Re: Person marking on nouns

Muke Tever wrote at 2005-09-03 10:58:02 (-0600)
 > Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
 > >  > The use of these clitics on the first and second persons--outside
 > >  > of pronouns, where they are frequent--is admittedly rare,
 > >
 > > Not rare, _unknown_.  Totally ungrammatical in any dialect I'm
 > > familiar with, or can even imagine, really.
 >
 > Your example "I, the president, am talking to you" would
 > _invariably_ be spoken that way, barring special emphasis on
 > "am". It merely can't be written that way--in writing the
 > apposition must be set off by commas, and "-'m" can't stand on its
 > own so "president, 'm" is disallowed.
 >

Mmmm, possibly.  There's not a lot of phonetic difference there, now
that I think about it - the difference between "I'm" and "I am" with
unstressed "am" is quite slight (and it's uncertain what sound "'m" is
really supposed to represent, outside its orthographically sanctioned
environment).

In any case, that's not the point.  Even if it is a clitic in that
example, it's attaching to an NP headed by a pronoun, not the noun
"president".

 > > In any case, the more you go beyond the original construction
 > > (e.g. by considering pronouns), the more clear it is that these
 > > aren't person/number affixes, but clitic copulas, and moreover
 > > the main verb in the sentence.
 >
 > Yes, I do know the standard analysis. That's not the usual meaning
 > of "main verb" though (which in this example would be
 > "talk")... it's a auxiliary verb.

"Head verb", then.  The head of the VP.  Or "matrix verb", is that
right? (What _is_ the traditional grammar term?)

 > > It's not a case of "person marking on nouns", but
 > > "indexing of person on an element that's phonologically attached to
 > > the last word of the subject noun phrase".
 >
 > Yes.  I only made the strong claim for my conlang. :p  I was mainly
 > giving an example of how it could be seen to happen.
 >

Really, the real problem is with just glossing them with person and
number, when clearly that's not _all_ they are, as only subjects in
certain constructions are marked.  It isn't *"The president's talking
to you're".  Of course, anything's possible in a conlang, but it
doesn't seem a very _likely_ reanalysis of English, ever if all tense
constructions without such an auxiliary disappeared.

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