Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Detail #27: Pronoun duplication

Pronoun duplication to mark perfect or perfective aspect. There may be a lot of room for designing the strategy by which the pronoun to duplicate is picked - e.g. something simple like subject twice, or then something like object if there is one, otherwise subject. The language should probably have some case morphology, at least on the pronouns.

Strategies if all arguments are full noun phrases could include: doubling the subject (or object) - once as a noun phrase and once as a pronoun, omitting aspect marking altogether, or having the noun phrase be a topic and having the doubled pronouns within the main part of the sentence. There's space for rules dealing with potential confusion due to extra pronouns possibly being ambiguous as to whether they refer to some NP outside the current verb phrase or whether they refer to an already present object/subject, depending in part on how much case morphology and such helps disambiguate. In such instances, aspect may be considered entirely unmarked. Of course, if the language has some kind of proximative/obviative pronoun distinction that is no problem.

The doubled pronouns do not occur in sequence. One is usually catapulted to the end or beginning of the sentence, or to the other side of the verb.


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