Language Documentation & Linguistic Theory 2 - Hans Rausing ...

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STUART MCGILL(9) (a) Ø-kùrì'áanì v-ú-'ɔ̀pɔ̀ z-záNC8-Koran AG8-FUT-hold\IRR NC8-person‘the Koran will take hold of someone’(b) Ø-kùrì'áanì w-ú-ɔ̀pɔ̀ z-záNC8-Koran 3S-FUT-hold\IRR NC8-person‘the Koran will take hold of someone’In summary, person agreement is possible if one of the following threeprerequisites is met: (i) there is no subject NP, (ii) there is a subject NP but it isunspecified for gender, (iii) there is an NC8 subject NP and the verb stem isvowel-initial. Otherwise, only gender agreement can occur.4.3. Cicipu agreement conditionsAgreement conditions apply when more than one possibility for agreement exists.In order to determine the relevant conditions for Cicipu I examined thedistribution of the two different types of agreement over a multi-genre interlinearcorpus of 12,000 clauses. This consists partly of texts collected through a projectfunded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Programme,and partly of texts collected specifically to investigate this alternation. Aqualitative analysis of subject agreement in these texts reveals that animacy anddiscourse topicality are two independent conditions influencing the alternationbetween gender and person agreement, in those environments where both canoccur.4.3.1. Inanimate referentsReferents which are both inanimate and non-topical rarely function as the subjectsof clauses. On occasion, however, anaphoric chains of inanimate non-topicalsubject referents do occur, in which case they are without exception coded usinggender agreement. Inanimate topical referents may trigger person agreement,although they do so rarely. Examples of inanimate referents triggering personagreement include beer, gin, tobacco, the Bible, the Koran, palm-wine, fishtrapping, trees, a lake, a fence, and clothing. In each case the referent is adiscourse topic.4.3.2. AnimalsNon-topical animal referents are without fail encoded using gender agreement. Incontrast, topical animals are very often indexed using person agreement, and infact the corpus does not contain any examples of topical animal referents whichfail to progress from gender-marking to person-marking. Thus animals clearlyreflect the importance of topicality. The following two examples, from separatetexts, form a ‘minimal pair’. The first example (10) is from a text about monkeys,the second (11) from one about dogs. Common to both texts is that they include asection about a dog chasing another animal: the monkey in the first instance, and ahare in the second. The crucial difference is that the dog is not a discourse topic in227
LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND LINGUISTIC THEORY 2the first excerpt, but it is in the second. Observe the contrasting means by whichthe dog is referred to in each of the examples 8 :(10) ǹ w-ǐndà mà-wáa mò-wṍsõ̀ / hálì m-ǔuwà kù-sṹuand 3S-see\RLS NC4-dog AG4-bark\RLS even AG4-feel\RLS NC9-smellkwéevì mò'úngònò mɔ̀dɔńìvì nìiláɗí /kw-éevì mò-'úngò-nò mɔ̀-dɔńɔ̀=vì n=ì-láɗí /AG9-3S.POSS AG4-rise\RLS-VENT AG4-follow\RLS=3S.PRO and=NC3-speed‘if it sees the dog bark / it feels its smell it gets up and it follows it fast’tò, n=ù-súmà / ù-náhà ù-gítà-nà mázámázáOK and=3S-run\RLS 3S-leave\RLS NC7-return-VENT hurriedly‘OK, when it runs / it won’t come back in a hurry’(11) tò, lóokàcí wú-nà mà-wáa, ǹ mɔ̀-dɔńɔ̀ mà-díyá /OK time 3S- NC4-dog and AG4-follow\RLS NC4-hareARTn=ù-húnà mà-díyá á↓=ká-dábá /and=3S-kill\RLS NC4-hare LOC=NC1-bush‘OK, some dogs [lit. ‘a certain dog’], when it follows a hare / when it killsa hare in the bush /’ù-sì-ràa cé 'ũ̂ / ù-sì-ràa cé /3S-HAB-eat NEG there 3S-HAB-eat NEGsée ú-tòonò ǹ m-é /unless 3S-come back home\IRR with AG4-PRO‘it doesn’t eat [it] there/ it doesn’t eat [it] / then it comes back homewith it /’In (10) the non-topical dog is indexed by subject gender agreement (mA-), whilethe topical monkey is indexed with person agreement (in a variety ofmorphosyntactic positions). In (11) the topical dog is at first marked with genderagreement, but then it graduates to person agreement. This is an instance of ageneral property of discourse-topical referents, i.e. they undergo a codingprogression from LEXICAL NP > GENDER AGREEMENT > PERSON AGREEMENT. Thehare, on the other hand, is only marked with gender agreement. It is important tonote that the propositions encoded in several of the individual clauses in (10) areabout the dog, and so the dog qualifies as a sentence topic 9 . However the dog in8 Bold references are to the dog, underlined references are to the monkey and the hare.9 See Lambrecht (1994: 149) for analysis of a similar example.228
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