The development of person marking on verbs.

TaylorS · Post by **TaylorS** » Sun Apr 25, 2010 5:15 pm

I have noticed that in my speech I will very often have constructions like "Alice, um, she went to the store" in which I stick in a redundant pronoun. Is this a common starting point for the development of person-gender-number marking on verbs? I know the Romance languages already have grammaticalized redundant pronouns.

Torco · Post by **Torco** » Sun Apr 25, 2010 5:19 pm

I can imagine personal verb marking developing as mandatory pronoun + verb becoming prefix+verb, tho' I doubt it's the only way.

Miekko · Post by **Miekko** » Sun Apr 25, 2010 5:43 pm

Torco wrote:I can imagine personal verb marking developing as mandatory pronoun + verb becoming prefix+verb, tho' I doubt it's the only way.

a VSO lang could also shift easily that way - the S being assimilated to the V, and the nominal subject dislocated to the left, as topics often are.

the duke of nuke · Post by **the duke of nuke** » Sun Apr 25, 2010 5:50 pm

I did that for a couple of my conlangs - the Northern branch of the Amaranth languages was originally VSO with no person marking, then pronouns fused to the verbs as subject marking and the whole affair turned into VOS. It was actually inspired by Yiuel's comments on Quebec French.

Yiuel Raumbesrairc · Post by **Yiuel Raumbesrairc** » Mon Apr 26, 2010 9:24 am

As duke said, QcFr does show what Torco and Miekko imagined.

As for Miekko's, it's related to QcFr's neutral inanimate pronoun "ça" which works like other clitics, but is always placed after the whole verbal complex.

Ex :

J'ai pas aimé ça la shot où il a insulté ma meilleure amie.
I didn't like that time when he insulted my best friend.

In italics you have the verbal complex, with "ça" shown in bold, which refers to (or makes the verbal complex agree with) the underlined phrase.

(But here, it's a remnant of SVO that shows up, causing object agreement.)