Personal pronouns and person clitics in Tabasaran: Toward a theory of Person

• Applicant: Natalia Bogomolova, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 503029971

The project has two major goals: an in-depth investigation of person in the grammar of Tabasaran (Nakh-Daghestanian) and using new empirical data from this understudied language in theoretical syntactic research in order to advance the theory of Person. The category of person in Tabasaran is manifested via two systems: free personal pronouns and an elaborate system of person clitics, which display a number of interesting properties. First, both subject and non-subject person arguments can be marked on the finite verb by a clitic. Clusters of a subject and a non-subject clitics are also possible. Second, person subjects of transitive and intransitive clauses and non-canonical subjects behave differently with respect to clitics. In root declarative clauses, canonical subjects are always clitic-doubled, while in clauses with non-canonical subjects both subject and non-subject can trigger a clitic on the verb. Third, allowing clitic clusters, Tabasaran demonstrates a phenomenon known as Person–Case Constraint, reminiscent of what is attested in Romance languages, with some important differences. Fourth, both pronouns and clitics exhibit indexical shift in speech reports, losing their indexical semantics and referring to the arguments of the matrix clause. The proposed project collects and analyzes a substantial body of new empirical data, challenging for syntactic theory, puts current approaches under scrutiny with regard to their ability to deal with those facts, and modifies them to the point of a better understanding how information about person is conveyed in human language.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants