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In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the
agreement Agreement may refer to: Agreements between people and organizations * Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law * Trade agreement, between countries * Consensus, a decision-making process * Contract, enforceable in a court of law ** Meeting of ...
of a verb with more than one of its
argument An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectic ...
s (usually up to four). Polypersonalism is a morphological feature of a language, and languages that display it are called polypersonal languages. In non-polypersonal languages, the verb either shows no agreement at all or agrees with the primary argument (in English, the
subject Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
). In a language with polypersonal agreement, the verb has agreement morphemes that may indicate (as applicable) the subject, the direct object, the indirect or secondary object, the beneficiary of the verb action, etc. This polypersonal marking may be compulsory or optional (the latter meaning that some agreement morphemes can be elided if the full argument is expressed). Polysynthesis often includes polypersonalism, which in turn is a form of head-marking. Polypersonalism has also been correlated with ergativity. Examples of languages with polypersonal agreement are the
Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...
, Basque, Georgian, Hadza, Magahi, to a lesser extent Hungarian (see definite conjugation), as well as most polysynthetic languages, like Mohawk,
Inuktitut Inuktitut (; , syllabics ; from , "person" + , "like", "in the manner of"), also Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, is one of the principal Inuit languages of Canada. It is spoken in all areas north of the tree line, including parts of the provinces o ...
and many other Native American and Australian languages.


Examples


Georgian

In Georgian, the verb consists of a root and several optional affixes. The subject and object markers might appear as suffixes or prefixes, according to the verb class, the person and number, the tense and aspect of the verb, etc.; they also interact with each other phonologically. The polypersonal verbal system of Georgian allows the verb compound to convey the meanings of subject, direct object, indirect object, genitive, locative and causative meanings. As examples of the extremely complicated Georgian verb morphology, these are some simple polypersonal verbs (hyphens indicate morpheme boundaries): : 'I see him' : 'they hide you (sing. or pl.)' : 'they hide it ''from'' you (sing. or pl.)' : 'he is doing it ''for'' us' : 'he will give it to him (as a gift)' : 'he will congratulate him on it' : 'They are making him run' : 'you would make us make him jump (towards us)' An example of a polypersonal verb that has the genitive meaning incorporated can be: : 'My hands got cold' Here, () means 'hands'. The second morpheme in the verb () conveys the meaning 'my'. In Georgian this construction is very common with intransitive verbs; the possessive adjective (''my'', ''your'', etc.) is omitted before the subject, and the verb takes up the genitive meaning.


Basque

Basque is a
language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The num ...
with a polypersonal verbal system comprising two sub-types of verbs, synthetic and analytical. The following three cases are cross-referenced on the verb: the absolutive (the case for the subject of intransitive verbs and the direct objects of transitive verbs), the ergative (the case for the subject of transitive verbs), and the dative (the case for the indirect object of a transitive verb). A dative (along with the absolutive) can also be cross-referenced on an intransitive verb without a direct object in a "dative of interest" type of construction (cf. English "My car broke down on me"), as well as in constructions involving intransitive verbs of perception or feeling. Synthetic verbs take affixes directly onto their stems, while analytical verbs use a non-finite form that carries the lexical meaning of the verb, along with a conjugated auxiliary which is either strictly transitive or intransitive. Some common auxiliaries used to conjugate analytical verbs are ''izan'' ‘be’, ''ukan'' ‘have’, and ''egin'' ‘do’. Unlike Georgian, Basque has only two really synthetic tenses able to take these affixes: present simple and past simple. Here are a few examples: Synthetic forms: : ''d-akar-ki-o-gu'' ‘We bring it to him/her’, from ''ekarri'' ‘bring’ (‘d’ standing for ‘it’, ‘ki’ for the dative case, ‘o’ for ‘he’, and ‘gu’ for ‘we’) : ''z-erama-zki-gu-te-n'' ‘They took them to us’ from ''eraman'' ‘take’ Analytical or semi-synthetic forms: : ''Ekarriko d-i-o-gu'' ‘We'll bring it to him/her’ : ''Eraman d-ieza-zki-gu-ke-te'' ‘They can take them to us’ (‘d…zki’ standing for ‘them’, ‘ieza’ being a form of the auxiliary ‘izan’, ‘gu’ standing for ‘to us’, ‘te’ for ‘they’, and ‘ke’ being a potential marker) : ''Iristen z-a-izki-zue'' ‘They get to you (pl)’ from ''iritsi'' ‘get, arrive’


Semitic languages

In
Biblical Hebrew Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of ...
, or in poetic forms of Hebrew, a pronominal direct object can be incorporated into a verb's conjugation rather than included as a separate word. For example, ''ahavtikha'', with the suffix ''-kha'' indicating a masculine, singular, second-person direct object, is a poetic way to say ''ahavti otkha'' ("I loved you"). This also changes the position of the stress; while ''ahavti'' puts the stress on ''hav'' (), ''ahavtikha'' puts it on ''ti'' (). The same is true also of Arabic and
Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to: * Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire * Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language * Akkadian literature, literature in this language * Akkadian cuneiform, early writing system * Akkadian myt ...
. A number of modern Arabic dialects incorporate both direct and indirect object pronouns, e.g. Egyptian Arabic "he didn't write them to me". (In
Classical Arabic Classical Arabic ( ar, links=no, ٱلْعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ, al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥā) or Quranic Arabic is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notab ...
the equivalent would be three words: .)


Ganda

In
Ganda Ganda may refer to: Places * Ganda, Angola * Ganda, Tibet, China * Ganda, the ancient Latin name of Ghent, a city in Belgium Other uses * Baganda or Ganda, a people of Uganda ** Luganda or Ganda language, a language of Uganda * ''Ganda'' and "Ga ...
, direct and indirect pronominal objects may be incorporated into the verb as object infixes. For example: In the second example, the applicative suffix ''-ira'' converts the (usually monotransitive) verb ''gamba'' to a
ditransitive In grammar, a ditransitive (or bitransitive) verb is a transitive verb whose contextual use corresponds to a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be ...
. While agreement with a verbal subject is compulsory, agreement with an object is required only when the object is omitted. Many other
Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...
exhibit this feature.


Hungarian

In Hungarian the suffix / indicates a first person singular subject and a second person (either singular or plural) object. The most prominent example is "I love you". The second person singular object may be omitted but the plural requires the pronoun ().


Clitic pronouns

Polypersonalism involves
bound morpheme In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression; a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound form, ...
s that are part of the verbal morphology and therefore cannot be found separated from the verb. These morphemes are not to be confused with pronominal
clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a w ...
s. Some have observed that the
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
pronominal clitics (common to all
Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European languages, I ...
s) have evolved into inseparable parts of the verb in the colloquial use, and so, suggested that French could be analyzed as polypersonal.


See also

* Morphological typology *
Clitic doubling In linguistics, clitic doubling, or pronominal reduplication is a phenomenon by which clitic pronouns appear in verb phrases together with the full noun phrases that they refer to (as opposed to the cases where such pronouns and full noun phrases a ...
*
Incorporation Incorporation may refer to: * Incorporation (business), the creation of a corporation * Incorporation of a place, creation of municipal corporation such as a city or county * Incorporation (academic), awarding a degree based on the student having ...
* Pro-drop language


References

{{Reflist, colwidth=30em Grammar