Cagliari, Italy 15-18 September 2003
ALT V Conference
Nina Sumbatova
Verbal person and inverse (some evidence of the East Caucasian languages).
NinaSumbatova@mtu-net.ru
The category of person (along with the categories of tense, modality, etc.) belongs to the finite (predicative) categories, which tie the new utterance to the discourse context.
Another category dealing with the person of the situation participants is that of direct/inverse (see, e.g. Givón 1994). This category estimates the relation between the agentivity of the participants and their position in the personal/animacy hierarchy as normal, i.e. direct (the agent is higher in the personal hierarchy than the patient), or inverse (the patient is higher than the agent). Though semantically close to person, the category of direct/inverse is prototypically non-finite, because it does not tie the referential situation either to the communicative situation nor to the discourse.
Being semantically close, the categories of person and direct/inverse are formally related in many languages.
In languages that have both verbal person and direct/inverse, the direct/inverse opposition is sometimes expressed by the choice of personal markers set (see, e.g., Guildea 1994 for the data of Carib).
In a number of languages there is only one of these categories, which shares some features of both verbal person and direct/inverse. The most evident case are the languages, where the personal agreement is controlled by the personal hierarchy (Kartvelian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, etc.). In the languages with the “pragmatic inverse” (in terms of Givón 1994), the category of direct/inverse expresses relative topicality of the participants, which can be treated as a feature of a finite category. Some languages with personal agreement do have formal devices of expressing “norm reversal”. In Hungarian, for instance, there are two sets of agreement markers (Maytinskaya 1955). One of them (traditionally called “object agreement” set) is used when the object of the verb is definite. However, this set is not used with the first and second person objects (though both of them are highly definite). Its absence can be treated as a case of “norm reversal” marking.
This paper mainly deals with the category of person in the East Caucasian languages. Though most languages of this group have no grammatical person marking, the ways and rules of expressing person in these languages are very diverse.
In most cases, person in the East Caucasian languages is undoubtedly a finite category. Since in nominal predicate sentences person markers can easily be added to nouns and attributes, person markers can be treated as universal morphemes modifying the whole sentence rather than the verb. In Lak, the category of person gives but little information on the relative position of the speech act participants. The personal agreement of verbs is frequently accompanied by elements of the inverse marking in Dargwa. Some TMA-forms of Dargwa include a suffix traditionally called “thematic element”. A closer look at the distribution of the thematic elements shows that their functions are very close to those of the direct/inverse marker. The element -i- appears when the agent is 1 or 2 person, the patient 3 person. In all other cases (except the case when both participants are third person) the verb is marked by the thematic element -u-. If we postulate for Dargwa the personal hierarchy (1, 2) > 3, then -i- marks the situation when the agent is higher than the patient, -u- marks the reverse situation.
The relation between person and direct/inverse in Dargwa shows some features that are generally typical for the relation of these semantically close categories:
1) direct/inverse markers are placed closer to the root than the morphemes coding person;
2) person can be a universal predicative category obligatory for a finite clause; direct/inverse is a verbal category; the functioning of these two categories differs in many respects:
a. direct/inverse marking is attested only in a part of TMA-forms; the finite category of person covers the majority of verbal forms and can be expressed also with nouns and attributes (in nominal predicate sentences);
b. predicative person markers are universal morphemes that can be separated from the predicate and cliticized to the focus of the sentence;
c. predicative person is present in assertive and interrogative clauses, direct/inverse –mainly in clauses expressing propositions without a truth value (conditional, concessive, subjunctive, optative, etc).