This kinda gets on the border of what makes sense, but hear me out:
Let's consider a split-S language, where e.g. 1st and 2nd person singular and plural are the triggers for one alignment. However, 1st person singular exclusive is excluded from this, and thus alignment communicates clusivity.
I could actually see this working the other way around - inclusive being the one to avoid SAP alignment. A 1st inclusive could very easily develop from a 3d person phrase ("the group", "the gang", "the committee", etc), and hence bypass normal SAP syntax.
ReplyDeleteActually, I might just do that...
EDIT: ...it took five failed attempts before I could pass that captcha...
I was very split about which way might be more natural, and basically just ended up flipping a mental coin at some point.
DeleteI had never thought of a concrete grammaticalization path, only some kind of abstract grammaticalization path. Abstract grammaticalization paths end up with results that lack natural biases, and for that reason they're sorta weak.
Thanks for the response, and thanks for the captcha feedback. I am considering migrating this blog elsewhere at some point.