forms such as je `I' always precede the finite verb. If they were anything else than agreement, this wouldn't be the case. She also shows (p. 314) that all emphatic pronouns (except for eux `them') are accompanied by the subject pronoun. With proper nouns, the percentage is lower (p. 321), for person names around 75% and for place names around 35%. Definite NPs (p. 329) have additional pronouns around 60% of the time, with human singulars the highest. Doubled `pronouns' occur very frequently with indefinite subjects, on average 77%. Examples are:
(62) une omelette elle est comme ça Swiss Spoken French
an omelette she is like this
`An omelette is like this' (Fonseca-Greber 2000: 335).
(63) si un: un Russe i va en france Swiss Spoken French
if a a Russian il goes to France
`If a Russian goes to France'. (Fonseca-Greber 2000: 335)
Quantifiers are the least likely to have doubling, namely about 20 %, but they do occur, as in (64):
(64) c'est que chacun il a sa manière de ... Swiss Spoken French
it is that everyone he has his way of
`Everyone has his own way of ...' (Fonseca-Greber 2000: 338).
This is the last stage before the pronoun is reanalyzed as an agreement marker. Once that happens, quantifiers will generally occur with the clitic/agreement marker. For a similar reason that (64) is rare, Colloquial French does not allow (65) (yet), according to Roberge (1988: 356), namely that the pronominal il would be bound:
(65) *Qui il est allé? Colloquial and Standard French
who he is come
`Who has come'?
However, Lambrecht (1981: 30) reports a switch from standard (66) to colloquial (67):
(66) C'est moi qui conduis Standard French
(67) C'est moi qu'je conduis Colloquial French
It is me that I-drive
`It is me that drives'.
A final argument to show that moi `me' is an emphatic or possibly a subject (as well as toi `you' and some others) comes from code switching. In Arabic, the agreement morpheme on the verb has a theta-role (or there is an empty subject with a theta-role) and a subject is therefore optional. If present it has to be the emphatic form, and this is true in code switching in (68) as well. In (69), the emphatic Arabic does not suffice, and a French tu is needed, evidence that tu is part of the French agreement morphology:
(68) moi dxlt Arabic-French
I went-in-1S
`I went in'.
(69) nta tu vas travailler Arabic-French
you you go work
`You go to work' (from Bentahila and Davies 1983: 313).
This may show that the emphatic is in the argument position, as in stage (a) of Figure 1, at least for first and second person pronouns.
To conclude the discussion on French, French is in transition between having subject arguments expressed analytically to having them expressed synthetically. Different varieties of French are in different stages, as one would expect. French pronouns show more evidence towards agreement status than English ones. In the next subsection, I examine a stage where pronouns can be seen to incorporate into the verb but without an immediate new emphatic element moving into the specifier of the TP.
2.4 Pronouns and nominals in complementary distribution
In some Australian languages (Dixon 1980), Old Egyptian and Coptic, and some of the modern Celtic languages, the pronoun is in complementary distribution with the agreement marker. Siewierska & Bakker (1996) note that these languages are rare, and to their knowledge a strict complementarity only occurs in Celtic and the Amazonian language Makushi. An analysis that has been given for this phenomenon is incorporation of the pronoun into the V or C (Willis 1999: 217). I will first cite some examples from Old Egyptian and Coptic and then from Celtic.
Reintges (1997: 62-6) shows for Old Egyptian that full nominal subjects and pronominal subjects have different distributions (with eventive verbs). In (70), there is only a perfective marker on the verb whereas in (71) the pronominal subject is placed together with the initial verb:
(70) 'h'-n Pjpj hr mht(y) pt hnc-f Old Egyptian
stand.up-PF Pepi at north heaven with-3SM
`(King) Pepi has stood up with him at the northern side of heaven'
(Pyramid Texts, 814b/P, Reintges 1997: 62)
(71) 'h'-k χnty-sn Old Egyptian
stand.up-2SM in.front-3P
`You stand in front of them' (Pyramid Texts, 255b/W, Reintges 1997: 62)
Reintges argues that the endings are incorporated pronouns that occupy the same (original) positions as full nominals.
The same remains true in a later stage, Coptic. When a full nominal subject is present in Coptic, the markers on the auxiliary or verb are absent, as the difference between (72) and (73) shows:
(72) hən te-unu de a pe.f-las meh ro-f Coptic
in the-hour PRT PF the-his-tongue fill mouth-his
`Immediately, his tongue filled his mouth'
(73) a-f-ent-əs ehun e-t-p(lis rak(te Coptic
PF-he-bring-her PRT to-the-city Alexandria
`It (the ship) brought her into the city of Alexandria' (both from Reintges 2001: 178).
Celtic languages languages are varied in their use of agreement with overt subjects. Middle Welsh has three sets of (preverbal) pronouns, but even the least emphatic of these are full phrases (Willis 1999), as in (74):
(74) ac ef ehun yn y priawt person a 'e gwylwys MWe
and he himself in his own person PRT 3S-ACC watched
`and he himself watched it in person'.
(Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys 141-2,Willis 1999: 136)
In (74), ef `he' is separated from the verb as well as modified. Willis argues that by early Modern Welsh, this situation has changed radically and modified and coordinated pronouns are very rare. This shows a reanalysis to head has taken place.
There is then a stage where the pronouns are doubled, as in 18th century (75), especially first person, and the preverbal ones are reanalyzed as complementizers:
(75) Mi af fi 'n feichiau trosti Early ModWel
I go I PRT surety for-her
`I'll act as surety for her' (Enterlute Histori 50.6, Willis 1999: 213).
None of the modern Celtic languages shows agreement between the verb and the subject if there is a full DP subject, as (76ab) from Modern Welsh show:
(76) a. Gwelodd y dynion ddraig Welsh
Saw-3S the men dragon
b. *Gwelsan y dynion ddraig Welsh
Saw-3P the men dragon
‘The men saw a dragon’ (from Borsley & Roberts 1996: 40).
An analysis of pronominal subjects in these languages is given in (77) with the pronoun as a head moving to T:
(77) TP
T'
T vP
san
v ...
gwel
Modern Welsh optionally has an emphatic pronominal subject with an inflected verb, as in (78), but this is impossible in Irish, as in (79):
(78) Gwelsan (nhw) ddraig Welsh
Saw-3P they dragon
‘They saw the dragon’ (Borsley & Roberts 1996: 40).
(79) chuirfinn (*mé) isteach ar an phost sin Irish
put.1S.COND I in on ART job DEM
`I would apply for that job´ (McCloskey & Hale 1984)
And an analysis of these would be as in (80), indicating that the emphatic is being reanalyzed as specifier of the TP and san is agreement in T:
(80) CP
C TP
nhw T'
T vP
san v'
v ...
gwel
This structure is as in stage (a). So the history of Celtic first shows a full phrasal subject in (74), then a head in (75), and then a phrasal pronoun in (78) for Welsh. This is an instance where stage (a) of Figure 1 is reanalyzed as (b) and (b) as (a).
3 Agreement as argument
In this section, I provide data on languages where the agreement marker bears the theta-role, i.e. stage (c) in Figure 1. These are called Pronominal Argument Languages (or PALs). I first provide some background information on this kind of language, focussing on Navajo. I then indicate how Spanish and varieties of Italian, even though they share many characteristics of PALs, do not fit this classification (contra e.g. Ordóñez & Treviño 1999). The latter's cycle instead goes from (a) to (b) and (a) again.
Jelinek (1984), in examining Warlpiri, argues that languages have either lexical or pronominal arguments. In non-configurational languages "Clitic Pronouns [are] Verbal Arguments" (1984: 43). Jelinek's version of this difference/parameter is (81):
(81) Configurationality Parameter
a. In a configurational language, object nominals are properly governed by the verb.
b. In a [...] non-configurational language, nominals are not verbal arguments, but are optional adjuncts to the clitic pronouns that serve as verbal arguments (Jelinek 1984: 73).
Making a similar point, Baker (1995; 2001) proposes the following macroparameter:
(82) The Polysynthesis Parameter
Verbs must include some expression of each of the main participants in the event described by the verb (the subject, object, and indirect object) (Baker 2001: 111).
Baker (2001: 148; 149) distinguishes between Subject and Object Polysynthesis. In this section, I just regard Subject Polysynthesis.
In full fledged PAL languages, all pronouns and nominals are adjuncts. For instance, in Navajo (83), the subject and two objects are marked on the verb:
(83) bínabinishtin Navajo
b-í-na-bi-ni-sh-tin
3-against-around-3-Q-1S-handle-IMPF
`I teach it to him' (Young & Morgan 1987: 223)
Characteristics of PAL languages, as in Baker and Jelinek, are (a) optionality of nominals (DPs as well as independent pronouns), as in (84), for Navajo, (b) sentences with more than one nominal are rare, (c) nominals as in (85) are adjuncts, (d) absence of anaphors and non-referential quantified DPs, (e) minimal embedding:
(84) Nanishté Navajo
na-ni-sh-té
around-you-I-carry.IMPF
`I am carrying you around'.
(85) (Diné bizaad) yíníshta' Navajo
Navajo language 1-study
`I am studying Navajo'.
The optionality of nominals, as in (84), follows if they are adjuncts, and so does their being specially Case marked in some languages. Regarding (d), Baker (1995: 49f.) makes the point that anaphors such as `himself' would be adjuncts and hence outside the c-command domain of the real subject. Quantifiers have been argued to be adverbial (Jelinek 1995; Faltz 1995). Thus, in (86), ałtso `all' is not a quantifier with scope over the entire sentence but just over the adjacent DP:
(86) má'ii ałtso dibé baayijah Navajo
coyote all sheep 3-3-ran-away
`The sheep ran away from all the coyotes' or
`All the sheep ran away from the coyotes'. (Jelinek 2001: 18).
As to (e), Hale (1989) notes that (non)-configurationality is confined to constructions, not languages, and notes that sentential complements such as (87) and (88) in Navajo have to be configurational, even though Navajo as a whole is non-configurational:
(87) Shi-zhé'é kinla'nígóó deesháál nízin Navajo
my-father Flagstaff-to 1-will.go 3-want
`My father wants to go to Flagstaff' (K. Hale 1989: 300).
(88) doogáál ní Navajo
3-arrive 3-said (disjoint reference)
`He said that he arrived' (Willie 1991: 143).
Baker (1995: chapter 10) says that polysynthetic languages avoid embedded arguments. Constructions such as (87) are rare in Navajo; the preferred embedding strategy being nominalization, as in (89) for instance:
(89) honeesná-nígíí yoodlá Navajo
3.win-NOM 3.believe (free reference)
`He believes he won' or `he believes the winner' (Willie 1991: 178).
These characteristics of Navajo indicate that a grammatical specifier position is not available. The adjuncts, as in (85) and (86), are not in the specifier of TP. Instead the role of agreement is prominent and in this, it resembles the stage a number of Romance languages are in. I first provide a few examples where this seems the case, but then show that neither Spanish not Italian dialects are being reanalyzed as (c); rather they are reanalyzed as (a).
In Spanish and standard Italian, as is well known, subjects are optional and one could argue that the agreement, shown in bold in (90) and (91) for Spanish, is the argument
(90) (Muchas tribus) buscaban la opotunidad de rebelarse Spanish
many tribes sought-3P the opportunity to rebel
`Many tribes sought to rebel'.
(91) a. (nosotros) buscábamos
`we sought'
b. (vostros) buscabais
`you sought'
c. (ellos, ellas) buscaban
`they sought'
Ordóñez & Treviño (1999) show that pre-verbal overt subjects pattern with left dislocated objects in ellipsis, extraction of quantifiers, and interpretation of preverbal quantifiers. Postverbal subjects in Spanish, however, do function as arguments (as different tests show though Ordóñez & Treviño 1999 do not take this into account), quantified subjects are grammatical as are embedded objects though. So, Spanish exhibits agreement, and has frequent topicalized subjects.
In standard Italian, the situation is similar to Spanish but, as is well known since e.g. Brandi & Cordin (1989) and Poletto (2004), there is an incredible diversity across the different dialects. I will come back to this in section five when talking about the definiteness hierarchy. In Venetian Italian, full nouns and pronouns, as in (92), can be doubled but not indefinites, as (93) shows:
(92) Ti te magni sempre Venice
you you eat always
(93) Nissun (*el) magna Venice
Nobody he eats (both from Poletto 2004)
In other varieties, especially Northern varieties such as Trentino and Fiorentino, all of these are grammatical, even the quantified one, as in (94) to (96). That means these varieties are back to stage (a) in Figure 1 and didn't reanalyze as stage (c). If they had, they would have stopped using the specifier of TP and there's no evidence that they have since quantifiers and other argument are possible:
(94) Nisun l'ha dit niente Trentino
nobody he-has said nothing
`Nobody said anything' (Brandi & Cordin 1989:118)
(95) Tut l'è capita de not Trentino
everything it-has happened at night
`Everything happened at night' (Brandi & Cordin 1989:118)
(96) a. Tuc i panseva Albosaggia (Lombard N.)
Everybody they thought..
b. Vargù al ruarà tardi
Somebody he will-arrive late (both from Poletto 2007)
In this section I have given an indication how Navajo can be analyzed as a Pronominal Argument Language. Colloquial French, as discussed in section two, and Spanish (and standard Italian) resemble Navajo in the importance that agreement plays. The agreement marking, however, doesn't necessarily have a theta-role (as it does in Navajo) since there are some overt subject arguments. Varieties of Italian show that they are now at stage (a). In the next section I show how stage (c) can be reanalyzed as stage (a).
4 From Agreement as Argument to Nominal as Argument
In (94) to (96) above, we saw that some dialects of Italian may be `back' at stage (a) from an earlier stage (b). In this section, I show how stage (c) can be reanalyzed as stage (a). I first briefly discuss the loss of PAL-hood in Pama-Nyungan, based on Jelinek (1987), and then go into a similar loss in the history of English.
Jelinek (1987) provides a scenario where stage (c) of Figure 1 is reanalyzed as (a). She argues that Proto-Pama-Nyungan was a PAL language where nominals were adjuncts. The development of Dyirbal, a Pama-Nyungan language, shows that it evolves from an accusative PAL into a split ergative non-PAL. The older stage, still represented by Warlpiri, has (pro)nominals adjoined and the real arguments marked through inflection on the AUX (in second position), as in (97), and zero for the third person, as in (98):
(97) Wawirri kapi-rna panti-rni yalumpu Warlpiri
kangaroo FUT-1S spear-NONPST that
`I will spear that kangaroo' (Hale 1983)
(98) Ngarrka-ngku ka-0 panti-rni Warlpiri
man-ERG PRES-3S.NOM-3S.ACC spear-NONPST
`The man is spearing it' (Hale 1983).
In Warlpiri, there are separate pronouns as well, and these are Case-marked the same as the full nominals. This prompts Jelinek (e.g. 1983: 80) to regard them as adjuncts and the markers on the AUX as NOM/ACC marked arguments in (99):
(99) ngajulu-rlu ka-rna-ngku nyuntu-0 nya-nyi Warlpiri
I-ERG PRES-1NOM-2ACC you-ABS see-NONPST
`I see you' (Jelinek 1983: 80; Hale 1973: 328)
The change that occurs in Dyribal is that it becomes a split ergative language marking ergative/absolutive on nominals and nominative/accusative for pronouns. Because of the absence of a third person pronoun AUX, the nominal was reanalyzed as an argument, and the ergative and absolutive, as in (100), "became grammatical cases" (Jelinek 1987: 103):
(100) yabu numa-ŋgu bura-n Dyirbal
mother-ABS father-ERG saw
`Father saw mother' (Jelinek 1987: 102).
The ergative Case derives from an instrumental. Since Dyribal has no AUX, the nouns and pronouns are the arguments. I'll now turn to English.
We have seen above that Modern English is in stage (a) perhaps being reanalyzed as stage (b). Old and Early Middle English, I will argue, are in transition between (c) and (a). Bonneau & Pica (1995) similarly argue that Old English developed from a system in which complement clauses, relative clauses, and DPs "were interpreted as adverbials to a system in which they are interpreted as arguments of the verb". I will likewise argue that DPs and CPs are not arguments and that Old English verbal subject agreement is argumental and that the language is in stage (c) .
Evidence for this can be found in the overt verbal agreement, the -est ending in (101), that eliminates the need for a full subject, with all kinds of subjects, as in (102):
(101) ær ðon ðe hona creawa ðriga mec onsæcest
before that that rooster crows thrice me-ACC deny-2S
`You will deny me three times before the rooster crows' (Lindisfarne Gospel, Matthew 26.75).
(102) þæt healreced hatan wolde | medoærn micel men gewyrcean
that palace command would meadhall large men to-build
`that he would order his men to build a big hall, a big meadhall' (Beowulf 68-9).
Instances of (101) and (102), i.e. of a null subject, are especially numerous with third person singular and plural pronouns. This kind of pro-drop continues up to the mid 13th century. Berndt (1956) estimates that in some Old English texts only 20% of subjects are overt. Pro-drop is particularly frequent with third person pronouns, which I come back to in section five.
Old English verbal agreement distinguishes person and number separately. In addition, subjects in the traditional sense are often optional, and a topic appears, as in (103) and (104), from the 15th century, without being clearly integrated:
(103) As for þe toþer.tway enemyes. wich ben ... seruauntes to hem. [...]. mowe sone be ouer come. whan here lordis and maystris ben ouercome
`As for the other two enemies, which are servants to them ... [They] must soon be defeated, when their lords and masters are defeated' (The Tree of xii frutes 149.11-14).
(104) As for the secunde þinge wiche longith to a religious tree þat is plantid in religioun: is watering
`As for the second thing which pertains to a religious tree that is planted in religion is watering' (Idem 5.8).
Other characteristics of Pronominal Argument Languages are that they not have object reflexives; see Baker (1995: 53). The absence of reflexive pronouns in Old English is well-known (e.g. Faltz 1985); simple pronouns, as in (105), function reflexively instead:
(105) Ic on earde bad | ... ne me swor fela
I on earth was-around ... not me-DAT swore wrong
`I was around on earth ... I never perjured myself' (Beowulf 2736-8).
Quantifiers or, as Lightfoot (1979) calls them, pre-quantifiers are quite complex in Old and Middle English. They are inflected as adjectives; many have an adjectival meaning, e.g. eall means `complete'; and some have pronominal functions. This shows they are more referential in keeping with what is known about quantifiers in polysynthetic languages. Carlson (1978) provides different reasons why she thinks that quantifiers are not a separate category in Old English. Two that I find interesting are (a) pre-quantifiers can occur together, as in (106), and can modify a pronoun, as in (107):
(106) Mid childe hii weren boþe two
With child they were both two
(Layamon, 2399, Carlson 1978: 308)
(107) Ealle we sind gebroðra ... and we ealle cweðað
All we are brothers ... and we all say
(Aelfric Homilies I 54.8, Carlson 1978: 320)
In PALs, clausal arguments are unexpected since it would be difficult to represent them on the verb. (108) is an example of lack of embedding but it has to be stated that this does not occur always. There are instances of embedded sentences even in Old English:
(108) An preost was on leoden. la3amon wes ihoten. he wes leouenaðes sone. liðe him beo drihten. he wonede at ernle3e. at æðelen are chirechen
A priest was among people. Layamon was called. He was Liefnoth's son. kind him be God. He lived at Areley. at lovely a church
`There was a priest living here, called Layamon. He was the son of Liefnoth, may God be him kind. He lived at Areley, at a lovely church' (Layamon, Caligula 1-3).
A feature of PALs that hasn't received (as) much attention is the lexical incorporation of aspectual information, such as `around' in Navajo (84). Inner aspect is also typical for Old English verbs (frequent use of affixes) but I will not go into that much here.
If subject pronouns are adjuncts in Old English, and the agreement is the real argument, how are subjects Case marked? It can be argued that there is a split Case system for subjects and objects, with objects being assigned inherent Case (by the V, Adj, or P), and subjects nominative Case by a functional category. In (109), the subject is nominative and the object him is dative because the verb forscrifan `proscribe' assigns a Goal theta-role:
(109) siþðan him scyppend forscrifen hæfde
since 3S-DAT creator-NOM banned had
`Since the creator had banned him' (Beowulf 106).
Inherent Case depends on the theta-role and can be genitive, dative, or accusative. It is, again relevant in section five, more frequent on third person pronouns than on first and second person (van Gelderen 2000).
In Old English, subjects are adjuncts with nominative Case while objects have inherent Case. Thus, Old English Case is interpretable (in terms of Chomsky 1995) and so is agreement. The loss of inherent Case around 1200 triggers checking of uninterpretable Case features in functional categories starting with the most definite nominals.
In this section, I have indicated that a number of the key characteristics of Pronominal Argument languages also hold for Old English. Like Navajo, but unlike varieties of Italian, the grammatical specifier position (Spec TP) is not present and the language is in stage (c) of Figure 1. This means that Old English stage (c) has been reanalyzed as Modern English stage (a).
5 Stages in the Cycle
In the present section I address two issues. (I) What is the typical `start' of the reanalysis of a subject pronoun as an agreement marker, and of the topic as subject pronoun? (II) What is the source for the renewals? The answer to (I), I suggest, is that preposing is more prevalent with more definite elements due to discourse considerations; the answer to (II) is that the element with the relevant features is incorporated. Each question is addressed in a separate subsection. The last section provides a summary.
5.1 Definiteness and Feature Economy
Above it was shown that first person pronouns may be the first to be reanalyzed as agreement markers. In Old English, the third person is more often dropped than first or second person pronouns. This means that first and second person are the first to be reanalyzed as subjects. Then, in Modern English, as we've seen in section two above, it is the first and second person that are more like agreement markers, i.e. marked with uninterpretable features, again leading the cyclical changes.
Definite nominals are ahead of indefinite nominals as well. For instance, Garrett (1990: 228; 234ff) shows that doubling in Lycian only occurs with definite NPs and in Kambera, according to Klamer (1997), clitic subjects occur when the subject is definite. There is typically the same set of changes, namely as in (110), as also mentioned above:
(110) Definiteness Hierarchy
1/2 > 3 > definite > indefinite/quantifier
In what follows, I will give more examples of this sequence, starting with Italian dialects.
Poletto (1993; 2004) shows that the hierarchy in (110) occurs in Italian dialects. In the Italian of Venice, first and second pronouns must be doubled , as in (111), definite nouns may be, as in (112), but quantified nouns cannot, as in (113):
(111) Ti te magni sempre Venice
you you eat always
(112) Nane (el) magna Venice
John he eats
(113) Nissun (*el) magna Venice
Nobody he eats (all from Poletto 2004)
In some other varieties, all of these are grammatical, even the quantified one, as in (114), and these varieties are back at stage (a). The reasons they are not at stage (c) is that at that stage quantifiers do not occur, and they do in this variety:
(114) Gnun a m capiss Torino
Nobody he me understands
`Nobody understands me' (from Poletto 2004).
Other instances of the hierarchy can be provided. In the history of English, contraction of pronouns to the left of verbal elements starts with first person around 1600, as in (116) from 1608 and (117) from 1630, both taken from the Early Modern English part of the Helsinki Corpus (HC):
(116) Ill haue another foole, thou shalt dwell no longer with me (Robert Armin)
(117) I’le be at hand to take it (Thomas Middleton)
Due to the spelling variants, it is hard to get a total picture. In the Early Modern English period, contraction with first person is more frequent. For instance, in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, there are 213 third person masculine singular pronouns and 10 of those are contracted (=5%), but of the 745 first person singular pronouns 74 are (=10%). (X-square 4.898, p < .05).
This asymmetry is still present in Present Day English as Table 3 shows (for the Faculty Meetings part of the Corpus of Spoken American Professional English, or CSE) and as other studies have shown, e.g. Kjellmer (1997). The explanation is that first person pronouns adjacent to auxiliaries are becoming agreement markers. They are moving towards having uninterpretable person features. What stops the complete change is that main verbs do not move and therefore there will always be some pronouns that will have to be in specifier position in English but not in French.
| uncliticized cliticized total |
|_____________________________________________ |
|I 2037 685 (=25%) 2722 |
|you 1176 162 (=12.1%) 1338 |
|he 128 19 (=12.9%) 147 |
Table 3: Contraction with pronouns in CSE-FAC (significant between first and second and second and third at p < .001).
Let me add a note on the contraction of nouns and auxiliaries. Axelsson (1998: 94ff.), in a study of contraction in 20th century newspapers, finds a small number of such contractions. Many of these involve personal, company, or geographical names and simple nouns of one syllable, as in the slightly odd (118):
(118) Hat’s the way to do it
(Axelsson 1998: 97).
Names can be seen as D heads and therefore incorporate as well. There are only a very few instances where such an analysis is problematic.
Poletto's explanation of the hierarchy involves feature checking: if there are too many features on the verb that the verb is checking, the verb is saturated and a clitic "is a sort of substitute for a verb" (2000: 147). Poletto (2007) develops a very ingenious model that explains the hierarchy in (110) in terms of features. The element on the left-hand side in (1) is the one with most features, number, person, case, and gender (in some languages) and rather than using the entire DP to check all the features in separate functional categories, Poletto argues that the clitics or agreement markers do this more economically. Poletto (2007) claims that pronoun doubling is more frequent with those elements that have "more functional information", and that the (too large) number of features to be checked is the cause of the doubling. She explains the Definiteness Hierarchy in (110) by a universal order of checking domains (first and second below third below plural etc). I will also use features but argue something a little different.
In section one, I have argued that there is a cognitive principle helping the acquisition process, namely Feature Economy, and that DPs and other elements are reanalyzed with fewer semantic and interpretable features. The consistency with which certain interpretable features disappear first, i.e. are reanalyzed as uninterpretable, needs to be explained. In section four, I noticed briefly that Old English third person pronouns have inherent Case more frequently (and that pro-drop is more likely). This means that first and second person pronouns have uninterpretable features before third person ones do. If displacement is brought about by discourse factors (e.g. Chomsky 2002), i.e. definite elements are more often subjects, these elements are the first to be seen as moving and having uninterpretable features and become probes.
5.2 Source of the Renewals
Most new emphatic or topic pronouns derive from oblique pronouns, as in (119). Hale (1973), in discussing Warlbiri subject and object markers, says that, historically, the pronouns became cliticized and that new forms were created from oblique pronominals. Third person pronouns (e.g. Latin to Modern Romance) are created from demonstratives. Asian pronouns derive from honorifics. In what follows, I give some examples of this trend, typically giving parts of cycles:
(119) The loss of phi-features
oblique > emphatic subject > pronoun > agreement > zero
[i-phi] [i-phi] [i-phi]/[u-phi] [u-phi]
Steele (1976) mentions that, in some Uto-Aztecan languages the clitics in second position (i.e. following the first element), are derived from independent pronouns. Steele (1979: 472) argues that proto Uto-Aztecan has an auxiliary marking modality, subjects, and tense in second position. The different daughter languages have different orders and positions. In O'odham, this comes out as (120) where the auxiliary `añ is reduced from the first person pronoun 'a: ñi:
(120) ‘a:ñi ‘añ s-ba:bigǐ ñeok O’odham
I 1S-IMPF slowly speak-IMPF
`I was speaking slowly’. (Zepeda 1983: 18-9)
O’odham is pro-drop and the optional subject pronoun could in fact be in a topic position, as in (121):
(121) CP
(‘a:ñi) C'
C TP
‘añ pro ...
[u-phi] [i-phi]
(122) also suggests that the auxiliary is in the CP-domain since the auxiliary is cliticised to the Q head:
(122) N-o hegam hihim O'odham
Q-3.IMPF they walk-IMPF.P
`Are/were they walking?' (Zepeda 1983: 14; 21)
O'odham, like Luiseño, marks its auxiliary with subject and aspect and is therefore a subject PAL. Many other Uto-Aztecan languages do not mark the subject on an auxiliary, e.g. Hopi.
Harris (1978) discusses the evolution in Romance of `disjunctive' and `conjunctive' pronouns, i.e. emphatic and clitic respectively. Old French, when it is still pro-drop, has second person tu and toi for nominative and accusative emphatic. After the loss of pro-drop, tu becomes the regular clitic pronoun and toi becomes the emphatic for both nominative and accusative. The two stages are represented in Table 4:
| Old French Modern French |
|Emphatic Regular Emphatic Regular |
|Subject tu zero toi tu |
|Oblique toi te toi te |
Table 4: Changes in French second person pronouns (from Harris 1978: 117)
Athabaskan agreement prefixes are very similar to the emphatic pronouns, as in (123):
(123) shí éiyá Lena yinishyé Navajo
I TOP Lena 1S-called
`I am called Lena'.
As mentioned in connection with the cline in (110) above, the full pronoun in e.g. (123) might be used for new discourse information.
In this section so far, I have discussed a definiteness hierarchy and provided additional examples of renewal. I'll now do a brief summary of Head Preference and Feature Economy.
5.3 Head Preference and Feature Economy
In section one above, I have provided an outline of the different stages and have given more empirical detail in the remaining sections. I'll now review the mechanisms of how certain stages are reanalyzed by the language learner as another stage. Figure 1 is repeated for convenience.
|a. TP b. TP (=HPP) |
|DP T’ DP T’ |
|pron T VP pron pron-T VP (Urdu/Hindi, Japanese) (Non Standard French) |
| |
|c. TP |
|[DP] T’ (=LMP) |
|[pron] pron-T VP |
|(Navajo, Old English) |
Figure 1: Stages of the Subject Cycle
The transition from (a) to (b) to (c) is facilitated by the Head Preference Principle and Late Merge. Both of these can be seen as a reinterpretation of the interpretable phi-features of the pronoun in the Specifier position as uninterpretable as agreement feature. In stage (c), there is no longer Case checking and this means that [uCase] has disappeared from the pronoun. For French, the changes could be summarized as:
(124) Old French Standard French Coll French
iCase uCase uphi
iphi iphi
All of these point towards a loss of features during the history of language.
6 Subjects reanalyzed: suffixes or prefixes?
This section is more speculative. I will examine why agreement is expressed as a prefix in languages such as the ones we have seen above and as a suffix in the languages we'll see in the first part of this section.
6.1 Reanalysis as C: Suffixes
In many languages, agreement is expressed as a a suffix. In these languages, verbs often move to C (or Fin), as in (125a). The (pronominal) subject needs to be adjacent for many speakers, as the ungrammaticality of (125b) shows, and the inflection is different as (125c) shows:
(125) a. Ga jij daar vaak heen? Dutch
go you there often to
`Do you go there often?'
b *Ga vaak jij daar heen
ga often you ther to
`Do you go there often?'
c. Jij gaat daar vaak heen
you go there often to
`You (seem to) go there often'.
In subordinate clause, the complementizer is in C, as in (126a), and it too has a special relationship with the subject. As in (125b), for example, for many speakers, adverbs cannot come in between, as (126b) shows:
(126) a. ... dat ie gisteren zou aankomen Dutch
that he yesterday would arrive
b. *... dat gisteren hij/ie zou aankomen
that yesterday he would arrive
`that he'd arrive yesterday'.
In some varieties of Dutch, subject pronouns on C can even be argued to be agreement markers, e.g. in (127), and certainly in (128):
(127) ... da-k daar niet heen wil Dutch
that-I there not to want
`that I don't want to go there'.
(128) Da ken-ik ik Flemish
that know-I I
`I know that'.
De Vogelaer et al. (2002: 236) provide the paradigm for Dutch inverted and non-inverted verbs with the doubled subject pronouns, as in (128), and maps of the Dutch speaking areas where they occur, mainly in Flanders and Brabant. The doubling shows that the clitic has become an agreement marker (and C is a probe looking for interpretable phi-features). De Vogelaer et al (2002: 242) conclude that sentences without inversion are more pragmatically marked. The least acceptable are the third person ones. The non-inverted doublings are not at all acceptable.
Verb-movement may be the reason why many agreement markers are suffixes. In VS constructions, the verb moves to the position of the pronoun on its way to a higher position, as in (129). The pronoun can be seen as a head in C triggering this movement:
(129) CP
C'
C TP
T'
T vP
pron ...
The reanalysis/change to a stage where the pronoun is agreement is of course easy to `explain' as Feature Economy. C is reanalyzed as a probe with [u-phi]. I will give some further examples.
In Old Norse (Faarlund 2004: 35; EyÞórrson 2004; Boer 1920: 210), first and second person pronouns may cliticize on the verb, as in (130), from 500 CE. In Icelandic, hygg ek can be hykk `think-I' and the Old English and Old High German second person singular -st derives from the Germanic/Indo-European the 2S clitic (Lühr 1984), as in (131) repeated from (101) above:
(130) hariuha haitika farawisa Old Norse
Hariuha named-I danger-knowing
‘I am called Hariuha, the one who knows danger’. (Sjælland bracteate 2 I Krause 1971).
(131) ... mec onsæcest Old English
... me betray-2S
`you betray me'.
Middle Dutch (Royen 1929: 487) and, as seen above, colloquial Dutch have a clitic, as in (132). Middle English hastow, wiltow, and other forms, as in (133), Old High German has (134), Farsi umad-esh ‘came-he’, Alemannic (135), and probably the Proto-Indo-European verbal endings -m, -s, -t (see Bopp 1816; Brugmann 1904) derive from a movement of the verb to the demonstrative pronoun:
(132) da kank nie doen Dutch variety
that can-I not do
(133) Sestow this people? Middle English
`See you these people'
(Piers Plowman 468)
(135) ni wane theih thir gelbo OHG
NEG think that-I you deceive
`Don't think that I deceive you' (Otfrid I 23, 64, Somers Wicka 2007)
(136) hätt-er gseit Alemannic
has-he said (Giacalone Ramat 1998: 117).
Many of these stages then double the pronouns, e.g. Old Norse (Boer 1920), as in (137), where the full pronoun is base generated in an argument position:
(137) Fanca ec mildan mann eþa sva matar goðan,
found-I-NEG I mild man noble and food good
`I found none so noble and free with his food'
(Hávamál 39, from )
In this section, I have provided examples of subject pronouns being reanalyzed not as T (as in e.g. French) but as C. The definiteness hierarchy is relevant and renewal does occur.
6.2 Prefixes
In 6.1, I have suggested a simple reason that subject pronouns are reanalyzed as suffixes, namely that the verb somehow adjoins to the their left (in accordance with Kayne 1994). I will now consider the origin of agreement prefixes.
Theta-marked subjects are merged in the Specifier of a vP. This means that in the stage where the pronoun is a phrase, it moves from specifier of vP to specifier of TP or another functional category above vP in languages such as English. The next stage is the result of a reanalysis by the language learner of the pronoun as a head. Chomsky (1995: 249) says "a clitic raises from its [theta]-position, and attaches to an inflectional head. In its [theta]-position, the clitic is an XP; attachment to a head requires that it be an Xo". Thus, in its vP-internal position, the subject is a phrase, but it then moves as a head. It is this movement that is complex since it interacts with the movement of auxiliaries.
Let’s assume a simplified VP-shell which looks like (138) and where the main verb see moves to v:
(138) vP
DP v’
D v VP
you me V’
V there
see
The subject then moves as a head (internal merge) to T. On its way to T, it can move through other heads, as in e.g. (139), assuming Kayne (1994):
(139) TP
T’
T MP
M’
M vP
you’ll you v’
v VP
see me there
(140) You'll see me there.
Initial merge of the pronoun is in the specifier because of theta-checking. The T-position has uninterpretable phi-features and probes for interpretable phi-features to agree with. It finds these in those of the subject pronoun. The next stage is when the pronoun is seen as late merged in T, and reinterpreted as being T with uninterpretable features and as a prefix, as may be happening in French.
Sentences such as (141) and (142) have 've in T with the subject and modal auxiliary left adjoining to it:
(141) She'll've done that yesterday.
(142) He'll've seen what recently transpired abroad. ()
In this section, two kinds of agreement morphemes wer discussed, one that ultimately grammaticalizes as a probe in C and the other as a probe in T. Renewal of a pronoun in the original argument position also occurs.
7 Conclusion
This paper has given descriptions of various stages of the Subject Cycle. I have identified three main stages in the Subject Cycle, one with the pronoun as specifier (stage a), one with the pronoun as head (stage b), and one without a real specifier (of TP) position available (stage c). Languages such French and English are moving from (a) to (b) and varieties of Italian are moving from (b) to (a). This is not a reversal or a counterexample to the unidirectionality of the change since the next stage uses a renewed specifier not the old one.
The Definiteness Hierarchy is very relevant as to where the cyclical changes start. As is well-known, more definite nominals appear in the Spec TP and hence they are reanalyzed earlier. A discussion of the difference between pronouns becoming prefixes or suffixes is also included. and the difference has to do with a reanalysis as either T or C.
The status of stage (c) is interesting. It seems that in this stage specifiers play a minor role and heads are the theta-bearers. This stage is characterized by a lack of quantifiers, nominal reflexives, and embedded sentences. If Old English is in this stage as I have argued, it can be shown to having been reanalyzed as Middle and Modern English (a). Navajo is definitely in stage (c) but certain other Athabaskan languages seem to be moving in this direction as well (Rice & Saxon 2005). Stage (b), at least in the languages I have surveyed is not reanalyzed as stage (c), and Table 5 summarizes the possiblities discussed in this paper.
|(a) to (b): English, French (b) to (a) Varieties of Italian |
|(a) to (c) not attested (c) to (a) Old English |
|(b) to (c) not attested (c) to (b) not attested |
Table 5: Changes in the Subject Cycle
Rather than just stating that a pronoun is reanalyzed as a clitic or agreement marker, I have provided structural positions for each of the stages and have argued there are Economy Principles that aid the language learner in the acquisition. The Head Preference and Late Merge Principles are general cognitive principles that help the language learner acquire a grammar. They can be reformulated in terms of Feature Economy. Lexical items are first selected from the lexicon and then merged and remerged in a derivation. The heavier the feature load, the less economical is the derivation. Hence, the tendency to be analyzed by the learner as light as possible.
Let me say something about linguistic change too. Lightfoot in much recent work (e.g. 2006) has talked about `cuing'. This refers to the "idea that children scan their linguistics environment for structural cues" (2006: 32) and concerns the change of the triggering experience from the E-language such that the language learner will come up with an I-language different from that of the previous generation. Thus, for Lightfoot, change can only come from the outside, i.e. triggered by variable data. In this paper, I have argued the opposite, namely that change can come from the inside as it were.
Abbreviations and notes
ACC Accusative Case
BNC British National Corpus
CdES Un Corpus d'entretiens spontanés
CI Conceptual Intentional
CP Complementizer Phrase
CSE Corpus of Spoken English
DAT Dative Case
ERG Ergative Case
FOC Focus marker
HC Helsinki Corpus
HPP Head Preference Principle
i- interpretable
LMP Late Merge Principle
NOM Nominative Case
OED Oxford English Dictionary
PAL Pronominal Argument Language
PRT partcicle
phi person and number features
PRES present
PST past
S singular
SM Sensory Motor
TP Tense Phrase
u- uninterpretable
UG Universal Grammar
X any head
XP any phrase
1P first plural etc.
3SM third person singular masculine, etc
% unattested
This use of oblique pronouns actually indicates a switch from a dependent marking to a head marking system, but I will not go into that here.
It is not clear that specifiers are as relevant in these languages. I come back to this briefly in section 3.
Old Egyptian also has a stative paradigm and here Reintges (1997) argues that the verbal endings are agreement markers since they are obligatory.
Initially, non-configurational languages are defined as having free word order (e.g. Hale) but then the emphasis shifts away from that because Navajo has relatively strict word order, and languages with free word order such as German can be accounted for through scrambling. There is structure to non-configurational languages.
I have not taken the EPP into account, i.e. obligatory subjects.
There is, as many people have pointed out a difference between universal quantifiers and negative or existential ones. For instance, Poletto (2007) provides the following difference:
(i) Bisogna che tuti i faga citu Bellinzona
necessary that everyone they make silence
`It is necessary that everyone is silent'.
(ii) Quaidun telefunarà al prufessur Bellinzona
Somebody will-phone to-the teacher
(Poletto 2007: 6)
Universal quantifiers are typically doubled by a plural and more easily left dislocated. Poletto argues this is because they are interpreted as [+specific]. Her explanation for the doubling hierarchy has to do with the number of features: the more features, the easier the doubling. This doubling is more economic because the feature will be checked through the clitic and the entire element (e.g. DP) won't have to move.
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