A Morphosyntactic Account of Indexical Pronouns
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The Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Person A Morphosyntactic Account of Indexical Pronouns Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 5775 Trans 10 e-mail: [email protected] 3512 JK Utrecht http://www.lotschool.nl The Netherlands Cover illustration: Bettina Gruber & Alexis Dimitriadis ISBN: 978-94-6093-123-9 NUR: 616 Copyright © 2013 Bettina Gruber. All rights reserved. The Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Person A Morphosyntactic Account of Indexical Pronouns De spatio-temporele dimensies van Persoon Een morfosyntactische verklaring van indexicale pronomina (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof. dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 14 november 2013 's ochtends te 10.30 uur door Bettina Gruber geboren op 17 mei 1975 te Gmunden, Oostenrijk Promotores: Prof.dr. N.F.M. Corver Prof.dr. L.C.J. Barbiers Co-promotor: Dr. J.M. van Koppen F¨urmeine Mama und meinen Papa Contents List of Tables . xi Acknowledgements . xv Abbreviations . xxi I Introduction 1 1 What This Thesis Is About . .1 1.1 The Main Research Questions . .2 1.2 The Hypothesis . .3 2 Person, Deictic Space, and Indexicality . .5 2.1 A Few Notes on the Terminology . .6 2.2 Some Traditional Issues of Indexicality . .7 2.3 Deictic and Grammatical Person . .9 2.4 Reconsidering the Category Person . 18 3 Summary and Outlook . 20 II Analysis: a First Outline 25 1 Setting the Stage . 25 2 The Internal Structure of Indexical Pronouns . 26 2.1 The Nominal Component: MAN . 28 2.2 The Spatial Component I: Relational Head ±AT . 29 2.3 The Spatial Component II: Situation Variable . 31 2.4 The Temporal Component: TIME in D . 33 2.5 Pronominal Spell-Out . 37 3 The External Structure of the Clause . 38 3.1 TIMEs as Referential Arguments . 39 3.2 Putting the Pieces Together . 45 4 A Note on Third Person and Related Issues . 47 5 Summary . 51 viii III Restriction by Eventuality Time: Blackfoot 53 1 Setting the Stage . 53 1.1 Some Background on Blackfoot . 58 2 The Core Data: Person Proclitics . 64 2.1 The Basic Paradigm . 65 2.2 The Puzzle of the Person Proclitics . 68 3 The Internal and External Syntax . 70 3.1 The AtP/DP Distinction . 71 3.2 Putting the Pieces Together . 77 4 Proclitics in the Nominal Domain . 81 4.1 A Few Notes on Possessive Constructions . 82 4.2 The Internal Syntax of Blackfoot Possessors . 85 4.3 The External Syntax of Blackfoot Possessors . 86 5 Proclitics in the Verbal Domain . 98 5.1 The Blackfoot Perfect and Simple Past . 99 5.2 Preliminary Additional Support: Modality . 109 6 Summary . 112 IV Restriction by Utterance Time: English, German, and Dutch 115 1 Setting the Stage . 115 2 The Core Data: Generic Second Person . 119 2.1 Data Collection: Methodology and Overview . 122 2.2 Standard German and Standard English . 126 2.3 Dutch . 131 2.4 The Broader Context: Some Notes on Genericity . 134 3 The Internal Syntax . 136 3.1 Dutch Indexical Pronouns . 136 3.2 Standard English and German Indexical Pronouns . 140 3.3 Genericity and Temporality: Independent Support . 143 4 The External Syntax . 146 4.1 Syntactic Restrictions on Generic Second Person . 146 4.2 Binding-theoretic Status . 149 4.3 Putting the Pieces Together . 153 5 Two Related Phenomena . 157 5.1 Second Person Pronouns Referring to the Speaker . 157 5.2 First Person Impersonals . 160 6 Factoring in Blackfoot . 161 6.1 Blackfoot and Generics . 161 6.2 Germanic and Restricted Relations . 163 6.3 Crosslinguistic Variation . 164 7 Summary . 165 Appendix to Chapter IV . 167 ix V Locating Person 169 1 Setting the Stage . 169 2 Location in the Pronoun . 171 2.1 Historic Predecessors . 174 2.2 More on the Nominal Component MAN . 176 2.3 The Content of AtP: Spatial Relation and Information 179 3 Morphological Evidence . 185 3.1 The General Issue of Morphological Evidence . 185 3.2 The Possession-Location Connection . 188 3.3 Armenian . 191 3.4 Italian . 198 4 Conclusions . 204 VI Conclusion 205 1 Summary . 205 2 Avenues for Future Research . 209 2.1 Spatial Relations . 209 2.2 Honorifics . 211 2.3 Sign Languages . 212 Bibliography . 215 Samenvatting in het Nederlands . 241 List of Tables I.1 φ-features across syntactic categories . 12 I.2 Italian oblique pronouns and spatial adverbs........... 15 I.3 Turkish personal pronouns and demonstratives......... 16 II.1 Pronoun type diagnostics (D´echaine and Wiltschko 2002:410) . 27 III.1 Blackfoot proclitics I . 56 III.2 Blackfoot direct/inverse markers . 63 III.3 Blackfoot proclitics II . 69 III.4 Independent Blackfoot pronouns . 88 IV.1 Summary of questionnaire results on second person generics . 124 IV.2 Blackfoot proclitics . 162 IV.3 Second person pronouns in English, German, and Dutch . 165 V.1 Russian fusional case and number morphology (Comrie 1981:44) 188 V.2 Armenian deictic expressions . 192 V.3 Italian oblique pronouns (Ferrazzano 2003:2) . 198 Sie sind so jung, so vor allem Anfang, und ich m¨ochteSie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungel¨ostein Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie B¨ucher,die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden k¨onnen, weil Sie sie nicht leben k¨onnten. Und es handelt sich darum, alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allm¨ahlich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein. Rainer Maria Rilke Briefe an einen jungen Dichter Vierter Brief, 1903 You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. [Translated by Joan M. Burnham, Novato: New World Library, 2000] Acknowledgements manchmal denkst du: nur noch der n¨achsteschritt geht. wenn du das oft genug gedacht hast, hast du's auf einmal geschafft! my ever so wise niece Mirjam Quite likely, these pages will be the most read part of the entire dissertation. So their content should be smart, complete, coherent, witty, and fun to read. Pretty much what is also expected from the rest of the book. But as opposed to the dissertation itself, I am trying to accomplish this task while my one year old is banging on my screen and without those numerous people who provided inspiration, help, support, feedback, encouragement, and distraction along the way. Therefore, please accept my apologies if you find the acknowledgements none of the above and, more importantly, if your name ought to be there but isn't. I assure you, this has everything to do with terrible forgetfulness and nothing with ungratefulness. Three people I could not possibly forget to thank are the ones who were involved in my project from the very beginning and held out until the bitter end (well, they kind of had to, but still, I am not taking it for granted): my supervisors Norbert Corver, Sjef Barbiers, and Marjo van Koppen. Norbert, thank you for always having an open door and for all your detailed comments on every single piece of writing I gave you. Now, whenever I embark on an- other writing adventure, you are constantly in the back of my mind saying: \Be more explicit!" Sjef, thank you for making me think harder, even when I thought it wasn't possible anymore. And for helping me towards the techni- cal implementation that I always wanted but thought impossible. You never failed to see the bigger picture and point me to it whenever necessary. Marjo, you contributed to this dissertation on so many levels from the very begin- ning that it's impossible to fully express my gratitude. Thank you for all the hours of discussing my analysis, for all the questions and ideas you came up xvi with, for your moral support, for helping with the Dutch translation, and, last but not least, for believing in me and always reassuring me when I needed it. You never seemed to get tired of listening to me (and if you did, you never showed it), whether I complained or shared excitement or had embarrassingly stupid linguistic questions. Oh, and the flowers! Who else gets sent a bunch of keep-going-flowers from their supervisor? Besides this strong board of supervisors, I was extremely lucky to have one more person to discuss my work with on a regular basis: From very early on, Alexis Dimitriadis was not only willing but also happy to listen to my ideas, struggles, and questions. Your paraphrases often made me see what I was actually trying to say, your explanations made many a semantic concept clearer, and your readiness to think outside the box always encouraged me. Thank you! A little further into the project, during my visit at the University of British Columbia in Spring 2010, I was extremely lucky to meet Heather Bliss. I'll never forget when you came up to me after my talk in Vancouver and said: \I think Blackfoot does exactly what you argue for." Never could I have imagined the consequences of this short statement.