This textbook deals with the grammatical category of person, which covers the first person, the second person, and the third person. Drawing on data from over 700 languages, Anna Siewierska compares the use of person within and across different languages, and examines the factors underlying this variation. She shows how person forms vary in substance, in the nature of the semantic distinctions they convey, in how they are used in sentences and discourse, and in the way they function to convey social distinctions. By looking at different types of person forms in the grammatical and social contexts in which they are used, this book documents an underlying unity between them, arguing against the treatment of person markers based on arbitrary sets of morphological and syntactic properties. Clearly organized and accessibly written, it will be welcomed by students and scholars of linguistics, particularly those interested in grammatical categories and their use.

The endpoint of the historical evolution of agreement marker from anaphoric person pronoun is the loss of referentiality on the part of the person marker and the obligatory presence of the nominal argument with which it agrees. Contrary to what might be supposed, such agreement, which I, inspired by Bresnan & Mchombo (1986, have termed grammatical, as opposed to anaphoric or ambiguous (grammatical and anaphoric) agreement, is cross-linguistically very rare. Moreover, among the attested instances of grammatical person agreement none involve object as compared to subject agreement. The present paper considers the distribution and formal realization of anaphoric, ambiguous and grammatical agreement markers in a sample of 272 languages and offers some tentative explanations for the existing asymmetry in regard to grammatical agreement. It is suggested that grammatical object agreement does not arise since ambiguous agreement, from which grammatical agreement evolves, is less common with objects than with subjects, and two of the potential sources of grammatical agreement, adherence to a verb-second constraint and phonological attrition are more likely to involve subjects rather than objects.

This paper argues that the word order possibilities of a language are partly determined by the parts-of-speech system of that language. In languages in which lexical items are specialized for certain functionally defined syntactic slots (e.g. the modifier slot within a noun phrase), the identifiability of these slots is ensured by the nature of the lexical items (e.g. adjectives) themselves.As a result, word order possibilities are relatively unrestricted in these languages. In languages in which lexical items are not specialized for certain syntactic slots, in that these items combine the functions of two or more of the traditional word classes, other strategies have to be invoked to enhance identifiability. In these languages word order constraints are used to make syntactic slots identifiable on the basis of their position within the clause or phrase. Hence the word order possibilities are rather restricted in these languages. Counterexamples to the latter claim all involve cases in which identifiability is ensured by morphological rather than syntactic means. This shows that there is a balanced trade-off between the syntactic, morphological, and lexical structure of a language.

Manzini, M. Rita & Leonardo M. Savoia. 2007. A unification of morphology and syntax:Investigations into Romance and Albanian dialects. London: Routledge. Sportiche, Dominique. 1988. A theory of floating quantifiers and its corollaries for constituent structure.

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