thesubjectcyclelinguisticchangeandcognitiveprinc.docVIP

The Subject Cycle: Linguistic Change and Cognitive Principles Elly van Gelderen 20 August 2007 Abstract In this paper, I provide examples of subject pronouns changing to agreement markers, agreement markers disappearing, and pronominal subjects being renewed again. This phenomenon is well-known from the linguistic literature of the 19th century and part of the Linguistic Cycle as e.g. Hodge (1970) calls it. This particular cycle involves the subject, and I therefore refer to it as the Subject Cycle. I provide a classification for the stages of the cycle using specific criteria as well as ways in which these stages change. The main languages I discuss (in order of appearance in the paper) are Urdu/Hindi, Japanese, Modern English, Standard and Colloquial French, stages of Egyptian, Welsh, Navajo, Spanish, varieties of Italian, Warlbiri, Old and Middle English, Oodham, and varieties of Dutch. One type of language I discuss is the Pronominal Argument (PAL) one. I show that, even though PALs are relevant to the Subject Cycle, they represent a special stage. I argue the changes are brought about by certain cognitive principles (or third factor principles as in Chomsky 2005; 2006), in particular by Economy Principles. Language change is therefore not so much triggered by new data as by new reanalyses of the linguistic data (that are then accepted). Emphatic (non-argument) pronouns can be reanalyzed as subject pronouns which in turn can be reanalyzed as agreement and then be lost. I refer to this series of changes as the Subject Cycle. Givóns (1971; 1978) views that agreement markers arise from pronouns that are adjacent to the verb are well-known: agreement and pronominalization ... are fundamentally one and the same phenomenon (1978: 151). Subjects arent the only arguments involved in this cycle since object pronouns can become agreement markers too but I will leave that unexplored here. There are many examples of the various cross-linguistic stages synchronic