Pronominal Person and Number Categories in Rembarrnga and Djeebbana

McKay, Graham

doi:10.2307/3622826

Cited by 36 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…8 Take for example the complex paradigms familiar from Latin, Greek, Bininj Gun-wok, Yélî Dnye or any number of other languages described recently for the first time. These can be so complex that they can be hard to grasp, and are readily misanalyzed -a nice simple example is the discovery of the logic of augmentation in Rembarrnga pronouns (McKay, 1978). Once you see the logic, you get a genuine 'Eureka' experience.…”

Section: Evolved Designmentioning

confidence: 97%

Time for a sea-change in linguistics: Response to comments on ‘The Myth of Language Universals’

Levinson

Evans

2010

Lingua

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The general issuesThis special issue replays many of the quarrels that have bedeviled the discipline over the last fifty years. Most of these disputes are undignified and ill-informed, and do not serve the discipline well (see e.g. Newmeyer, 1983Newmeyer, , 1999Newmeyer, , 2005. Nevertheless, there is much at stake -in particular the hearts and minds of young scholars whom we hope will advance linguistics. The new generation have excellent instincts for changes in the academic landscape, and they will look for fresh approaches with a clear sense of mission. Discussions of the sort in this special issue are not the place then to make cheap debating points. We all have a sense of a tipping point in the language sciences, and the question is: What is the way forward?We believe that linguistics is on the brink of major changes in data, methods and theory. This was the message we tried to get across in the BBS paper and perhaps especially in our response to the 23 earlier comments in BBS -a response, we suspect, that many of the commentators here have failed to study. A B S T R A C TThis paper argues that the language sciences are on the brink of major changes in primary data, methods and theory. Reactions to 'The myth of language universals' (Evans and Levinson, 2009a,b) divide in response to these new challenges. Chomskyan-inspired 'Clinguists' defend a status quo, based on intuitive data and disparate universalizing abstract frameworks, reflecting 30 years of changing models. Linguists driven by interests in richer data and linguistic diversity, 'D-linguists', though more responsive to the new developments, have tended to lack an integrating framework. Here we outline such an integrative framework of the kind we were presupposing in 'Myth', namely a coevolutionary model of the interaction between mind and cultural linguistic traditions which puts variation central at all levels -a model that offers the right kind of response to the new challenges. In doing so we traverse the fundamental questions raised by the commentary in this special issue: What constitutes the data, what is the place of formal representations, how should linguistic comparison be done, what counts as explanation, what is the source of design in language?Radical changes in data, methods and theory are upon us. The future of the discipline will depend on responses to these changes: either the field turns in on itself and atrophies, or it modernizes, and tries to capitalize on the way language lies at the intersection of all the disciplines interested in human nature. ßIn the response here we try to locate the central issues in this collection of eighteen further responses to our BBS paper. As before, about half are pro and half are con. Here, drawing support from the pros we try to sharpen our own position, while focussing on the cons, to see exactly where the fault lines lie. The issues matter enormously to a discipline which, if it makes the right moves, can regain its centrality as the study of what makes us human, thus linking the humanities,...

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Section: Evolved Designmentioning

confidence: 97%

Time for a sea-change in linguistics: Response to comments on ‘The Myth of Language Universals’

Levinson

Evans

2010

Lingua

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“…1 (2002a) 3 H&R do not give any example for geometry number 14b. Trying to follow their logic, this gap might be filled by a dual (or 'minimal') inclusive as found in a so called 'unit-augmented' systems, as first described for Rembarrnga by McKay (1978).…”

Section: Spelling Out the Feature Geometrymentioning

confidence: 98%

The expression of person and number: a typologist’s perspective

Cysouw

2010

Morphology

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The categories of person and number have been analyzed extensively, both from a generative/structural perspective and from a typological/cross-linguistic perspective. The goal of both approaches is to account for the diversity of human languages, but in practice both have a rather different take on the subject. One major difference between these approaches is the relation between language-specific and cross-linguistic analyses. This paper argues that it is crucial to strictly distinguish between the two. However, this plea is at odds with the generative/structural perspective, which attempts to deal with both kinds of analyses at the same time. In contrast, it is of central importance from a typological/cross-linguistic perspective to keep the comparison constant across the wide variation as attested among human languages, thereby often ignoring many language-specific details (for the course of the comparison). The final section of this paper summarizes some major results of recent cross-linguistic comparisons of the person/number categories in the world's languages.

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“…A language with such evidence is Rembarrnga (McKay 1978, Cysouw 2003. In this language the element -bbarrah is attached to plural pronouns to produce their dual counterparts, except for the inclusive.…”

Section: Number In Non-suppletive Paradigmsmentioning

confidence: 99%