Talk:Polypersonal agreement

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[edit] Polypersonal verbs vs. polypersonalism

Regarding the edits by Ruakh:

I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the Polypersonal agreement article after the change in the intro paragraph. I understand PPA as a feature of the language (or better, of the verbal morphological system), not of particular verbs. That's why I don't like how the article now starts by talking of "polypersonal verbs".

I'm sure it's entirely possible for a language to have some verbs (valency > 1 of course) that agree with several arguments, while others (also valency > 1) do not, this difference being lexically or pragmatically determined. But AFAIK this is not the case; polypersonalism is clearly a feature of the verb morphology and thus of the language, not a treat of specific verbs. Is there a compelling reason why I should not revert?

As for the comment on isolation, I agree that it was incomplete and therefore better left out (if expressed in full, it would be intrussive).

--Pablo D. Flores 22:13, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

You make a good point. The goal of my change was to make the introduction simpler - shorter sentences, not jumping in with the word "morphological," focusing initially on verbs rather than on the languages that contain them - but you're right about the problem this produces.

I've re-written; is the new version better? If you still don't like it, go ahead and revert.

(BTW, I'm watching this page, so you don't need to post your comments in two places if you don't want to.) Ruakh 05:17, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm OK with the new version. Thanks for understanding! --Pablo D. Flores 10:20, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] French polypersonalism?

I don't see how the French pronominal clitics are less free or more bound than the Spanish ones; can you give some examples in the two languages that demonstrate this? If anything, I'd be inclined to say that Spanish is more polypersonal than French, because indirect objects in Spanish are always marked on the verb, even when they occur separately as well (e.g., English "He gave it to his friend," French "Il l'a donnée à son amie," Spanish "Se la dio a su amiga"). It doesn't seem to me to be verb agreement if adding the argument to the sentence requires that you drop the morpheme from the verb. Ruakh 20:28, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

In spoken French, both the subject and the object pronouns are clitics of the verb, which may also be a complex word. Phrases like je te l'ai bien dit or il ne t'ai rien pris are single phonological words. While these can be seen simply as clitics, they have a tendency to become affixes, since they have a fixed slot in the verbal phrase, and they can't appear in isolation. In fact, most native speakers cannot produce them in isolation. The polypersonal agreement part comes when you also learn that spoken French, having effectively lost its (free) subject pronouns, uses the contrastive forms moi, lui, etc. as free pronouns, and uses them together with full NPs even when the information is already present on the verb word: moi je l'ai vu son fils "me I have seen him his son". I got most of this from the CONLANG list (see [1], [2] etc.). The idea apparently has serious backers, even though it represents a tendency.

As for Spanish, the situation is different because the extreme simplification that took place in French is not there, so it's quite simple to mark the subject as a verb inflection (French would be doing the same if je is considered an affix, but using agglutination -- which BTW is a common treat of polysynthetic languages). Spanish subject pronouns are not clitics and they can be moved around rather freely. The object pronouns are clitics, but they can be moved too, sometimes, and native speakers perceive them as separate entities. The obligatory mention of both pronouns and the full NPs referenced by them in Spanish is simply clitic doubling and is restricted to animate indirect objects.

See also [3] (search for the first instance of "French", then look down for the examples of dislocation). BTW, dislocation (syntax) seems a nice article to be linked somewhere from here...

--Pablo D. Flores 11:45, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

That's an interesting point! I never thought much about it, but of course you're right that French-speakers dislocate (both right and left) much more than English-speakers do. I see how that could be viewed almost as polypersonal.

It's a strange thought, though, and I can't help but feel that the underlying construction is different. I'll need time to wrap my mind around it.

Some of this explanation should definitely go in the article, BTW. :-)

Ruakh 21:34, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Morphemic Glosses?

   v-khed-av "I see him"
   g-mal-av-en "they hide you (sing. or pl.)"
   g-i-mal-av-en "they hide it from you (sing. or pl.)"
   gv-i-ket-eb-s "he is doing it for us"
   a-chuk-eb-s "he will give it to him (as a gift)"
   mi-u-lots-av-s "he will congratulate him on it" 

1. [morphemically divided original language text]
2. [morpheme-by-morpheme gloss]
3. [English translation]