Cagliari, Italy  15-18 September 2003

ALT V Conference

Peter Schmidt

pschmidt@ldv.uni-trier.de

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest - both empirical and theoretical - in phenomena of suffix resumption, centering on the comparatively widespread double marking of possessor NPs, and on Australian Aboriginal resumptive case marking (‘double case’, ‘case stacking’), comprising, inter alia, case resumption of core arguments of the clause on other arguments/adjuncts.

The present paper is a contribution to this general topic, albeit with a different focus, in directing attention to resumptive marking of core arguments by gender/number/person agreement affixes, a phenomenon which, while sporadically attested elsewhere, has a conspicuous wider areal resp. genetic distribution in (i) NE Caucasian/(Non-Nakh) Daghestanian and (ii) Modern Indo-Aryan; cf. e.g. (agreement triggers: boldface, targets: underlining; (noun class) IV):

“she(II).ERG here-IV father-IV-DAT apples(IV).ABS(-PTC) IV-buy IV-AUX“

“She was buying apples for father here.” (Avar, Antsukh dialect; Kibrik 1985: 318),

“[him-OBL around-M.PL] 20 elephants(M).PL stand-M.PL were-M.PL”

“20 elephants stood around him.” (Marathi; Hook 1989).

The paper presents a detailed survey of the phenomenon in both groupings, by cataloguing its instances and extent in the languages under analysis, by examining, inter alia, grammatical functions and participant roles of both resumption triggers and resumption targets, grammatical agreement categories involved, word (sub)classes and lexical distribution of resumption targets, semantic liability to resumption, functions of resumption, and the interrelations of these properties, and by correlating the phenomena with the over-all grammatical architecture of the resp. languages.

Furthermore, Daghestanian and Indo-Aryan resumptive agreement is confronted with the better-studied Australian Aboriginal case, and wider functional and semantic parallels are explored, e.g. concerning adjectival (agreeing predicative) expression of ‘adverbial’ concepts.

Finally, the paper touches upon the diachronic aspect of the topic, by speculating on possible or plausible grammaticalization scenarios giving rise to the type of resumption under analysis. Here, Indo-Aryan is particularly rewarding, due to its time-depth of written record, which allows identification of historical sources, as well as courses, of development of non-case resumption, which can provide plausible partial models for an interpretation of the Daghestanian evidence, complementing what can be deduced from the ‘internal logic’ of Daghestanian grammatical design.

References:

Hook, P.: Natural Absolutivity in Indo-Aryan. In: Carlson & al. (eds.): Proceedings of the 4th Meeting of the Pacific

     Linguistics Conference. University of Oregon, Dept. of Linguistics, 1989, 256-265.

Kibrik, A.E.: Toward a typology of ergativity. In: Nichols & Woodbury (eds.): Grammar inside and outside the clause.

     Cambridge 1985, 363-413.

Nordlinger, R.: Constructive Case. Evidence from Australian Languages. Stanford 1998.

Plank, F. (ed.): Double Case. Agreement by Suffixaufnahme. Oxford 1995.