Talk:Polypersonal agreement

Polypersonal verbs vs. polypersonalism

Regarding the edits by Ruakh:

I'm not sure I'm satisfied with the Polypersonal agreement article after the change in the intro paragraph. I understand PPA as a feature of the language (or better, of the verbal morphological system), not of particular verbs. That's why I don't like how the article now starts by talking of "polypersonal verbs".

I'm sure it's entirely possible for a language to have some verbs (valency > 1 of course) that agree with several arguments, while others (also valency > 1) do not, this difference being lexically or pragmatically determined. But AFAIK this is not the case; polypersonalism is clearly a feature of the verb morphology and thus of the language, not a treat of specific verbs. Is there a compelling reason why I should not revert?

As for the comment on isolation, I agree that it was incomplete and therefore better left out (if expressed in full, it would be intrussive).

--Pablo D. Flores 22:13, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

You make a good point. The goal of my change was to make the introduction simpler - shorter sentences, not jumping in with the word "morphological," focusing initially on verbs rather than on the languages that contain them - but you're right about the problem this produces.

I've re-written; is the new version better? If you still don't like it, go ahead and revert.

(BTW, I'm watching this page, so you don't need to post your comments in two places if you don't want to.) Ruakh 05:17, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm OK with the new version. Thanks for understanding! --Pablo D. Flores 10:20, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

French polypersonalism?

I don't see how the French pronominal clitics are less free or more bound than the Spanish ones; can you give some examples in the two languages that demonstrate this? If anything, I'd be inclined to say that Spanish is more polypersonal than French, because indirect objects in Spanish are always marked on the verb, even when they occur separately as well (e.g., English "He gave it to his friend," French "Il l'a donnée à son amie," Spanish "Se la dio a su amiga"). It doesn't seem to me to be verb agreement if adding the argument to the sentence requires that you drop the morpheme from the verb. Ruakh 20:28, 10 May 2005 (UTC)

In spoken French, both the subject and the object pronouns are clitics of the verb, which may also be a complex word. Phrases like je te l'ai bien dit or il ne t'ai rien pris are single phonological words. While these can be seen simply as clitics, they have a tendency to become affixes, since they have a fixed slot in the verbal phrase, and they can't appear in isolation. In fact, most native speakers cannot produce them in isolation. The polypersonal agreement part comes when you also learn that spoken French, having effectively lost its (free) subject pronouns, uses the contrastive forms moi, lui, etc. as free pronouns, and uses them together with full NPs even when the information is already present on the verb word: moi je l'ai vu son fils "me I have seen him his son". I got most of this from the CONLANG list (see [1], [2] etc.). The idea apparently has serious backers, even though it represents a tendency.

As for Spanish, the situation is different because the extreme simplification that took place in French is not there, so it's quite simple to mark the subject as a verb inflection (French would be doing the same if je is considered an affix, but using agglutination -- which BTW is a common treat of polysynthetic languages). Spanish subject pronouns are not clitics and they can be moved around rather freely. The object pronouns are clitics, but they can be moved too, sometimes, and native speakers perceive them as separate entities. The obligatory mention of both pronouns and the full NPs referenced by them in Spanish is simply clitic doubling and is restricted to animate indirect objects.

See also [3] (search for the first instance of "French", then look down for the examples of dislocation). BTW, dislocation (syntax) seems a nice article to be linked somewhere from here...

--Pablo D. Flores 11:45, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

That's an interesting point! I never thought much about it, but of course you're right that French-speakers dislocate (both right and left) much more than English-speakers do. I see how that could be viewed almost as polypersonal.

It's a strange thought, though, and I can't help but feel that the underlying construction is different. I'll need time to wrap my mind around it.

Some of this explanation should definitely go in the article, BTW. :-)

Ruakh 21:34, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

The difference is that in (spoken) French, the morphemes are used even when the corresponding argument is present, eg. Sa grand-mère elle est morte. Il l'a mordue le chien la petit fils.--90.179.235.249 (talk) 00:27, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand this argument entirely, though I think I understand for the most part. If I do understand, I don't agree... You're saying that a phrase such as je te l'ai bien dit is a single morphological word? What? I'm a proponent of a liberal view of word boundaries, but that seems simply outrageous. Perhaps je te l'ai dit could get away with that, but as it is you have an adverb in there splitting the verb up. I'm failing to see the major difference between Spanish treatment of it's pronouns and French. Wouldn't such Spanish peculiarities as requiring an indirect object pronoun even when the indirect object is present classify as verb agreement, and therefore polypersonalism (as Ruakh said)?

On the other hand, I'm surprised and a bit confused to see no mention or discussion of French's past participle agreement (as in je l'ai ouverte, when the object is une fenêtre). This is obviously verb agreement with multiple objects, ai agreeing with the subject and ouverte agreeing with the gender and numbers of the object. No? For that matter, I think Italian does the same, though on a slightly more restrictive basis. This also include Gujarati, for it's practice of having verbs in the perfect tense agree with their objects in gender and number. Or is there some preclusion of gender/number agreements from qualifying as polypersonal?

Afaik, Gujarati shows split ergativity, and is ergative in the past/perfect tense. It agrees with the objects then, but not with the subjects. So it does not have polypersonal agreement. Jalwikip (talk) 09:19, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

-- auk (talk) 00:32, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

The last sentence about French is "But these morphemes could simply be seen as inseparable clitic nouns." This is a bit of a flawed sentence, since clitics are not nouns (even if they are derived from them), and the main difference between a clitic and an affix is their seperability (another being their difference in triggering phonological processes). Someone should rephrase (I will if noone replies to this). Jalwikip (talk) 09:19, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Morphemic Glosses?

   v-khed-av "I see him"
   g-mal-av-en "they hide you (sing. or pl.)"
   g-i-mal-av-en "they hide it from you (sing. or pl.)"
   gv-i-ket-eb-s "he is doing it for us"
   a-chuk-eb-s "he will give it to him (as a gift)"
   mi-u-lots-av-s "he will congratulate him on it" 

1. [morphemically divided original language text]
2. [morpheme-by-morpheme gloss]
3. [English translation]

Iristen z-a-izki-zue ‘They'll get to you (pl)’

Somebody should check the Laka reference. I am not a native speaker of Basque, but I think the English and the Basque versions don't match. It is either:

• Iristen zaizkizue: They keep arriving to you (pl), They usually arrive to you (pl)
• Iritsiko zaizkizue: They'll arrive to you.

--Error (talk) 01:52, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

The form with "iristen" is historically a habitual form, but when used in periphrastic verb phrases, it can be translated as a simple present, or continuous present in some situations, in English. Basque grammar is quite different from English, so not everything matches up directly with English grammatical terms. I have fixed the broken reference link and corrected the translation to better reflect the Basque sentence. Sjheiss (talk) 10:34, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Please expand on important point

I quote from the head section: "This polypersonal marking may be compulsory or optional (the latter meaning that some agreement morphemes can be elided if the full argument is expressed)." This is very important, in my opinion. The "optional agreement", as found in Arabic and seemingly most of the relevant languages, is actually just a personal pronoun added to the verb if applicable. So I say in Arabic: Arā l-mar’ah ("I see the woman"), and: Arāhā ("I see her"). -- 1.) What is the difference between this "optional agreement" and a clitic pronoun? 2.) Is "optional" really the correct word, because there's nothing optional in Arabic: As soon as the object is given in full the clitic pronoun vanishes. 3.) What languages have "compulsory agreement", that is they require the verb to agree with the object even when the latter is spelt out in the phrase?

Globalize

At current the languages discussed are Georgian, Basque, Ganda, Hungarian, with additional brief discussion of Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, French. Now it is nice that a number of varied language families are represented here, with pretty much every language mentioned being from a distinct family. However there are some blind spots. For one no example is of a language widely considered to be polysynthetic, even though polypersonal agreement is often considered to be a key feature of polysynthetic languages. Perhaps related there seems to be a euro-centric bias present in the languages discussed. Aside from Ganda every language is spoken in or very near to Europe. North American, South American, Asian and Australian languages are completely absent despite the fact that polypersonal agreement can be found in these regions. For this reason I'm adding Template:Globalize to examples section. In the interest of a clear goal I think it would be best if 1-2 examples from each of the mentioned regions were added. Some languages are discussed in the lede which may make good candidates, but of course such will generally require some knowledge of the languages. AquitaneHungerForce (talk) 16:20, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

Klingon

İs Klingon verb conjugation polypersonal? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:8108:1140:945:E0AF:B69E:EDA6:710D (talk) 15:51, 1 May 2022 (UTC)