Surrey Linguistics Circle
Spring Semester 2010 Diary
Talks typically take place on a Thursday at the following time and in the following place, but note the not infrequent exceptions!
Time: 1.00 p.m. – 1.50 p.m.
Place: Room 55AC05, Guildford Campus.
Speaker: Dr Sebastian Fedden, SMG
Title: TBA
Date: Tuesday, March 30
Time: 1 pm
Speaker: Dr Tania Paciaroni, University of Zurich
Title: TBA
Date: Tuesday, May 11
Time: 1 pm
Past talks
Number and Aspect in Nen, a language of Papua New Guinea
Nicholas Evans, Australian National University
Pirahã and Portuguese: language contact, transfer and the question of complexity
Jeanette Sakel, UWE Bristol
Gender and person agreement in Cicipu Discourse: the role of topicality
Stuart McGill, School of Oriental and African Studies
Abstract
The Cicipu language (Kainji, Benue-Congo) of northwest Nigeria has the kind of robust noun class system familiar from the Bantu languages – gender agreement is found on a great many agreement targets inside and outside the noun phrase. The gender system has a number of interesting features in itself, such as the class 8 prefixes expressed simply by word-initial gemination. However this paper focuses on the alternation between the gender system and a separate paradigm, that of person agreement, based on a spoken Cicipu corpus of approximately 12,000 clauses. The two systems of agreement are in competition across a number of different targets, including not only verbs and pronouns, but also demonstratives, the article, and the copula.
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. Inanimate or animal participants normally trigger gender agreement, but 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 <em>discourse </em>topic (e.g. Dooley 2007) rather than sentence topic (e.g. Lambrecht 1994).
It is often assumed that anaphoric agreement (Bresnan and Mchombo 1987, Siewierska 1999) is necessarily “topical” agreement. However since both the gender and person subject prefixes are ambiguous agreement markers , and yet differ with respect to their discourse function, the Cicipu data supports Culy's (2000) contention that topicality should instead be treated as an independent dimension for the classification of agreement markers.
Enquiries to: Marina Chumakina m.tchoumakina@surrey.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1483 682843
