Abstract
We show that the same Universal Grammar mechanism of Agree can have two quite different grammatical effects: normal agreement in person-number-gender features, or inducing a referential dependency between two designated DPs. As an instance of the latter, we study the switch-reference systems of two Panoan languages, Shipibo and Yawanawa. In addition to the fairly widespread distinction between same-subject (SS) and different-subject (DS) adjunct clauses, these languages also have clauses that are marked as having the object of the adjunct clause coreferential with the matrix subject (OS). We show that the coexistence of SS and OS makes it extra-clear that Agree is at work to establish a relationship between the switch-reference head and the “pivot” DP, since the relationship has all the properties characteristic of Agree: c-command, intervention, phase-restrictedness, and sensitivity to oblique case. We claim that SS and OS are the result of Agree-Link applying to create a pointer from a functional head to a DP, but Agree-Copy not applying to copy phi-features from the pointed-to DP back to the head (“Agree without agreement”)—a distinction that is independently motivated by recent studies of phi-agreement. When Agree-Copy does not apply, the pointers created by Agree-Link survive to LF, where they are interpreted as referential dependency. In contrast, DS is a default construction, used wherever SS and OS cannot be. We conclude by showing that this analysis of switch-reference extends naturally to account for the reflexive voice construction in Shipibo and other languages, illustrating the generality of the approach.
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Notes
Unless otherwise indicated, Shipibo examples are from Baker’s fieldwork, and Yawanawa examples are from Camargo Souza’s fieldwork. Most examples not from these sources are from Pilar Valenzuela’s (2003) excellent grammar of Shipibo. Baker’s fieldwork was done in October 2012 with three native speakers of Shipibo living in Lima: Luz Franco Ahuanari (Benxo), Wilmer Ancón Lopez (Pekon Sani), and Nimia García Nunta (Jisbe Jabe). Even when our displayed examples are from Baker’s fieldwork, we often cite examples from Valenzuela (2003) too, for further illustration and corroboration. Camargo Souza’s fieldwork was conducted with multiple speakers in the Rio Gregório Indigenous Reservation in the context of the Yawanawa Language Documentation Project, Yawanawahãu Xinã (ProDocLin, Museu do Índio and UNESCO, 2010–2013) and the Yawanawa Language Revitalization Project (Línguas indígenas ameaçadas: pesquisa e teorias linguísticas para a revitalização, CNPq, 2014–2017). Earlier sources on Yawanawa include Paula (2004) and Camargo Souza (2013).
The languages do have optional (not especially common) tense suffixes, which co-occur with and appear inside of plural subject agreement -kan and the aspect markers. Valenzuela (2003:284–289) lists seven of them for Shipibo, one with an immediate future meaning and the others expressing various degrees of pastness. In light of both their optionality and their low position in the verbal complex, we tentatively assume that these are adverbial elements, not instances of the functional category T. Whether these count as tenseless languages is then a terminological matter.
It seems likely that -kan is not precisely in T/Aspect, because it comes inside of the aspect markers -ke and -ai in Shipibo, and inside imperfective -i in Yawanawá. It is also found along with nonfinite Ts in infinitival clauses (Valenzuela 2003:488 (117)) and participle clauses (Valenzuela 2003:175 (24), 179 (36)) in Shipibo. Therefore, we adopt a more exploded Infl space for Panoan, analyzing -kan as a realization of a distinct head Subj in approximately the sense of Cardinaletti (2004) and Rizzi (2006). T is a higher head that selects SubjP as its complement. We assume that SubjP bears the EPP property in Panoan, so that Spec SubjP is the landing site of obligatory A-movement of subjects. These details of implementation are not crucial to our analysis, however. In Yawanawa, -kan is not compatible with perfective aspect, and the clitic =hu is used instead, the same morpheme that pluralizes DPs.
Yawanawa does not have verbs with this case frame; the theme of a psych verb is always oblique. Zariquiey (2017) discusses similar verbs in Kakataibo, where the “quasi-object” is not overtly oblique, as in Yawanawa, but is nevertheless inaccessible to OS marking, in contrast to the grammatical version of (16b) in Shipibo, suggesting that it bears covert oblique case. Evidently, the properties of these clauses vary quite a bit across the Panoan languages.
This is systematic in Shipibo (for speakers who allow the construction at all), but varies some from speaker to speaker in Yawanawa. Thus the noun ‘dog’ would be absolutive in (17b) for some speakers (see (18)). We do not speculate about the nature of this idiolectal difference here.
Note that this movement may be covert, or disguised by other movements of the scrambling type. Thus, it is not the case that the theme argument has to appear linearly before the goal argument to act as the pivot for OS marking, as shown by (20a) and (21a). A full-scale study of goal-theme order in these languages remains to be done, however.
As in many languages, one can debate whether the object markers in Quechua are simple agreements or pronominal clitics. However, it doesn’t matter much for our purposes, as long as Agree is involved in the syntax of clitics too, either as a precondition for moving a D head (Kramer 2014; Preminger 2014:ch. 4, etc.), or as creating a dependency between D adjoined to v and a DP inside the complement of v (Baker and Kramer 2018).
However, both Quechuan languages allow agreement with dative objects, as seen in (23b). This is parallel to the fact that both Panoan languages allow ergative subjects to be pivots for SR (see (12), (13)). This may be evidence that dative in Quechuan, like ergative in Panoan, is a structural (dependent) case, rather than a true oblique case.
Another interpretation of the data in this section is that the dative complements of psych verbs are PPs in Shipibo but are case-marked DPs in Yawanawa. We think that this is a slightly less elegant view, but a possible one.
In contrast, Imbabura Quechua does have subjects with quirky accusative case with predicates like ‘be cold’ and ‘hurt’. These cannot count as pivots for SS clauses, according to Hermon (1985:115), whereas nominative subjects can. This is a possible instance of the activity condition influencing the syntax of SS constructions in a way that is analogous to its influence on OS clauses in Shipibo.
An alternative could be the view of Baker (2008), in which it is a primitive property of a given functional head whether it is an Agree probe or not, not reduced to having a particular unvalued feature.
The alternative analysis would be based on the fact that Kobon’s DS+subject agreement series differs from simple subject agreement and from the SS+subject agreement series by having forms that end in /ö/ (sometimes backed to /o/ by vowel harmony, and in one case deleted after /e/; Davies 1981:182). Moreover, ö is a prominent segment in overt conjunctions in the language (nöŋ(öm), aöŋ, Davies 1981:67, 186). Therefore, this could be a case of Haiman’s (1983) second pattern, with ordinary subject agreement, a null SS marker, and an overt DS marker that is historically a conjunction /ö/. What is special about Kobon is that the DS marker has fused morphologically with agreement, so that subject agreement in SS clauses looks a bit different from subject agreement in DS clauses. If this is correct, one needn’t say that the SS head itself varies for phi-features, even in Kobon. There are also two South American languages for which this sort of analysis of potentially problematic patterns might be appropriate: the Jivaroan language Aguaruna (Overall 2007) and the Tukanoan language Kotiria (Longacre 1983; Stenzel 2016).
An index-copying theory can of course stipulate that a given functional head can copy the index of a DP or the phi-features of a DP but not both (Karlos Arregi, p.c.). But if the complementarity is universal (or nearly so), we would like it to follow more organically from the architecture of the theory. See also Sect. 6, where we extend our view to reflexive voice markers, which also do not vary with the phi-feature of the arguments they relate to.
Yet another option would be to say that LF only posits referential dependency for pointers from heads that do not have phi-feature slots associated with them—a property of heads that is uniformly present at LF regardless of when Agree-Copy applies. On the one hand, this stays true to the Y-model where PF does not feed LF. On the other hand, it seems a bit stipulative, since it is not so clear conceptually why the presence of feature slots on a head should influence the interpretation of a pointer from that head in exactly this way. We leave this possibility open.
This differs from our view in Baker and Camargo Souza (2019), where we proposed that C of the embedded clause actually Agrees with an operator in Spec CP, which is then controlled by the subject of the matrix clause. Our primary reason for taking this line was to allow for cases of SS (and OS) in which the pivot overlaps with the matrix subject in reference but is not identical to it (see (63) below, and Valenzuela 2003:430–434). If there is a control link in the analysis of these constructions, such examples can be treated as instances of partial control, in the sense of Landau (2001) and others. But this view requires some extra theoretical machinery, and it is not clear that it achieves its goal, given Landau’s (2013:227) claims that partial control is not possible into adjunct clauses. (We thank Emily Clem and an anonymous reviewer for pressing us on this point.) See Sect. 5.2 for a brief discussion.
There is something of a reconstruction paradox here, in that SR clauses can be interpreted inside the clause for the purposes of scope with respect to T-like heads (see also McKenzie 2012:235–237), but outside the clause for purposes of Condition C. Clem (2018b) tries to avoid the paradox by saying that a form of cyclic Agree (Bejar and Rezac 2009) allows C to Agree with the matrix subject from an adjoined position above the subject. We don’t entirely rule out this possibility, but Clem does not address scope evidence like that in (44), which is half of the paradox. See also Arregi and Hanink (2019) for an argument against Clem’s theory applied to Washo. Instead, the lack of reconstruction for Condition C might be addressed by some version of David Lebeaux’s “late merger of adjuncts” view, in which the TP inside the adjunct clause is merged into CP after a shell of the CP has extraposed.
We only address in passing the question of why SS (and OS) is only found on adjunct clauses, not on complement clauses in our Panoan languages. In fact, the more accurate generalization is that an SS clause cannot receive a thematic role from a matrix verb. Thus they cannot be sentential subjects or objects of Ps (see the discussion of (77) below) any more than they can be complements of theta-marking verbs. At the same time, they can be complements of certain auxiliary verbs—of ‘start’ in (37), or of ‘go’ in a periphrastic future construction. Why then can’t they receive thematic roles? A plausible reason might be that their C-heads are adjectival in category, rather than nominal, and a phrase must have some nominal properties (e.g., a referential index) in order to receive a thematic role (Baker 2003:Sect. 3.6). If so, “CSUB” in the vocabulary insertion rules in (51) might better be called CADJ. This may also cohere with the fact that SS clauses in Panoan show a form of case concord, which is a property of adjectival phrases in many languages. It is, however, possible for SR to be marked on complement clauses in some languages, including Choctaw (Broadwell 2006:269), Washo (Arregi and Hanink 2019), and Hopi (Jeanne 1978), so this is not a deep and invariant property of SR.
An anonymous reviewer asks if it would be simpler to have T agree with the embedded subject, move to C, and itself agree with the matrix subject from this new position (rather than C doing it). We suspect that the mechanics could be handled this way too, but we have not worked out the details to see whether they are simpler or not.
Of course the exponents for combinations like these will be different in other languages with similar SR systems. As a special case of this, one morpheme in a set like (51b) may be realized as ∅, a null realization. Thus there are languages in which the SS marker is null whereas DS is an overt morpheme, like Washo and Seri (Marlett 1981). Those could just be languages where T[D]+C[D,sub] = ∅ but C[sub] is not ∅. Conversely, there are languages in which the SS marker has a fixed overt exponent, but DS (normal subordinate C) does not, although normal T-agreement may take place in the embedded clause. (Indeed Shipibo can be like this; see fn. 36; see also the brief discussion of some New Guinean languages in Sect. 4.1.) This is a special case of the familiar fact that morphological markedness may or may not reflect syntactic markedness. These variations in which the morpheme is overt do not have any syntactic significance as far as we know. (Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for raising these issues.)
There are no ergative languages with canonical SR in North America, unless the Inuit languages count as having SR; see McKenzie (2015) and Baker and Camargo Souza (2019) for claims that they do not. Stirling (1993) writes of the Pomoan languages as being ergative, but they more properly have active case marking systems.
There is a contrast here between our theory and the similar Agree-based theories of Clem (2018b) and Arregi and Hanink (2018), both of which could in principle allow SR to be sensitive to the structural case features of possible pivots in the embedded clause, leading to over-generation in this respect. (But see fn. 44 for brief discussion of the subject=object marker in Amahuaca, which is important to Clem’s theory.)
An anonymous reviewer points out that, in languages where SS clauses can function as the complement of a triadic verb (unlike our Panoan languages), something is required to make sure that C Agrees with the subject and not the higher object (which would be closer), and suggests that C probing for a nominative DP could fill this gap. We agree that there is an important gap here in existing theories of SR (see Baker and Camargo Souza 2019 for discussion). However, we doubt that case-sensitive probing is the answer. If it were, then SS-marked complements would shift to object control in ergative languages, where the object is absolutive, although not in accusative languages, where the object is accusative. This effect is unknown to the literature.
Also this twice-Agreeing C would have to be the phase head itself, so it can see into TP, not a higher head in the C-space which can only see outward, as we suggested for Shipibo and Yawanawa (compare Carstens 2016).
An anonymous reviewer reminds us that Choctaw also has an SS marker -cha that replaces C and is incompatible with T marking (see Broadwell 2006:284–285). Although this marker is incompatible with past tense, it does co-occur with mood marking (-aachi IRR) and ordinary subject agreement. Therefore, it would require more study of the T-space in Choctaw to see if this is different from the kind of SR discussed in the text in any important way.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to do this, Simon Charlow for very helpful advice and checking our work, and Rajesh Bhatt for helpful discussion. Mistakes are our responsibility, as always.
By “is equivalent” in (57) we may assume for concreteness and familiarity that pointer relationships are translated into indexing relationships in the course of semantic interpretation, and these indices are in turn interpreted in the usual way. However, we also leave open the possibility that all of anaphora could be recast using pointers (links) instead of numerical indices, as suggested by Higginbotham (1983) and Safir (2004).
One might properly object that these examples are atypical of quantification in general, since each phrases and indefinites are known to take unusually wide scope, and special techniques exist for handling this, especially in the case of indefinites. But in fact, we really only know about the semantic behavior of this class of DPs—plus proper names and definite descriptions—in the Panoan languages anyway. “Better behaved” quantifiers like ‘exactly two NPs’ remain to be studied in these constructions. It is very possible that such examples will motivate moving to a dynamic semantics in the tradition of Heim (1982), Kamp (1981), and Chierchia (1995), where a DP in the adjunct clause can dynamically bind a pronoun in the matrix clause (or vice versa) without undergoing QR. This possible upgrade goes beyond the goals of the current sketch, however.
A related question, raised by an anonymous reviewer, is whether QR can take a DP out of two adjunct clauses, as could be needed to interpret a complex example like [[[José.ABS came in-SS] pro Mary.ABS greeted-SS] pro fish.ABS ate], meaning ‘Jose came in, he greeted Mary, and he ate fish.’ Longer chains of SS marked clauses like this are perfectly possible in Shipibo and Yawanawa and have a meaning like José λx [[[x came] x greeted Mary] x ate fish]. We suggest that such examples can be handled by Charlow’s (2019) view that QR (of indefinites, but extendable to definite DPs) can first raise a DP to the edge of an island, and then can raise the island as a whole to the edge of a containing clause, possibly iteratively, to give the effect of the DP taking widest scope.
Also to be considered in a full treatment is whether an example like (60) (perhaps with a different quantifier as the pivot) violates Weak Crossover. This depends of course on what version of Weak Crossover is accepted. Barker’s (2012) version, according to which (59a) is possible, says that the antecedent must precede the bound pronoun in “reconstructed linear order.” This is satisfied in (60) (and (58)) as it is in (59). For an example like ‘When pro danced-SS, someone drank yucca,’ we might have to appeal to the possibility of the adjunct clause reconstructing into a lower position (cf. Chierchia 1995). We want to allow this anyway, so that an adjunct clause can be interpreted under the scope of functional heads inside the main clause, as in (44). The relevant facts need closer study before pursuing this further, however.
This view can be compared to that of Arregi and Hanink (2019), who claim that when F Agrees with a plural DP in an SR construction it has the option of copying only one index from a set of indices associated with the DP. A similar assumption could work for us too: Agree-Link can create a pointer to one index in a set of indices associated with a DP. But a concern with this way of doing it is that normal phi-feature copying Agree does not seem to have option of picking out only some of the features of the agreed-with DP in this way. If it did, we might expect to see sentences in (say) Spanish like *Nosotros canto (We sing-1(sg)) and/or *Nosotros cantan (we sing-(3)pl) more than we do. Therefore, we suggest that it is not Agree-(Link) per se that can see into the fine-structure of the plural DP, but rather the interpretation of the pointer that can. This is what (66) does.
v also skips over Voice on its way to T and C, if our analysis of (81) below is correct.
Not all Yawanawa speakers have ergative case on the subject in examples like (69), but the theme still acts as the pivot for SS marking in examples like (19a), showing that it has moved to Spec SubjP.
There is presumably no deep incompatibility between OS and imperfective aspect, and indeed the related language Kakataibo does have an imperfective OS marker (Zariquiey 2011:585–587). This is a semiarbitrary lexical property of Shipibo and Yawanawa, perhaps related to perfective being the more common and less marked aspect.
More specifically, they are forms of C for subordinate clauses only (CSUB), like that or for in English. Matrix clauses have a distinct ∅ complementizer, as in many languages. (We thank an anonymous reviewer for this clarification.)
Another reason not to pin too much on -tian and -n as DS markers is that they are not entirely obligatory. Valenzuela (2003:422–423) says that “Different-subject marked clauses … may lack the morphemes -tian or -n and thus look just like finite clauses,” citing three examples. From our perspective, this just means that the C head of these adjunct clauses can sometimes be null, like that in English. We have not studied this option ourselves, though.
But see Arregi and Hanink (2019) for a more Finerian analysis of DS in Washo, built on the assumption that vocabulary insertion rules can detect whether two indices copied onto a head by Agree are the same or not. Clem’s (2018b) analysis is similar in this, although she takes DS to be the default form, as we do. McKenzie (2012) analyzes DS morphemes as having a lexical meaning “i≠j” in contrast to SS morphemes meaning “i=j”.
Two other Panoan languages, Kashibo-Kakataibo (Zariquiey 2011) and Amahauca (Clem 2018b), do have specialized SR markers for this S=O situation as well, although this is extremely rare typologically and of limited distribution even in Panaon. The two languages are not even identical in this: in Amahuaca the relevant marker is used only for an S=O case, whereas in Kakataibo it is also used for O=O. These additional markers also block default DS marking, so that in Kakataibo “DS” marking is used only if no core argument of the embedded clause is coreferential with any DP argument in the matrix. See fn. 44 for a further remark on S=O SR in Amahuaca.
In fact, the blocking between OS and DS is not absolute in our experience. In Baker’s Shipibo fieldwork, DS was rejected by native speakers with an object=subject interpretation 16 times, but it was accepted with this interpretation five times. Similarly, Valenzuela (2003) says that DS marking is bad in an O=S situation, but we found two apparent examples in her work. Similar remarks hold for Yawanawa. This variability is not necessarily bad for a pragmatic account. SS marking is much more common than OS marking in texts, and this might account for the fact that SS blocks DS more automatically and categorically than OS does.
Consider, for example, what might need to be done to get the distribution of DS in our Panoan languages in the theories of McKenzie (2012) or Arregi and Hanink (2019). They might have to say that the perfective DS morpheme (but not the imperfective one) collects indices from both the embedded subject and the embedded object (say i and k) by Multiple Agree, and that DS[PFV] means i≠n & k≠n, where n is an index collected from the matrix subject. This expansion to Multiple Agree is otherwise unmotivated for them, and seems clumsy.
Note also that DS clauses in these languages, like OS clauses, do not show case concord with the matrix subject.
An anonymous reviewer points out that a possible problem for our account is the fact that in some languages either SS or DS is possible, in seeming free variation, in examples like (63), where the two subjects overlap in reference. If SS is possible at all in this construction, it should block DS entirely, the reviewer suggests. This possible problem does not arise in perfective clauses in Shipibo, since SS marking is possible and DS marking is not, according to Valenzuela (2003:430–431). For languages in which the issue may arise, a fuller theory of the referential overlap cases is probably needed (fn. 39 on the pragmatic blocking of DS being weaker in rarer constructions than in the most frequent ones may also be relevant).
A reviewer suggests that this may be a form of Irene Heim’s “Maximize Presupposition.” We are open to this possibility, but do not commit ourselves to it, because it is not entirely clear what the presuppositions of an SS or OS construction are (or if they are always the same), or whether they are a superset of the presuppositions of a DS construction. Therefore, we leave our discussion of pragmatic blocking at an informal level. A closer analogy might be the more specific notion that pronouns cannot have locally bound readings when they are in competition with anaphors which are specialized for those readings, as in Safir (2004) and Reuland (2011).
There is one possible case of overgeneration: suppose that one generated a structure with all three of C[D,sub], T[D,pfv] and v[D], with T and v moving to C. That could potentially generate a structure like [[Maria pro tickle-AFFIX] pro laugh], with three pointers: one to the embedded object position, one to the embedded subject, and one to the matrix subject. The structure would then mean ‘When Mariai tickled herselfi, shei laughed.’ This is impossible in our languages. Why? As part of the answer, we can easily say that there is no vocabulary item to realize this combination of heads. However, this might not be enough, since a more general item that has a subset of this combination of features (e.g., -ax or -a) might still be insertable. Therefore, we tentatively block this unwanted derivation by a strict interpretation of how a morpheme’s affix features must be satisfied. Let us say that if head H has an unsatisfied affixation feature [__X], and head movement of either H or G forms H+G, the structure is bad if X≠G. In other words, affixation properties must be satisfied as soon as possible. Then since T[D,pfv] is an affix to C (see (51a)), v[D] cannot move to T[D,pfv] directly, since v is not C. In contrast, normal T[pfv] does not have an affix property, so it is possible for v[D] to move to this T (this independent T can count as a base for “affixation” of v[D]).
One construction that does not emerge naturally from this typology that one might wish did is a construction which Clem (2018b) documents for the Panoan language Amahuaca in which the subject of the embedded clause is coreferential with the object of the matrix clause (S=O). As far as pivot selection is concerned, there is nothing very special about these clauses: they could have T[D] in our sense. The challenging issue has to do with antipivot selection: how is it possible for C[sub,D] to agree with the matrix object rather than the matrix subject in this language/construction only? Perhaps the most likely answer is that some kind of object movement (possibly covert) raises the object to a position where C can agree with it. (Indeed, a kind of object shift is an ingredient in Clem’s analysis too.) Alternatives might be that these S=O clauses are generated lower, inside VP, so C can agree upward with an unmoved object, or that C can somehow probe downward into the matrix clause in this case (also an element in Clem’s analysis). But any of these suggestions raises the question of why this happens only in Amahuaca, and we do not know enough about that language to speculate. (We note that our OS construction, though very rare outside of Panoan, is reasonably robust and stable inside the family, found in all the languages that have been described fully enough to know. In contrast, Amahuaca’s S=O construction is rare even inside Panoan, with no exact analog in any of the other known languages. Kakataibo has a similar but not identical S-or-O=O construction; see fn. 38.)
As in many languages, the morphology used for reflexive forms is also used for anticausative and passive-like readings. Therefore, Valenzuela (2003) refers to it as middle morphology, not as reflexive. Presumably this homophony has something to do with there being a formal similarity between having a movement dependency between a thematic object position and a nonthematic subject position and having a reflexive dependency between a thematic object position and a thematic subject position. But we do not commit to any particular proposal here.
A peculiarity of Shipibo is that reflexive voice seems not to be very productive on ditransitive verbs, whereas there is no restriction on this in Bantu, Mohawk, etc. This is partially explained by a morphological restriction on reflexive voice in Shipibo: it needs to attach directly to roots (see Valenzuela 2003:Sect. 8.1), perhaps because its morphological realization can be fairly idiosyncratic. This accounts for why reflexive voice cannot attach to derived ditransitives formed by causative or applicative, but not why it cannot attach to some simple ditransitive verbs, including ‘give’.
Note that reflexive voice is quite different in this respect from DP reflexives, which often do agree with their antecedent in phi-features (e.g., English: Wetickledourselves). Our Agree-without-agreement proposal is intended to cover only the former, not the latter (different from e.g. Reuland 2011). DP reflexive anaphora also has a rather different syntactic distribution from reflexive voice, as discussed briefly below.
Reciprocal voice, marked by the suffix -anan in Shipibo, differs from reflexive voice in some of these respects. Valenzuela (2003:ch. 18) shows that reciprocal voice can relate an oblique object to the subject of a psych verb, and it can relate the possessor of the object to the subject. Thus an Agree-based analysis seems inappropriate for reciprocal voice in Shipibo. This shows that the grammatical restrictions on reflexive voice should not be taken for granted, but call for a grammaical account in terms of Agree. However it also raises the question of what the analysis of reciprocal voice should be. One possibility is that -anan is really a kind of incorporated adverb meaning ‘mutually.’
There is a reason to say that Shipibo has a null anaphor that is distinct from its null pronouns: the null anaphor does not trigger ergative case on the subject (see (79b)), whereas null pronouns do (e.g., see the embedded clause in (46b)). Within the theory of Baker (2015:ch. 5), this could be because the null anaphor has fewer grammatical features than the null pronoun does, perhaps lacking phi-features. (An alternative view would be that there is no syntactic object in reflexive sentences at all in Shipibo, and middle morphology is a valence-reducing operation applying in the lexicon—a possibility that we do not entirely rule out. If that alternative turns out to be right, then we’d switch to Lubukusu and Kannada as our paradigm cases of reflexive voice being Agree without agreement.)
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Acknowledgements
There are many people to thank for their help with this work.
Baker’s fieldtrip to Lima, Peru to collect data on Shipibo was supported by a University Research Council grant from Rutgers University. Hearty thanks go to three Shipibo consultants, members of the Shipibo community living in Lima, for their cheerful and insightful contribution to this research: Luz Franco Ahuanari (Benxo), Wilmer Ancón Lopez (Pekon Sani), and Nimia García Nunta (Jisbe Jabe). Also essential to the project was Teresa Torres Bustamante, who served as a research assistant, and helped with logistical support as well as the discussion of ideas. Thanks also to the Pontifical Universidad Catolica del Peru for allowing Baker to use their facilities.
Camargo Souza’s work with the Yawanawa people was supported by Museu do Índio-RJ, the Brazilian National Indigenous Foundation (Funai), UNESCO, and the Brazilian National Research Counsil (CNPq). Thank you to all the Yawanawa chiefs and friends for their hospitality and enthusiasm to share their lives and their language through the years. Special thanks to the always patient and insightful consultants: Manoel Tika Matxuru da Silva Yawanawa, Jorge Luis Vea Yawanawa, Fernando Kate Yuve Yawanawa, Gilberto Mushuinũ Yawanawa, and especially Raimundo Sales Shukuvena Yawanawa.
For comments and discussion of the ideas in this work, we thank audiences at NELS 49 at Cornell University, at the DISCO conference held at the University of Leipzig, at McGill University, and at the Rutgers University Syntax reading group. We also benefited greatly from personal discussions with Emily Clem, Emily Hanink, Karlos Arregi, Kyle Johnson, Rajesh Bhatt, Ken Safir, Andrew Nevins, and especially Simon Charlow, as well as from the input of four anonymous reviewers, who pushed us in various ways. All have helped make this a better article, and only we are responsible for remaining errors.
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Baker, M., Camargo Souza, L. Agree without Agreement: Switch-reference and reflexive voice in two Panoan languages. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 38, 1053–1114 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09463-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09463-w