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In:Typological Hierarchies in Synchrony and Diachrony
Edited by Sonia Cristofaro and Fernando Zúñiga
[Typological Studies in Language 121] 2018
► pp. 377–402

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Chapter 11
Morphosyntactic coding of proper names and its implications for the Animacy Hierarchy

 | University of Regensburg
 | University of Regensburg
 | University of Regensburg
 | University of Regensburg
Published online: 26 July 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.121.11hel
Abstract
The Animacy Hierarchy (AH) is an important construct employed for the description and explanation of variation and splits in case marking and agreement in various grammatical domains. The AH is a scale that combines person, definiteness and semantic animacy and is used to state clear preferences of certain morphosyntactic coding types over others. One assumption of the AH is that proper names (PNs) occupy an intermediate place between personal pronouns and common nouns. Despite the large body of research since its first extensive formulation in Silverstein (1976), it is astonishing that there has been almost no empirical evidence published for this claim. Since the AH has been formulated mostly on the basis of case marking and agreement phenomena in languages with split ergativity or hierarchical alignment, we compiled a sample of more than 30 such languages in order to find data on the morphosyntactic coding of PNs. While there are only a very few instances that confirm the claim, there are more instances that contradict it. We concluded that PNs should be removed from the AH, since their assumed position has no predictive value for typological generalizations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction1
    • 1.1The Animacy Hierarchy
    • 1.2The problem and the research question
    • 1.3A note on sampling
  • 2.Analysis and results
    • 2.1Languages with a split ergative marking system
      • 2.1.1Split marking patterns that are in accordance with the AH
        • 2.1.1.1Case marking of P arguments
        • 2.1.1.2Case marking of A arguments
        • 2.1.1.3Tripartite marking pattern
      • 2.1.2Split marking patterns that contradict the AH
    • 2.2Languages with hierarchical marking systems
  • 3.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
  • Appendix
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