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Person markers in Gutob

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Published/Copyright: September 2, 2015

Abstract

Gutob is notorious for its variable placement of agreement markers. Gutob has independent pronouns and, for first and second persons, postverbal pronominal clitics which function as subject agreement markers. The placement of the pronominal clitics is quite complex, and has not been studied extensively. Pronominal clitics cannot only attach to verbs, but also to certain adverbs preceding the predicate. Furthermore, the placement of pronominal clitics within the verb complex varies considerably between different auxiliary constructions. The aim of this article is to present a new analysis of person markers in Gutob. Firstly, a discussion of the placement of person markers in sentences with different types of predicates will be given. Secondly, person markers at different positions will be compared on the basis of co-occurrence possibilities and morphosyntactic criteria. It will be argued that person markers in sentence-initial and postverbal position fall into two separate categories: independent pronouns and agreement markers. However, preverbal person markers cannot be assigned to either category, as they share features of both.

List of Abbreviations

1

First person

2

Second person

3

Third person

ACT

Active

AUX

Auxiliary

DET

Determiner

ECHO

Echo word

EMPH

Emphatic

FUT

Future

IMP

Imperative

HAB

Habitual

HON

Honorific

LOC

Locative

MID

Middle

NPST

Non-past

OBJ

Object

PL

Plural

PROG

Progressive

PST

Past

SEQ

Sequential converb

SG

Singular

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dabney Grewe, Uta Reinöhl and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Published Online: 2015-9-2
Published in Print: 2015-9-1

©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton

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