3. Marc geogràfic
3.2. Característiques generals de les precipitacions a les Illes Balears
Multiple exponence is a departure from the customary one-to-one relationship between form and function: the same morphosyntactic features appear in multiple places within the same complex head. This is problematic for morphosyntax more generally, not specifically for affix-genesis. In some cases, like the Piattino example from the previous chapter, it can be shown that the feature information contributed by each morpheme is actually different; this is a case of fission rather than true multiple exponence.136
Nevertheless, bona fide multiple exponence certainly exists, and where it exists it must have an origin. The goal of this section will be to examine the genesis of multiple exponence and thereby gain a better perspective on other aspects of the grammar.
A naïve view of multiple exponence might consider it problematic for the framework of linguistic change adopted here. One might assume that, if the locus of an affix is taken to reflect a permitted position relative to the form to which it is affixed, for there to be multiple simultaneous positions for it implies that it occupied multiple positions in the same clause prior to its affixation, which is not always the case. If this were true, it would be support for a lexicalist position. As this section will illustrate, however, multiple exponence can arise in a number of ways, but random proliferation concurrent with affix-genesis is unattested. All examples of the origin of multiple exponence known to me are completely consistent with the theoretical approach taken here.
Morphosyntactic changes resulting in multiple exponence appear to be of at least three types. First, it may be the case that an M-word previously marked for a particular category with one affix may later receive another affix marking the same (or a similar) category, a change which we might call “redetermination”. The Piattino example from the previous chapter is an example of this type of change, except that there is no redundancy in the Piattino system. Sometimes, however, redetermination does produce a degree of redundancy, as will be demonstrated in 4.3.1.
The second type of change arises when two independent M-words, each marked individually for the same category, become fused into a single M-word. This phenomenon is not dissimilar from the “trapped” clitics discussed earlier in this chapter, with the addition of redundancy within the M-word. Here it is clear that the redundant affix really did originally occur in multiple places, and it has only been trapped by the vagaries of fate (so to speak). Multiple exponence arising through the fusion of two inflected M-words will be discussed in 4.3.2, which includes a sub-section devoted to a somewhat more detailed case study of the rather extreme case of “exuberant exponence” in Batsbi, a language that allows the same subject agreement marker to occur up to five times within a single verbal complex.
There are also cases in which doubling appears to arise sui generis; these are the hardest to account for. The appearance of definiteness marking on nouns in Swedish in the presence of an overt determiner is one example of this type, which I will call sporadic pleonasm. This will be discussed in 4.3.3. General issues that come up along the way will be recapitulated in 4.3.4.
139 4.3.1 Redetermination
Some cases of multiple exponence reflect two different historical layers: a language first gains an affix marking a particular category at one point in its history, and then, generations later, acquires another. This process is redetermination, defined in (4.168). This section will concentrate on two instances of redetermination: agreement markers in the Italian dialect Vicentino, and plural markers in Breton.
(4.168) Redetermination: state of multiple exponence obtained in multiple stages: generation P acquires an affix marking category C, and generation P+n
acquires another affix also marking C
Redetermination is often found with specific lexemes; the explanation offered by traditional historical linguists is that the older exponent was no longer felt to be marking the category by language learners. A good example of this is the English plural children, whose plural marker -ren, unique in the language, can be traced back to a succession of two different markers. The Old English plural of cild was cildru, where the plural suffix -ru is cognate with the -er plurals of German. Later, probably because this particular plural formant had become all but obsolete, the more productive plural suffix -en was added to cildru to produce
children. The interesting point here is that speakers did not simply swap one plural suffix for another – to give †childs or †childen137 – but added a second plural suffix on top of the
original – or, rather, to the right of the original, so that the newer suffix -en is further from the root from the older one.
This is exactly the prediction the theory advocated here makes for cases such as these: in cases of redetermination, the newer affix may not be closer to the root than the older one. It could, of course, be equidistant from the root, in the cases where one affix is a prefix and the other a suffix; but we should never find cases where the newer affix is closer to the root than the older one.
Redetermination does not always result in multiple exponence; in many cases, the two affixes are not marking precisely the same set of features, giving rise to Fission rather than bona fide multiple exponence. As noted in Chapter Three, some modern Romance and Germanic dialects have developed (or are developing) subject agreement prefixes in addition to the inherited subject agreement suffixes, often in connection with syncretism of the older suffixes. In Piattino, as we saw, redetermination has given rise to Fission, since the affixes are spelling out different features. But in languages with less syncretism than Piattino, redetermination could result in true multiple exponence. Fuß (2005:259ffn.) reports a
potential example of this phenomenon based on his fieldwork on Vicentino, a variant of Veneto spoken in Northern Italy. The superficial pattern of subject pronominals in Vicentino is shown in Table 4.4; this will be modified below. Note that, interestingly, the form and position of the pronominals are dependent on the syntax of the sentence: in the second and third persons, a different clitic is used in inversion contexts, as given on second line of the relevant cells of Table 4.4.138
137 † is used here to mark hypothetically possible but unattested forms.
140
Singular Plural
1st. (a) magn-o (a) magn-emo
2nd. te magn-i
magn-i=to (a) magn-è magn-è=o 3rd. Masc. el magn-a-Ø
magn-e=ło i magn-a-Ø magn-e=łi 3rd. Fem. ła magn-a-Ø
magn-e=ła łe magn-a-Ø magn-e=łe Table 4.4: Subject agreement and clitics in Vicentino, present indicative
Vicentino looks to have the following set of Vocabulary Items for the present indicative:
(4.169a) [+2] ↔ -è / [PL]
(4.169b) [+1] ↔ -emo / [PL]
(4.169c) [+2] ↔ -i
(4.169d) [+1] ↔ -o
Like their equivalents in Piattino, the third persons require a pronominal subject. Vicentino agreement suffixes do not distinguish number in the third persons, so each of the third person pronominals marks all of the subject features and there is neither Fission nor multiple exponence. Meanwhile, the first-person pronominals are always optional, and the first-person endings are always distinctive. Again, this looks much like Piattino.
The second-person forms, however, are more challenging. Here, the existing subject agreement suffixes are distinctive, so that the clitics are redundant. The second singular requires clitics across the board, both in inverted and non-inverted sentences (4.170), while the second plural does not require a clitic in non-inverted sentences but does require a clitic in inverted sentences (4.171). For clarity, the clitics are in boldface. As the examples show, the clitic subjects can double non-clitic subject pronouns.
(4.170a) Ti te vien da Montecio. 2nd.sg 2nd.sg. come.2nd.sg from
‘You come from Montecio.’ (4.170b) * Ti vien da Montecio. (4.170c) Da ‘ndó vien to ti?
where-from come 2nd.sg. 2nd.sg.
‘Where do you come from?’ (4.170d) * Da ‘ndó vien ti?
(4.171a) (A) vegn-i da Durlo.
CLIT come-2nd.pl. from
‘You come from Durlo.’ (4.171b) Da ‘ndó vegn-i o (voaltri)?
where-from come-2nd.pl 2nd.pl 2nd.pl
‘Where do you come from?’ (4.171c) * Da ‘ndó vegni (voaltri)?
There is reason to believe that the optional and obligatory clitics are completely different objects in Vicentino, beyond the matter of their optionality. First, the correlation between homophony and optionality in this system is perfect. All of the formally distinctive clitics - the third persons, the second singular, and the second plural inverted – are obligatory. All of the optional clitics – the first persons and second plural uninverted – are a. This could be a coincidence; however, the fact that the two groups of clitics show different syntactic
141 behaviour suggests otherwise. Fuß (2005:262) reveals that clitic a precedes negation, while
distinctive clitics follow negation.
(4.172a) A no vegn-o da Vicensa.
CLIT NEG come-1st.sg. from
‘I do not come from Vicensa.’ (4.172b) A no vegn-emo da Vicensa.
CLIT NEG come-1st.pl. from
‘We do not come from Vicensa.’ (4.173a) No te vien da Vicensa.
NEG 2nd.sg. come.2nd.sg. from
‘You do not come from Vicensa.’ (4.173b) No ła vien da Vicensa.
NEG 3rd.sg.FEM. come from
‘She does not come from Vicensa.’
In fact, a can be used for the second singular also. When it is, however, it must co- occur with the obligatory te, so that a sentence with a second singular verb can contain up to three subject pronominals.
(4.174) Ti a no te vien da Vicensa.
2nd.sg. CLIT NEG 2nd.sg. come.2nd.sg. from
‘You do not come from Vicensa.’
This indicates that the clitic a is only tangentially relevant to the discussion of the other Vicentino subject markers; whatever it is, it is part of a different system, and it is relevant to the discussion only insofar as it provides clues to the analysis of the second plural.
The alert reader will have noticed that the second singular forms used in the examples above are different from the forms cited in Table 4.4 and identical to the third person forms. This is not an error, but a feature of a few irregular verbs; Fuß (2005:265) cites also tegnere
‘to hold’. His hypothesis is that second singular clitics became obligatory in precisely this context, to avoid homophony, and subsequently spread to the other second singular forms in the language. This was abetted, in his view, by the fact that another class of irregular verbs indicates changes in person by alternations in the stem vowel rather than by the addition of a discrete subject suffix. There are four such verbs, all very frequent: dare ‘to give’ (2nd.sg. de,
3rd. da), fare ‘to do’ (fe, fa), nare ‘to go’ (ve, va), and savere ‘to know’ (se, sa). He suggests
that children would, when confronted with a choice between stem quality and clitic, choose the clitic as the exponent of subject agreement on the grounds that children prefer affixes over readjustment rules (cf. Clark 1998:384).
Fuß’s account of the obligatory second plural enclitic is similar in nature if different
in detail. He observes that the second plural indicative and subjunctive forms of four irregular verbs – dare, fare, poder ‘to be able to’, and vegner ‘to come’ – are identical, and suggests that speakers first redetermined the second plurals of these verbs and then spread the new obligatory marking to the other second plurals. I find this account less than satisfying, for several reasons. First, all of these irregular verbs save fare have first plural forms in the indicative and subjunctive, yet the first plural does not behave like the second plural. Second, one might predict that there would be a distinctive obligatory proclitic in non-inversion contexts as well as inversion contexts, which there isn’t. This analysis therefore seems a bit ad hoc.
Both of these accounts run afoul of the MARC from the previous chapter, which theorises that speakers conclude that their language has multiple exponence only if they have no other choice in the matter, if the data leaves them no other conclusion. The second-person
142 markers are unambiguous; why augment them? As to Fuß’s conjectures about pressure from
irregular forms, speakers are notoriously comfortable with irregularity even when it involves homophony. From the perspective of the general bias against multiple exponence, the preference of Vicentino speakers for systematic multiple exponence over four homophonous irregular forms seems irregular, if not outright perverse. In addition, MARC aside, Fuß’s
speculations are rooted in a rather deterministic view of diachronic change. Language change does not happen because speakers decide that it would be nice if all the subjunctive and indicative forms of their language were phonologically distinct.
A different tactic one could pursue in the Vicentino problem is to examine the clitic system from the perspective of someone attempting to acquire it, rather than the verbal system as a whole. Fuß’s initial description of the distribution of the non-distinctive a is misleading,
though he later clarifies the point. A is simply not part of the same system as the other clitics: it doesn’t have the same syntax, it can co-occur with the other clitics, and so on. But this means that there is a curious gap in the clitic system: there are no first person clitics equivalent to the third person clitics – or, at least, there are none in Fuß’s discussion. As I
said earlier, the complementarity in this system is perfect. Why is this so? In Piattino, the optional clitics were clearly of the same species as the obligatory clitics; this doesn’t seem to be true in Vicentino. Why are there no optional first person clitics filling the same role as el
or ła? Something is missing here.
Assuming these data are accurate, then the most likely scenario would be that the language learners acquired the following rule: distinctive clitics are obligatory, regardless of whether or not the verb has another salient marker. Language learners observe, first, that the third-person suffixes are all homophonous, and conclude that the actual exponent of the category of number and gender is the clitic in its various guises. Having made that step, they extend the same analysis to the other clitics that pattern with the third-person forms: the second singular and the second plural in inverted contexts. The fact that all the clitics are phonologically reduced gives them further motivation for interpreting them as affixes. This forces them to make a choice between a grammar with multiple exponence and a grammar where objects of the same syntactic distribution are of different types; in this case, they opted in favour of the former, probably because learners disprefer partial affixation patterns. Had there been distinctive first person clitics as well as second singular, speakers may well have opted for a more Piattinesque grammar. This analysis of the Vicentino data is simpler and more consistent with the understanding of language change set out in Chapter Two than Fuß’s.
Further investigation is needed into the syntax of subject markers in Vicentino; a definitive analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter. It is not completely clear whether to analyse the distinctive markers as clitics or affixes, due to the variability in their syntactic position, but the fact that they are always adjacent to the verb regardless of the rest suggests that they are reasonably likely to develop into affixes if they haven’t already. Despite this uncertainty, the Vicentino data do illustrate the two basic properties of multiple exponence via redetermination: one set of affixes is demonstrably older than the other, and the newer set is not nearer the root than the older, whether it is prefixed (and therefore equidistant from the root) or suffixed (and thus further). In both cases the newer marker is also peripheral, as predicted.
Different issues arise in the case of plural markers in Breton. Nominal number marking is complex in Breton, which has, in addition to singular and plural, a limited dual and a singulative, used on mass nouns and collectives. In addition, many nouns have, in an addition to a simple plural, a “double plural”, with a second plural suffix. Stump (1989:262) notes that nouns which take double plurals often have an irregular simple plural, as in (4.175a–d), though (4.175e–h) show this is not always the case.
143
(4.175) Singular Simple Plural Double Plural
a. louarn ‘fox’ lern lern-ed
b. gavr ‘goat’ gevr gevr-ed
c. houarn ‘iron’ hern hern-ioù
d. troad ‘foot’ treid treid-où
e. merc’h ‘girl’ merc’h-ed merch’-ed-où
f. loen ‘beast’ loen-ed loen-ed-où
g. preñv ‘worm’ preñv-ed preñv-ed-où
h. roñse ‘horse’ roñse-ed roñs-ed-où
Both the simple plural and the double plural trigger plural agreement on the verb and receive a plural interpretation.
(4.176a) N’ eo ket mat ar merc’h-ed= se; re vihan int.
PTCL BENEG good DEF girl- PL1=DEM too little BE.3rd.pl.
‘These girls aren’t good, they are too small.’
(4.176b) N’ eo ket mat ar merc’h-ed-où= se; re vihan int.
PTCL BENEG good DEF girl- PL1-PL2=DEM too little BE.3rd.pl.
‘These girls aren’t good, they are too small.’
Simple and double plurals also behave alike within the DP. In the presence of a cardinal number, neither plural suffix can appear (De Belder 2010:4).
(4.177a) ugent merc’h twenty girl ‘twenty girls’ (4.177b) * ugent merc’h-ed
twenty girl- PL1
(4.177c) * ugent merc’h-ed- où twenty girl- PL1-PL2
The data shown so far could be taken to imply that Breton double plurals are much like English children, only more widespread; however, other facts indicate that this is not quite true. First, the simple plural can serve as the stem in denominative verbs.139
(4.178) merc’h-et- a
girl- PL1-VERBAL.SUFFIX
‘to womanize’
Second, when a diminutive of a plural is made, the diminutive suffix comes between the two plural suffixes (data from Stump (1989:266).
(4.179a) labous-ed- ig- où ‘birdies’
bird- PL1-DIM-PL2
(4.179b) merc’h-ed- ig- où ‘little girls’
girl- PL1-DIM-PL2