Volume 56, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Person and gender in discourse: An empirical crosslinguistic perspective, Guest Editors: Diana Forker and Geoffrey Haig

Agreement is among the most widely-researched issues in theoretical linguistics. In this introduction, we critically review some of the key issues, focussing on typological approaches to agreement, the role of agreement in establishing and maintaining reference, and the emergence of agreement diachronically. We point to the interplay of semantic, pragmatic and syntactic factors in shaping the way agreement systems function, and emphasize the need for more usage-based research in understanding the impact of extra-syntactic factors. We also argue for greater attention to lesser-researched languages, particularly those where features other than person are central in agreement relations. Finally, we offer a short synopsis of the contributions to this issue.

While the grammaticalization of subject agreement appears to be a diachronic near-universal, there has been little agreement on usage-based motivations for this crosslinguistic tendency. Three usage-based approaches – Givón’s NP detachment under topicalization, Ariel’s accessibility theory, and a set of accounts in terms of frequency-driven morphologization – are examined here in the light of corpus data from the Oceanic language Vera’a. The high frequency of overt pronouns in 1st and 2nd person subjects, as well as formal reduction in some 1st-person pronouns, observed in the corpus seem suggestive of grammaticalization of subject agreement in speech-act participants (SAPs). Yet, the remaining variation between pronominal and zero forms and the distribution of reduced forms do not appear to reflect functional factors in the way of topicalization or accessibility. Overall, frequency-driven accounts appear to fare better in explaining the Vera’a facts, in particular the distribution of 1st person zero subjects and the formal reduction of 1st person subject pronouns. The overall high levels of subject pronouns, however, are not fully accounted for by any of the three approaches; I suggest that, in addition to genre effects, the deictic and shifting nature of reference to speech-act participants may be a relevant factor.

While the grammaticalization of person agreement is a widely-cited and apparently uncontroversial topos of grammaticalization theory, the striking differences in the outcome of subject pronoun, and object pronoun grammaticalization, remain unexplained, and the relevant literature continues to assume a unified grammaticalization pathway. This paper argues that the grammaticalization of object pronouns is fundamentally different to that of subject pronouns. More specifically, although object pronouns may be rapid early grammaticalizers, often losing prosodic independence and cliticizing to a verbal head, they do not advance further to reach the stage of obligatory agreement markers typical of subject agreement. Typically, object markers remain at the stage of Differential Object Indexing, where their realization is conditioned by a bundle of semantic and pragmatic factors exhibiting close parallels to those operative in Differential Object Marking. Evidence from language typology, and from the diachrony of person markers across two millennia of Iranian languages, is adduced to back up these claims. Thus the widely-assumed grammaticalization cline for the grammaticalization of agreement needs to be reconsidered; for object agreement, there is evidently an attractor state, that of Differential Object Indexing, beyond which object agreement seldom proceeds. Finally, explanations grounded in discourse data are proposed, which also account for why obligatory object agreement in the category of person is so rare, while gender and number agreement for objects is far less constrained.

Grammaticalization is often considered to reflect frequent co-occurrence of certain elements in certain positions. This paper tests the frequency-based account of the grammaticalization of person agreement, comparing the grammaticalization of person agreement in Tabasaran, a Lezgic language, with the syntax of free pronouns in closely related Agul. Our assumption is that the situation in Agul, where person marking is not grammaticalized, approximately reflects a diachronic stage prior to the grammaticalization of person marking in closely related Tabasaran. We find little evidence in support of a frequency-based approach, at least when frequency is treated in terms of global frequencies. We do, however, identify a highly frequent verb that already in Agul appears to regularly associate with the pattern that has generalized to become person agreement in Tabasaran. We suggest specific information structural configurations associated with this verb, which have provided the impetus for the development. More generally, we show that while global measures of frequency may not yield the correct predictions, investigating the syntactic constructions associated with individual lexical items may be more revealing, and provide a more realistic model for reconstructing the paths of syntactic change involving the generalization of existing and quite local patterns.

Ingush (Nakh-Daghestanian, Caucasus) offers a variety of contexts with contrast, variation, or speaker choice between agreement and non-agreement and between overt and null arguments, which provide speakers many opportunities to manipulate agreement and argument marking. Ingush discourse is therefore a good test case for the plausible hypothesis that agreement and overt arguments are in complementary distribution. I survey referential density in a corpus of about 5000 words and find no evidence of either straightforward complementarity or expected incidental effects of such complementarity, and some evidence going against it. Some additional, orthogonal distributions were evident, showing that the corpus is large enough to reveal discourse effects if they were present. Ingush agreement is in gender, not person, and there is an arbitrary and strictly lexical bifurcation of verbs into those that do and those that do not have gender agreement; these typological points raise comparative and theoretical issues of interest.

Person and gender are typical agreement features within the clause, and crosslinguistically they are frequently part of one and the same agreement system and even expressed through the same morphological exponents. Some theories even go so far as to claim that person and gender agreement on different targets, e.g., verbs and adjectives, are instances of one and the same agreement phenomenon. This paper discusses gender and person agreement in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Lak. It shows that the two agreement systems are formally and functionally completely separated from each other. Corpus data from Lak does not prove that gender agreement in this language is used to establish reference. Therefore it should rather be treated as concord, that is, similar to modifier agreement within the noun phrase.