Re: Marking nouns with person?

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Henrik Theiling <theiling@A...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> "ruittenb@t..." <ruittenb@t...> writes:
> > This makes me wonder..
> > Is there any language that marks nouns with
> > person? E.g.:
> >
> > The man-2SG is-2SG eating.
> > = You, the man, are eating.
> >
> > The president-1SG is-1SG talking to you.
> > = I, the president, am talking
> > to you.
>
> Chris Bates' long-stalled-very-slowly-developing conlang does
> this. :-)  I am thinking about borrowing it into S11.
>
> Wrt. natlangs, I don't know.
>
> **Henrik
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.
Person is always used for highly-accessible entities; those in the
spotlight, on-stage, or, in some cases, waiting in the wings; (in
very particular and idiosyncratic circumstances it might be used for
continuing characters, as, for instance, the servants of a high-
ranking household might use "He" to mean the lord of the manor if
there is no other antecedent to hand.)
Thus "person" always means either the speaker, the addressee, or
somebody else; in some languages, "somebody else" can split
between "the one we've been talking about" and "someone else
entirely".
Nouns are generally used when some kind of definite description, or
at least a situationally unique identifier, is needed.  Therefore
nouns are inherently 3rd person, unless certain exceptions obtain.
Nouns are often used in place of personal pronouns out of politeness.
In European languages, frequently this was a possessive phrase;
one referred to another as "Your Honor" rather than as "you", for
example, and then one would say "Your Honor looks well this morning"
instead of "you look well this morning", so that 2nd-person forms end
up replaced by 3rd-person forms.  In effect this is how the "Usted"
of Spanish and the "U" of Dutch came about, although I don't know
that the verb-agreement is 3rd person.
If one addresses the Pope in French, one ends up speaking to him as
3rd-person singular feminine, because "Holiness" is singular and
feminine in French.
In English we have "Your Majesty" for Kings and Emperors, "Your
Grace" for Dukes, "Your Worship" for some British judges and "Your
Honor" for American judges and mayors, etc.
In South Asian and Southeast Asian and Insular Southeast Asian
languages which have a lot of honorifics, "slave" has become the
first-person (noun or pronoun?) and something like "servant of
Buddha", if I remember correctly (which may not be the case), has
become the second-person (noun or pronoun?).  In others, "soles of
the feet" (short for, "the one under the soles of the feet of whom
this speaker is") has become 2nd-person and "hair of the head" (short
for some phrase elevating the listener above the speaker) has become
1st-person.

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.

-----

I don't remember where I read it anymore, but;
I once read that "Person" is really more a category of the Verb
(in that it is something the Verb has to agree with)
than it is of the verb's arguments.
I think in a thoroughly head-marking language, Person also might be
something that gets marked on Adpositions.

-----

But, in any case, if Siewierska's accessibility-based analysis is
correct, it is easy to see why Person would go with Pronouns and not
with Nouns;  both Pronouns and Person are for highly-accessible
referents, whereas Nouns can be used for nearly any referent
whatsoever.

Tom H.C. in MI

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