Re: Marking nouns with person?
| From: | Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, September 2, 2005, 8:16 |
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>
>Hi.
>I just finished Anna Siewierska's "Person", and I think I can
>summarize what that book had to say about this question in re
>natlangs.
>
>
Cool. I've skimmed through that book, but unfortunately I don't own it.
>In other words:
>In NatLangs, diachronically,
>it is far more common for a person-marked pronoun to be lost,
>and replaced by a 3rd-person noun,
>than for a noun to become marked with person.
>
>
What basically happened in my conlang is that 3rd person pronouns
started being used as a kind of article on nouns to mark gender (there
is a gender system). This is kindof important because the language was
developing verbal agreement which included gender and there is no case
system, so... but anyway, this has happened in some natlangs so I don't
think there's really a problem. But I didn't think it was too much of a
stretch to also include in the system markers for 1st and 2nd person
referrents also, given that 3rd person pronouns started being
consistently used with nouns. So the motivation for the system was more
or less gender marking, and the person agreement was just an accidental
extention to the system.
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