Inclusory Pronominals

Many Austronesian (and other) languages contain one or more syntactic constructions of the following basic kinds: PETER WE(DUAL)WENT FISHING and/ or PETER WE(DUAL)-WENT FISHING, which can be glossed as 'Peter and I went fishing' or 'I went fishing with Peter'. The independent pronoun or the dependent pronominal (such as an affix) identifies a set of participants that includes the one or those referred to by the lexical noun phrase. Pronominal forms with this function are "inclusory." Constructions with inclusory pro-nominals have usually been analyzed as coordinate or comitative. The purpose of the paper is a detailed investigation of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the two types of inclusory-pronominal construction found in Toqabaqita, arguing that they are neither coordinate nor comitative. One type is a noun phrase with the inclusory pronoun as its head and the lexical noun phrase as its modifier. In the other type, the inclusory function is borne by a dependent pronominal. It is mismatch in the values of morpho-syntactic features that identifies constructions of the latter type as inclusory. This also shows that dependent pronominals may be independently meaningful rather than merely agreement phenomena.

1. Introduction.

Quite a few languages—Austronesian as well as others—have constructions that are analogous to that found in Toqabaqita, exemplified (in boldface) in (1):²

(1) Kamareqa doqora-ku        meki         lae ma-i     qusungadi.

1DU(EXCL) brother-1SG.PERS 1DU(EXCL).FUT go VENIT-at tomorrow

'I and my brother will come tomorrow.'

Although the Toqabaqita sentence is best translated as 'I and my brother will come tomorrow', and although it contains a direct counterpart of 'my brother' (doqora-ku), it does not contain a first-person singular pronoun. Instead, it contains the first-person dual exclusive independent pronoun kamareqa (and also the first-person dual exclusive future tense subject marker meki, which agrees with the independent pronoun). Importantly, sentence (1) makes a statement about two and only two individuals: the speaker and his/her brother. The independent pronoun identifies the total set of participants (two), and the following lexical noun phrase identifies a subset (the speaker's brother).That is, the referent of the lexical NP is included in the set identified by the pronoun. In the discussion that follows, a pronominal form that identifies a total set of participants, a subset of which is identified by a lexical NP, will be referred to as an "inclusory pronominal." The term "pronominal" is a convenient cover term for independent personal pronouns and various dependent forms that exhibit distinctions that are the same as, or similar to, those found with the independent pronouns, such as subject and object markers; see meki in (1) above. Inclusory pronominals are not special forms distinct from noninclusory pronominals (and "inclusory" is not the same as "inclu-sive"). The term "inclusory pronoun" will be used to refer specifically to independent personal pronouns that are inclusory. The lexical noun phrase that identifies a subset of the set encoded by an inclusory pronominal will be referred to as the "included noun phrase."

The central concern of this study is an investigation of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of constructions with inclusory pronominals, or inclu-sory constructions for short, in Toqabaqita, an Oceanic language spoken on Malaita, Solomon Islands.³ I leave it to experts on other languages that have constructions with inclusory pronominals to decide which, if any, of the conclusions reached here are applicable to those languages as well.

The structure of the paper is as follows: in section 2, I exemplify and discuss basic types of constructions with inclusory pronominals, two of which are found in Toqabaqita. Section 3 brie³y considers some earlier studies of inclusory constructions. Section 4 contains a detailed discussion of one of the two types of inclusory construction in Toqabaqita, and in section 5 the other type is discussed. Section 6 looks at the pragmatic properties of the first type of inclusory construction. The paper concludes with some general remarks in section 7.

As will be seen in sections 2 and 3, there are two main types of analysis of constructions...