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Full-Text Articles in Morphology
'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay
'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory Of Person, Kaden T. Holladay
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation investigates the morpho-syntactic makeup of personful expressions
in natural language; special focus is given to referential uses of personal pronouns. The central thesis guiding the inquiry is that utterance contexts, which serve to fix the semantic values of person indexicals, are specifically a kind of centered situation. This treatment of contexts puts restrictions on what kinds of person features are definable, and the resulting inventory of such features (in conjunction with independently-motivated pragmatic constraints on the use of referential expressions) provides a novel explanation for the typology of person systems.
Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly
Person-Based Prominence In Ojibwe, Christopher Hammerly
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as "first" and "second" (the "local" persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time? The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into …