Johannes Helmbrecht

The syntax of personal agreement in East Caucasian languages

Cross-linguistically, personal agreement is one of the most widespread means of coding syntactic and semantic relations within the clause. Like case marking and distinctive word order, personal agreement can be found in languages all over the world. Personal agreement is directly connected with the existence of personal inflection in the predicate. So, if we speak of personal agreement, it is presupposed that there is a person-based paradigm of grammatical forms which, when attached to the clausal predicate, index or refer to one or more arguments of the clause. In many Indo-European languages, these grammatical forms, hence person markers, distinguish three persons, two numbers, and refer invariably to the subject of the clause. This familiar image of person marking and personal agreement which is the common model in linguistic textbooks does not reflect the facts in other, more exotic, languages of the world. The present article is a survey of personal paradigms and personal agreement in a couple of East Caucasian languages. The majority of these languages are spoken in the Russian republic of Dagestan located roughly between the Western shore of the Caspian Sea and the main range of the Caucasus. The East Caucasian languages are not related to the languages of the surrounding major language families, i. e. the Turkic languages or the Indo-European languages, and their genetic relation to the Northwest and South Caucasian languages is still a major subject of debate. On the other hand, it is widely accepted among Caucasianists that the different groups of East Caucasian languages are at least remotely related to each other. It is the goal of the present article to show a) that there is a remarkable diversity in the systems of person marking and personal agreement even within this limited number of related languages, b) that these systems differ from the Indo-European based model of personal agreement, and c) that the controlling factors of personal agreement sometimes are not in harmony with other grammatical relations marking devices in a specific language. The data which will be presented below in favor of these claims include the structure and shape of personal paradigms and their syntactic behavior in intransitive and transitive clauses in these languages. The cognitive foundation of a paradigm of person markers is the category of person, which reflects the basis structure of a speech act. The category of person seems to be a universal con-

Studies on Grammaticalization

Grammaticalization theory has played a major role in the developments in language typology and functional linguistics during the last three decades. The contributions in this book discuss the major theoretical issues of grammaticalization theory, illustrate the current trends in this field, and present evidence for grammaticalization from several familiar as well as little studied languages.

Hoocąk and other Siouan languages: A typological overview

This paper provides a typological overview of Hoocąk, a North American Indian language. Attention is focused on the encoding of grammatical relations, a domain where Hoocąk diverges from more familiar European languages in several respects. In particular, Hoocąk is a head-marking language and belongs to the active/inactive type. This has important consequences for the way in which information is rendered morphosyntactically in the language. Information on related Siouan languages is also provided in order to show that Hoocąk shares a number of properties with several neighboring languages.