Gender and person agreement in Cicipu discourse
The Cicipu language (Kainji, Benue-Congo) of northwest Nigeria has the kind of robust noun class system characteristic of Benue-Congo languages - GENDER agreement is found on a great many agreement targets inside and outside the noun phrase. For a number of these targets, gender agreement is in competition with a separate paradigm, that of PERSON agreement. The dissertation focuses on the distribution of this alternation with respect to subject prefixes, object enclitics, and pronouns, based on a corpus of 12,000 clauses of spoken language. The alternation proves to be complex to describe, involving a constellation of lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors. In particular, both animacy and topicality are CONDITIONS (Corbett 2006) on agreement. While inanimate or animal participants normally trigger gender agreement, if they are topics then they may trigger person agreement. Likewise while human nouns typically trigger person agreement, this is not always the case, and gender agreement is more likely if the referent is of incidental importance to the discourse. Furthermore it is argued that this alternation is sensitive to discourse topic (e.g. Dooley 2007) rather than
McGill, Stuart John
Gender and person agreement in Cicipu discourse. The Cicipu language (Kainji, Benue-Congo) of northwest Nigeria has the kind of robust noun class system characteristic of Benue-Congo languages - GENDER agreement is found on a great many agreement targets inside and outside the noun phrase. For a number of these targets, gender agreement is in competition with a separate paradigm, that of PERSON agreement. The dissertation focuses on the distribution of this alternation with respect to subject prefixes, object enclitics, and pronouns, based on a corpus of 12,000 clauses of spoken language. The alternation proves to be complex to describe, involving a constellation of lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic factors. In particular, both animacy and topicality are CONDITIONS (Corbett 2006) on agreement. While inanimate or animal participants normally trigger gender agreement, if they are topics then they may trigger person agreement. Likewise while human nouns typically trigger person agreement, this is not always the case, and gender agreement is more likely if the referent is of incidental importance to the discourse. Furthermore it is argued that this alternation is sensitive to discourse topic (e.g. Dooley 2007) rather than
gender person agreement discourse language congo northwest nigeria kind robust noun class system characteristic congo languages gender agreement find great_many agreement target inside_outside noun_phrase number target gender agreement competition separate paradigm person agreement focus distribution alternation respect subject prefix object pronoun base_corpus clause spoken_language alternation prove complex describe involve constellation lexical phonological morphosyntactic semantic discourse pragmatic_factor particular conditions agreement animal participant normally trigger gender agreement topic may trigger person agreement likewise human noun typically trigger person agreement always case gender agreement likely referent incidental importance discourse furthermore argued alternation sensitive discourse topic rather