Uncovering the dynamics of person marking: A construction-based approach in historical microtypology

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The category of ‘person’ is the grammatical system that lets us refer to the ‘speaker’ role (first person), the ‘addressee’ role (second person), the ‘other’, non-speech act participant role (third person), and commonly also groups of these basic roles (e.g., plural person forms). Traditionally, person forms are thought to be unusually stable. A considerable body of literature has examined the synchronic typology of this grammatical category, in particular regarding various paradigm types. We have a fairly good understanding of how different types of person markers function, i.e., bound vs. free markers; person markers of different syntactic roles (S, A, O); etc. We also know something about the diachronic developments of person forms, for example how different paradigmatic sets are diachronically related. But despite the long tradition of research on ‘person’, one important line of investigation remains entirely underexplored: the diachronic dynamics of particular person markers. That is, how particular person markers (rather than entire paradigms) change, and more specifically, how this happens in particular constructions. This project offers the first systematic approach to understanding the specific ways in which person markers can and do change over time. The South-Central (‘Kuki-Chin’) branch of Sino-Tibetan serves as an excellent language ‘sample’ to track the dynamics of person markers. Prior research shows that this branch of around 50 languages displays a remarkably high rate of changes in the domain of person marking. At the same time, the close phylogenetic relationship creates what comes closest to laboratory conditions: A range of variables can be held constant, from overall typological profile to phonological setting to inventories of particular constructions and specific grammatical forms. Moreover, the rich verbal morphology in SC overtly codes distinct person constructions, which makes specific pathways trackable. This includes, e.g., apparently bidirectional shifts between the inclusive (1+2) and 2nd person; changes from plural to inclusive marking; from 2nd to speech-act participant object marking; or the evolution of inverse markers. Many of the changes evident in South-Central (SC) apparently occur in languages around the world although less commonly. Thus, this project will identify general pressures for change experienced by particular person markers in particular constructions. Focusing on SC, the project will be able to examine variation both diachronically across related languages as well as synchronically in corpora of individual languages. This gives us a new angle to examine the impact of factors such as tense/aspect, transitivity, sentence polarity, or (socio-)pragmatics, among others. This in turn will provide us with a much deeper understanding of the general interactions between the category of person and other grammatical categories.