Referential hierarchies: A new look at some historical and typological patterns
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Abstract
This paper proposes a diachronic typology for the various patterns that have been referred to as Hierarchical Alignment or Inverse Alignment. Previous typological studies have tried to explain such patterns as grammatical reflections of a universal Referential Hierarchy, in which first person outranks second person outranks third person and humans outrank other animates outrank inanimates. However, our study shows that most of the formal properties of hierarchy-sensitive constructions are essentially predictable from their historical sources. We have identified three sources for hierarchical person marking, three for direction marking, two for obviative case marking, and one for hierarchical constituent ordering. These sources suggest that there is more than one explanation for hierarchical alignment: one is consistent with Givón’s claim that hierarchical patterns are a grammaticalization of generic topicality; another is consistent with DeLancey’s claim that hierarchies reflect the deictic distinction between present (1/2) and distant (3) participants; another is simply a new manifestation of a common asymmetrical pattern, the use of zero marking for third persons. More importantly, the evolution of hierarchical grammatical patterns does not reflect a consistent universal ranking of participants – at least in those cases where we can see (or infer) historical stages in the evolution of these properties, different historical stages appear to reflect different hierarchical rankings of participants, especially first and second person. This leads us to conclude that the diversity of hierarchical patterns is an artifact of grammatical change, and that in general, the presence of hierarchical patterns in synchronic grammars is not somehow conditioned by some more general universal hierarchy.
Acknowledgments
For support during the conceptualization and writing of this article, we gratefully acknowledge the support of the EuroCORES / EuroBABEL Collaborative Research Project Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax, and to our colleagues in that project, especially Balthasar Bickel, Katharina Haude, and Anna Siewierska†. Spike Gildea also acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation, grant no. BCS-0936684 and from the Collegium de Lyon. For their many thoughtful and stimulating comments on earlier versions of this work, we thank Katharina Haude, Antoine Guillaume, Alena Witzlack, and Françoise Rose; comments from two anonymous reviewers were also quite helpful. Any remaining mistakes are our own.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Referential hierarchies and alignment: An overview
- Inverse and symmetrical voice: On languages with two transitive constructions
- Referential hierarchies: A new look at some historical and typological patterns
- Decomposing hierarchical alignment: Co-arguments as conditions on alignment and the limits of referential hierarchies as explanations in verb agreement
- Referential and lexical factors in alignment variation of trivalent verbs
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Referential hierarchies and alignment: An overview
- Inverse and symmetrical voice: On languages with two transitive constructions
- Referential hierarchies: A new look at some historical and typological patterns
- Decomposing hierarchical alignment: Co-arguments as conditions on alignment and the limits of referential hierarchies as explanations in verb agreement
- Referential and lexical factors in alignment variation of trivalent verbs
