The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking

This book explores person markers, the linguistic elements that provide points of reference to speech-act participants. Michael Cysouw develops a new framework for the typology of person marking based on the rejection of the notion of plurality for its analysis. When a mother says "Mummy is going to say goodnight now", Mummy is the person marker in a way that in English is confined to motherese but which is used more commonly in some other languages and may also be characteristic of much earlier forms. Dr Cysouw divides the person markers of 400 languages into paradigms. He considers how the structure of these person paradigms relates to their function. His investigation provides a clear account of how person markers work syntactically, pragmatically, and semantically as well as giving fresh insights into aspects of linguistic change, language-relatedness, and the interfaces between discourse, syntax, and semantics. The combination of a typological and a comparative approach results in the first outline of a cognitive map of the paradigmatic structure of person marking.

1 - Introduction: Objective, Definitions, Method and Some History
2 - One Among the Crowd: The Marking of Singular Participants
3 - Group Marking: Redefining Plurality in the Pronominal Domain
4 - The Diversity of the Core: A Survey of Patterns of Singular and Group Marking
5 - Compound Pronouns: Other Person Categories Disqualified
6 - Cardinality: Redefining Number in the Pronominal Domain
7 - The Diversity of Restricted Groups: A Survey of Dual Person Marking
8 - Connecting Paradigms: Person Paradigms Through Time and Space
9 - Cognate Paradigms Revisited: Connecting the Dual
10 - Finale: Summary and Prospects

Michael Cysouw is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin and affiliated to the Department of English at the Free University of Berlin. He wrote his doctoral dissertation (upon which this book is based) at the Department of General Linguistics of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The Association for Linguistic Typology prized this dissertation with its 2001 junior award.