Information structure and agreement: Subjects and subject agreement in Swahili and Herero

The analysis presented in this paper provides a development of the idea that subject agreement markers in Bantu can be analysed as pronouns. With reference to Swahili and Herero, it is shown that the interpretation of subject markers is dependent on the context in which they are found and that it is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Lingua Vol. 121; no. 5; pp. 787 - 804
Main Author: Marten, Lutz
Format: Journal Article Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.04.2011
Elsevier
Subjects:
Agreement
Bantu Languages
Descriptive studies and applied theories
Dynamic Syntax
Information Structure
Linguistics
Pronoun interpretation
Pronouns
Semantics and pragmatics
Subject agreement
Swahili
Syntactic Analysis
Syntax
Syntax Pragmatics Interface
Subject agreement
Bantu languages
Dynamic Syntax
Pronoun interpretation
Information structure
Syntax–pragmatics interface
Logical subject
Dynamic syntax
Swahili
Syntax-pragmatics interface
Grammatical agreement
Herero
Pronoun
Pragmatics
Semantic representation
Word order
Syntax
ISSN:0024-3841, 1872-6135
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The analysis presented in this paper provides a development of the idea that subject agreement markers in Bantu can be analysed as pronouns. With reference to Swahili and Herero, it is shown that the interpretation of subject markers is dependent on the context in which they are found and that it is, similar to ordinary pronouns, constrained by locality, directionality and class features. The relevant context includes both the wider, pragmatic context as well as the relation between overt subject and agreeing subject marker, and thus includes word-order variation between subject–verb and verb–subject structures. Lexical restrictions on the interpretation of subject markers interact with different ways in which logical subjects can be syntactically related to the verb, expressing different information structure relations such as topic and focus. By employing the Dynamic Syntax notion of incremental growth of semantic representations, a formal analysis is developed which shows how the interaction between context, word-order and lexical information from agreement markers results in the step-by-step development of the context-specific interpretation.
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ISSN:0024-3841
1872-6135
DOI:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.11.005