The Atoms of Person: Limitations on Concept Formation

Even though person markers such as agreement suffixes, clitics or independent pronouns are very common crosslinguistically, many questions about the possible person referents these markers can refer to remain. Consider for example the inclusive, which refers to the referents of both first and second person, respectively speaker (called i in this paper) and hearer (called u): iu. In a representative sample of 370 languages, the other logically possible person referent combinations, io (for speaker and other) and uo (for hearer and other), are unattested and therefore impossible person distinctions in natural language. The literature often equates io and uo with first and second person plural, respectively. However, I show that pronominal plural is not an instance of ‘+ third person’ or ‘+ o’, but that it is in fact an instance of ‘+ associates’ or ‘+ a’, resulting in the plurals iua, ia, ua and oa. The CONCEPT FORMATION CONSTRAINT in the kite framework (see Jaspers 2012; Seuren & Jaspers 2014; Roelandt 2016) makes generalisations about lexicalisation in closed lexical fields and predicts exactly the gap in lexicalisation we see for person, namely the absence of person markers for the combinations io and uo. As such, the fact that these are impossible person distinctions is part of a broader generalisation on lexicalisation in natural language.