Features of Person

Abstract

A proposal that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. This book offers a significant reconceptualization of the person system in natural language. The authors, leading scholars in syntax and its interfaces, propose that person features do not have inherent content but are used to navigate a “person space” at the heart of every pronominal expression. They map the journey of person features in grammar, from semantics through syntax to the system of morphological realization. Such an in-depth cross-modular study allows the development of a theory in which assumptions made about the behavior of a given feature in one module bear on possible assumptions about its behavior in other modules. The authors' new theory of person, built on a sparse set of two privative person features, delivers a typologically adequate inventory of persons; captures the semantics of personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and R-expressions; accounts for aspects of their syntactic behavior; and explains patterns of person-related syncretism in the realization of pronouns and inflectional endings. The authors discuss numerous observations from the literature, defend a number of theoretical choices that are either new or not generally accepted, and present novel empirical findings regarding phenomena as different as honorifics, number marking, and unagreement.

Restrictions on “Low” person agreement in Dutch specificational copular constructions

“…Second, despite the fact that the thermometer technique is sensitive enough to pick up differences in degrees of acceptability/unacceptability, we did not find any effect of syncretism, contra theories of multiple agreement in SCCs (e.g. Ackema and Neeleman 2018). These two aspects of the data are consistent with our own analysis of how agreement works in SCCs (Hartmann and Heycock 2018a).…”

“…it was I/you.SG that the whisky stolen has 'It was me/you who stole the whisky.' (Ackema and Neeleman 2018) In Hartmann and Heycock (2018c), however, we found that there is considerable variation between and within native speakers concerning number agreement in examples like (8). This therefore gives rise to the question of whether there might in fact also be more variation in person agreement than suggested in the works just cited.…”

The third person gap in adnominal pronoun constructions

“…Note that this is not an argument against the PDA-and PF-based analysis of the third person gap proposed here for English, but simply suggests that a third person gap may also arise in different configurations. It is also not a reason to adopt an alternative analysis of unagreement over that based on the structure in (68), since neither Choi's (2014a) specifier-based proposal nor the view that APCs in these (and other) languages involve apposition (Ackema & Neeleman 2018) offer an obvious explanation for the third person gap in these languages.…”

On the syntax of addressee in imperatives: insights from allocutivity

“…To explain the above-mentioned usages of je, I follow the analysis of the French 2nd person plural pronoun vous as proposed in Ackema & Neeleman (2018). Like je, vous can be employed for a plural addressee who may be honorific or non-honorific.…”

“…Additionally, vous can be employed for a singular honorific addressee. Ackema & Neeleman (2018) propose that in syntax, vous consists of the following featural specification: [2 PL HON]. 21 To explain the availability of the singular, honorific addressee reading, the plural number feature on vous is argued to get deleted at LF, in the presence of honorific feature value, as in (92).…”