Speaker: Alexandra Vydrina (CNRS)
Title: From addressee-oriented deixis to a reflexive: the case of the pronoun ì in Kakabe (Mande)
Date: Thursday 12 November
Venue: Skype (contact us to get access to the meeting)
Time: 15.15 – 16.30 hrs
Abstract
It is not uncommon cross-linguistically to find a polysemy pattern whereby the same pronoun stands for the addressee and can be used as a generic pronoun. This is, for example, the case of the English pronoun you can be used deictically to refer to the addressee, but also as a generic pronoun as in (1).
(1) You don’t drink and drive.
The Kakabe pronoun ì, just like the English you, has both the deictic 2nd person use and the generic use as in (1). What is more surprising, ì can also appear in contexts of the so-called restricted genericity where the variable introduced by it has a generic or a universally-quantified DP as antecedent. In this case, it patterns with the French generic-reflexive pronoun soi (Charnavel 2018); cf. (2) where soi has a distributive universal DP as antecedent:
(2) [Tout linguiste]i parle de soii. Every linguist talked about himself.
Finally, and this type of use is the most unexpected one, ì can be used as a reflexive pronoun, but only if its antecedent is PRO in an infinitive clause or a relativized DP.
I will argue that, in its generic, distributive and reflexive-like uses, the Kakabe pronoun ì is a morphological instantiation of the zero pronoun, a semantic entity described by (Kratzer 1998). Relying on the evidence of other Mande languages, a diachronic scenario will be proposed whereby the 2nd person pronoun has developed into a dedicated morphological expression of the zero pronoun.