Table Of ContentFeatures of Person
Linguistic Inquiry Monographs
Samuel Jay Keyser, general editor
A complete list of books published in the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs series appears
at the back of this book.
Features of Person
From the Inventory of Persons to Their Morphological Realization
Peter Ackema and Ad Neeleman
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage
and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Times LT Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and
bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ackema, Peter, 1965- author. | Neeleman, Ad, author.
Title: Features of person : from the inventory of persons to their morphological
realization / Peter Ackema and Ad Neeleman.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2018] | Series: Linguistic inquiry
monographs ; 78 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2017057053| ISBN 9780262038195 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780262535618 (softcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Grammar, Comparative and general--Person. | Grammar,
Comparative and general--Pronoun. | Grammar, Comparative and
general--Pronomials. | Grammar, Comparative and general--Morphosyntax. |
Generative grammar.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Preface ix
Abbreviations xi
1 Person: A To-Do List 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 The Inventory of Persons and Their Interpretation 4
1.3 Agreement for Person 10
1.4 Syntactic Restrictions on Agreement 13
1.5 The Realization of Person Features 15
1.6 Maximal Encoding 16
1.7 Summary 19
2 Person Features: Deriving the Inventory of Persons 21
2.1 Introduction 21
2.2 The Basic Proposal 22
2.3 The Interpretation of Person in Discourse 30
2.4 The Third Person as Default 37
2.5 Effects of Maximal Encoding 40
2.6 Honorifcs 42
2.7 Consequences for the Morphosyntax of prs 50
2.8 Bound Pronouns 62
2.9 Conclusion 68
3 Interactions between Person and Number 71
3.1 Introduction 71
3.2 Two Types of Number System 72
3.3 Number in Pronouns and Associative Plurals 84
3.4 Conclusion 104
4 Impersonal Pronouns 105
4.1 Introduction 105
4.2 Overview 106
vi Contents
4.3 Generic and Arbitrary Readings of Plural Pronouns 116
4.4 Dedicated Impersonal Pronouns: imp-2 120
4.5 Generic Second Person Singular Pronouns 123
4.6 Dedicated Impersonal Pronouns: imp-1 127
4.7 Why Inclusive Impersonal Pronouns Are human 130
4.8 Conclusion 132
5 The Symmetric Nature of Agreement 133
5.1 Agreement: Symmetric or Asymmetric? 133
5.2 Feature Spreading 135
5.3 Referential Unagreement 146
5.4 Quantifcational Unagreement 159
5.5 The Link between Unagreement and Pro Drop 163
5.6 Conclusion 167
6 Syntactic Restrictions on Agreement 169
6.1 Introduction 169
6.2 Agreement and the Theory of Syntactic Dependencies 171
6.3 Syntactic Agreement versus Restrictor Agreement 176
6.4 Agreement: Upward and Downward 188
6.5 The Domain of Feature Spreading 214
6.6 Intervention Effects 234
6.7 Conclusion 239
7 The Morphological Realization of Person 241
7.1 Introduction 241
7.2 Patterns of Syncretism 242
7.3 Accounting for Person Syncretisms 246
7.4 Shifts in Person Syncretism in Dutch 259
7.5 Conclusion 281
8 Conclusion 283
Notes 287
References 323
Index 351
Series Foreword
We are pleased to present the seventy-eighth volume in the series Linguistic
Inquiry Monographs. These monographs present new and original research
beyond the scope of the article. We hope they will beneft our feld by bringing
to it perspectives that will stimulate further research and insight.
Originally published in limited edition, the Linguistic Inquiry Monographs
are now more widely available. This change is due to the great interest engen-
dered by the series and by the needs of a growing readership. The editors thank
the readers for their support and welcome suggestions about future directions
for the series.
Samuel Jay Keyser
for the Editorial Board
Preface
This book is the result of a long-standing collaboration, dating back to our
time as undergraduate students at Utrecht University in the 1980s. We cannot
recall when we started talking about person in particular, but it is so long ago
that it is not possible to thank everyone who helped us develop our ideas.
Apologizing, therefore, for any oversights, we would like to thank the follow-
ing people.
For helpful discussion or other forms of assistance during the writing of
this book, we thank Suzanne Aalberse, Klaus Abels, Sam Ackema, Matthew
Baerman, Amela Camdzic, Greville Corbett, Jan Don, Antonio Fábregas, Jane
Grimshaw, Daniel Harbour, Georg Höhn, Olaf Koeneman, Hans van de Koot,
Jeffrey Lidz, Marc Lowenthal, Anne Mark, Klaartje Neeleman, Tessa Neele-
man, Nadja Rajgelj, Henk van Riemsdijk, Maaike Schoorlemmer, Jolijn Son-
naert, Yasutada Sudo, Kriszta Szendrői, Misako Tanaka, Jochen Trommer,
Edwin Williams, Anthony Zannino, Ziren Zhou, and Wim Zonneveld.
Some people carefully read a frst draft of this book, and their comments
and objections signifcantly helped shape the fnal result. They include
Caroline Heycock, Andrew Nevins, Omer Preminger, and three anonymous
reviewers for MIT Press.
We also received very useful feedback from participants in courses where
we presented this material. Apart from students at the University of Edinburgh
and University College London, we would like to mention the audience at the
University of the Basque Country in 2013 and at the LOT Summer School at
Utrecht University in 2016.
Aspects of the research we report on were presented in talks at the following
institutions: the University of Verona (Words Don’t Come Easy Workshop,
2008), the University of York (North East Syntax Seminar, 2010), the City
University of Hong Kong (2011), the Radboud University Nijmegen (Mor-
phology Days, 2011), the University of Tromsø (2011), the Catholic University
of Leuven (BCGL 7, 2012, and BCGL 10, 2017), the Goethe University at
