A0071
Elly VAN GELDEREN
Mary WILLIE
The Possible Diachrony of Null Objects in Athabascan
The Possible Diachrony of Null Objects in Athabascan
Like subject pronouns, independent object pronouns can attach to verbs to become
dependent heads. They can subsequently be reanalyzed as agreement markers and
disappear. This increase and decrease in head marking can be named the Object Cycle.
The phenomenon is widely attested in the Afro-Asiatic, Bantu, Dravidian, and
Indo-European language families. In most languages this does not lead to object
polysynthesis. In this paper, we will first show two pathways that can be the result of
object incorporation into the verbal complex and then focus on developments in
Athabascan to provide evidence for an increase in object polysynthesis.
In Southern Athabascan languages such as Navajo, both subject and object
markers are obligatory on verbs, as are pronominal and oblique objects. Northern
Athabascan languages such as Ahtna, Slave, and Dogrib display complementary
distribution between nominal objects and verbal affixation. Rice (2003: 72) notes that
the Southern pattern is an innovation. The trend in the Athabascan languages seems to
be towards more object polysynthesis. The most archaic Athabascan languages, Ahtna
and Koyukon, have retained noun incorporation, but Navajo, Apache, and the Pacific
Coast languages have not. We will ague that, when pronouns are reanalyzed as the
bearers of [i-phi] and nominal arguments as adjuncts, the nominals can no longer
incorporate.
Rice, Keren 2003. Doubling Agreement in Slave. In Andrew Carnie, et al. (eds) Formal
Approaches to Function in Grammar, 51-78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Workshop Title
The Diachrony of Referential Null Arguments
Elly VAN GELDEREN ellyvangelderen@asu.edu
Mary WILLIE mwillie@email.arizona.edu