Georg Höhn (Göttingen)

A typology of (ad)nominal person and some implications


Nominal person anchors the denotation of nominal projections with respect to speech act participants, a prominent example being English "we linguists". This talk presents crosslinguistic data and generalisations concerning expressions of nominal person based on a survey of 87 languages from about 40 language families, drawing on published grammars and augmented by elicited data. The focus is on adnominal pronoun constructions (APCs) like "we linguists", although nominal person has also been observed to be marked by means of clitics in the extended nominal projection. Possessive marking was deliberately excluded from the investigation.

Parameters investigated include word order (relative order of head noun wrt. adnominal pronouns and demonstratives, type of adpositions), the presence of articles in APCs, the co-occurrence of personal pronouns and demonstratives as well as person/number restrictions in nominal person marking (cf. English *I student, *they linguists).

Adopting as heuristics the Final-Over-Final Condition (Biberauer et al. 2014) and the assumption that adpositions form part of the extended nominal projection, I discuss implications of the typological data for crosslinguistic variation in the structural representation of nominal person and the interaction of person with other features like definiteness and demonstrativity.