One could imagine a language where certain constructions signal inclusivity, while others signal exclusivity, without there being any dedicated morphemes for clusivity.
1. Reflexives in two ways
In some languages, there is a reflexive pronoun that can be used for any person (see the Russian себя), whereas in others, reflexives are person-specific (myself, yourself, etc).
In Russian, in some circumstances you can use the person-specific possessive or accusative, but this is unusual. However, we could imagine a language in which first person plural uses the third-person reflexive whenever the listener is not included. This of course limits the clusivity to reflexive constructions, unless the clusivity-signaling reflexive is intentionally overused, maybe as a dative or something else like that, or just as a dummy object with intransitives.
2. Gender (dis)congruence
In a language where plural first person pronouns encode gender, in a system where, e.g. the masculine pronoun can refer to a mixed group (but feminine pronouns cannot), feminine first person plurals when speaking to males can signal clusivity. This is a pretty restrictive situation in which clusivity emerges, but maybe it could be taken one step further, such that gender congruence with a singular listener (or uniform group of listeners) becomes a way of signalling clusivity, rather than signalling the gender of the group.
3. Differential object or subject case on the first person pronoun
For some reason, I imagine a vocative case could actually double as an inclusive subject or object marker.
4. The selection of auxiliaries, especially ones that denote evidential information?
One could imagine a couple of near-synonymous auxiliaries, where one is just for whatever reason associated with the inclusive or the exclusive second person plural.
5. Differential object case on a noun phrase object
Perchance deriving from a historical "our", where the language normally would prefer reflexives possessive pronouns. However, this might disable the marking for clusivity if the subject is not also the first person pronoun, and it disables mixed clusivity in a clause (e.g. "we-excl sold our-incl harvest in town").
6. Word order
"Our house" = inclusive, "house of ours" = exclusive. "They us saw" = inclusive, "they saw us" = exclusive. This could very well be a statistical rule rather than a strict one, such that if the context leads to parsing it differently, such different parsing is permissible - but 90% of the time, this will hold.
For subjects, I imagine this might be less common, although I can also imagine that a SVO language could have VSO as an exclusive structure, since putting the verb first feels like a more "pressing" narrative, where the listener might be unaware of what happened.
7. Selecting between different semantically similar structures
E.g. something like the English perfect and the English past tense. I imagine a language could start associating such a pair with a distinction such as this, due to the situations in which one is likely to use one or the other: 'have done' seems slightly more likely to be used when telling someone who did not participate, "did" slightly more likely when talking to someone who did participate.
8. Dual or trial
One can also imagine that the dual / (trial /) plural distinction might, for second person plural under some circumstances become an inclusive/exclusive distinction instead. However, I want to keep the ability to use the dual/plural distinction itself, so - how about discongruence conveying clusivity. Dual + singular verb = exclusive, plural + dual verb = exclusive? This of course requires an unusually rich verbal morphology with regards to number, and we're also restricting it to elements that have congruence on the verb. Maybe the clusivity distinction becomes so important that in all other positions, the distinction is clearly one of clusivity, or maybe both distinctions are important enough that they're simply thoroughly ambiguous and only context serves to disambiguate between "we two" versus "we, but not you" versus "we several" versus "we and you".
No comments:
Post a Comment