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Pronouns in Nanosyntax a Typological Study of the Containment Structure of Pronominals

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Pronouns in Nanosyntax a Typological Study of the Containment Structure of Pronominals Pronouns in Nanosyntax A typological study of the containment structure of pronominals *Name* *Student number* rMA Linguistics Universiteit van Amsterdam 24-06-2015 Acknowledgements This paper is the result of my Research Project Linguistics, the final part of my Research Master Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. In following this rMA, I had the opportunity to study the fields that I am interested in the most: linguistic theory and typology. These two fields are fused in this research project, that was sometimes challenging but more often fun to work on. I would like to thank all my teachers and fellow students, in particular my co-students at the rMA, for the educational and fun experience this rMA has been. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to two of my teachers: Eva van Lier and Jan Don. I would like to thank Eva van Lier, for introducing me to the field of typology and for being an inspirational teacher. Besides that, I am grateful for her comments on earlier versions of this paper which made me evaluate my own work critically. I am most grateful to Jan Don, for making me realise that linguistics is the most interesting field of study, for his valuable lessons about linguistics and academic research, and for his faith in my capacities. Above all, I want to thank him for being the most inspirational, encouraging and helpful supervisor of this thesis project that a student could wish for. i Abbreviations 1 1st person 2 2nd person 3 3rd person ABS absolutive ACC accusative ALIEN alienable possession C common gender COM comitative D dual DAT dative DEM demonstrative DTLZ determinalizer ERG ergative EXCL exclusive F feminine gender GEN genitive INALIEN inalienable possession INCL inclusive INST instrumental M masculine gender MHG middle high grade polite form (used in Nepali) N neuter gender NMLZ nominalizer NOM nominative OBJ object OBL oblique P polite PL plural POSS possessive SBJ subject SG singular In the text, languages are referred to in the following template: 'Language (family; location; reference)' ii Pronouns in Nanosyntax A typological study of the containment structure of pronominals *Name* Abstract This paper describes a typological study of pronominal elements, including personal pronouns (I, me etc.), possessive pronouns (my etc.) and nominalized possessives (mine etc.). It aims to confirm a previous analysis of Dutch pronominals (Don et al. 2015) cross-linguistically. In this analysis, pronouns are complex forms that mirror an underlying containment structure. This structure is such that the accusative contains the nominative, the genitive contains the accusative, the possessive contains the genitive and the nominalized possessive contains the possessive. The results from the typological data argue indeed for an extension of this containment structure: it is not a structure underlying Dutch, but underlying all pronominals in human language. Besides this, it will be shown that this containment structure can be accounted for in a nanosyntactic framework (cf. Starke 2009; Caha 2009). Case studies of the implementation of the containment structure in nanosyntax are provided to strenghten this claim. Keywords: nanosyntax; containment hierarchy; typology; pronouns; possessives 1 Introduction Whilst studying the Dutch pronominal system, Don et al. (2015) observed patterns of formal (phonological) similarities between the different pronominal and possessive forms. In their analysis, they do not only study the standard possessive pronouns as in (1a), but also the 'nominalized possessives' in (1b-c). (1) a. Dit is mijn boek this is 1SG.POSS book 'This is my book.' b. Dit is de mijne this is the 1SG.POSS.NMLZ 'This is mine.' (Litt.: "This is the mine.") c. Dit is mijnes this is 1SG.POSS.NMLZ 'This is mine.' This formal correspondence is not acknowledged in grammatical descriptions of Dutch (cf. Broekhuis & Den Dikken 2012; Haeseryn et al. 1997), where personal and possessive pronouns 1 are treated as different paradigms. However, Don et al. (2015) claim that the personal and possessive pronouns (including the nominalized possessives) form in fact a single paradigm. They argue that the different pronominal and possessive forms can be analysed as complex forms that are built from each other. In their analysis there is an underlying 'containment structure' (cf. Bobaljik 2012), such that the accusative formally contains the nominative, the genitive contains the accusative, the possessive contains the genitive and the nominalized possessive contains the possessive, as in (2). (2) [[[[[nominative] accusative] genitive] possessive] nominalized possessive] Don et al. (2015) explain this containment structure by implementing their analysis of Dutch pronouns in the theory of nanosyntax (Starke 2009; Caha 2009). This leads to a nanosyntactic account of the Dutch pronominal system. However, previous work on both containment structures and nanosyntax has cross-linguistic implications, claiming explicitly that their generalizations hold across all human languages. This raises the question as to whether the analysis of Dutch pronouns by Don et al. (2015) can be confirmed cross-linguistically. This paper aims at answering this question. Based on data from a genetically balanced sample of fifty languages, it is tested whether the containment structure of pronouns applies cross-linguistically. As in the work by Don et al. (2015), this paper studies pronouns, possessives and nominalized possessives. I will argue that the analysis of Dutch can indeed be extended cross-linguistically, and that there is a universal containment structure underlying pronominals. Furthermore, I will show how this containment structure can be accounted for in a nanosyntactic framework. It is important to note that the claim of this paper is twofold. The first aim of this paper is to describe the containment structure of pronominal elements. Independent of a theoretical framework, the formal similarities between these elements can be established cross- linguistically. In itself this is an interesting and important typological conclusion. However, the second goal of this paper is to fit this statement in a theoretical framework. I will show that the cross-linguistic patterns follow naturally from a nanosyntactic account of the containment structure. This does not discard any other theoretical framework: that nanosyntax can account for the containment hierarchy does not mean that other frameworks cannot. In this paper, nanosyntax is shown to be a plausible framework to account for the data, but I explicitly do not want to claim that it is the compelling framework. This paper is structured as follows. The next section will describe the theoretical background, including the nanosyntactic framework and previous work on Dutch pronouns, and present the research question and hypotheses. Section 3 describes the methodology used and 2 section 4 gives a first description of the data. In section 5, the data are analysed with respect to the hypotheses and several case-studies are presented. Section 6 provides a conclusion and some points for discussion. 2 Theoretical Background Previous work on Dutch pronouns (Don et al. 2015) has shown that the patterns of formal similarity in Dutch can be accounted for in a nanosyntactic framework. This section will start with the observations on Dutch from Don et al. (2015), and will then show how these observations can be accounted for in a nanosyntactic analysis. This analysis leads to new research questions, hypothesis and predictions for a cross-linguistic study, that will be presented at the end of the section. 2.1 The empirical observation: Dutch pronouns The paradigm of Dutch personal and possessive pronouns, based on Broekhuis & Den Dikken (2012) and Weerman & Evers-Vermeul (2002), is given in table 1. A first observation that was made by Don et al. (2015) is that the paradigm contains many formal similarities between the different personal and possessive forms. For the first person singular for example, the object form mij 'me' and the possessive mijn 'my' are phonologically similar. All formal similarities in the paradigm are indicated by grey cells in the table. Nominative Accusative Possessive Nominalized Nominalized (Subject) (Object) possessive 1 possessive 2 ik mij mijn de mijne mijnes 1SG [ɪk] [mɛɪ] [mɛɪn] [də mɛɪnə] [mɛɪnəs] jij jou jouw de jouwe jouwes 2SG [jɛɪ] [jaʊ] [jaʊw] [də jaʊwə] [jaʊwəs] u u uw de uwe *uwes 2SG.P [y] [y] [yw] [də ywə] hij hem zijn de zijne zijnes 3SG.M [hɛɪ] [hɛm] [zɛɪn] [də zɛɪnə] [zɛɪnəs] zij haar haar de hare ?hares 3SG.F [zɛɪ] [ha:r] [ha:r] [də ha:rə] [ha:rəs] wij ons ons de onze onzes 1PL [wɛɪ] [ɔns] [ɔns] [də ɔnzə] [ɔnzəs] jullie jullie jullie *de jullie-e ?jullies 2PL [jʏli] [jʏli] [jʏli] [jʏlis] zij hun hun de hunne ?hunnes 3PL [zɛɪ] [hʏn] [hʏn] [də hʏnə] [hʏnəs] Table 1. Overview of personal and possessive pronouns in Dutch 3 The nominative pronoun is used in subject function. The accusative pronoun is used as direct object, indirect object and in prepositional phrases. Examples of this are shown in (3), and for the sake of completion, the examples of possessive constructions are repeated in (4). (3) a. Ik kus hem. 1SG.NOMkiss 3SG.ACC 'I kiss him.' b. Ik dans met hem. 1SG.NOMdance with 3SG.ACC 'I dance with him.' c. Ik geef hem een cadeau. 1SG.NOMgive 3SG.ACC a gift 'I give him a gift.' (4) a. Dit is mijn boek this is 1SG.POSS book 'This is my book.' b. Dit is de mijne this is the 1SG.POSS.NMLZ 'This is mine.' (Litt.: "This is the mine.") c. Dit is mijnes this is 1SG.POSS.NMLZ 'This is mine.' The examples in (4) show that a possessive pronoun in Dutch acts as determiner-element. It cannot be combined with other determiners (such as articles and demonstratives), precedes other prenominal elements and is always interpreted as definite (Weerman & Evers-Vermeul 2002: 313). The possessive pronoun can be nominalized with two different strategies in Dutch.
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