Tag Archives: definiteness

Indefinite Pronouns in Ayeri

I think it was Miekko who pointed this out to me a whole while ago. There’s a long-decommissioned page by Apollo Hogan on which he summarizes bits on the typology of indefinite pronouns from the book Indefinite Pronouns by Martin Haspelmath.[1. My university’s Linguistics department library has a copy of the book, however, I don’t have it at hand now, so I’ll maybe add proper page references later. For the time being, I’ll rely on the information on Hogan’s page.]

Some Theoretical Underpinnings

According to Haspelmath’s classification, there are 9 groups of indefinite pronouns:[1. This table copied from Hogan’s page, linked above.]

Specific Known to speaker SK (1)
Unknown to speaker SU (2)
Non-specific Irrealis context I/NS (3)
Negative polarity Conditional protasis COND (5)
Polar question QU (4)
Standard of comparison COMP (8)
Indirect negation IN (6)
Direct negation DN (7)
Free choice FC (9)

What is interesting here is that languages form contiguous groups from these elements according to the item indices above. For example, English is indicated as 12345 (some-), 456789 (any-), 7 (no-); German is indicated as 123456 (etwas), 23456+89 (irgend-), 456+8 (je-), 6+89 (jemand-), 7 (n-):[1. This table, too, is lifted from Hogan’s page.]

(7) DN
(1) SK (2) SU (3) I/NS (4) QU (6) IN
(5) COND (8) COMP
(9) FC

A Little Survey of Ayeri

Let us now see how this translates into Ayeri. In the following, I will more or less faithfully translate and adapt some of the example sentences given on the website linked above, which are probably quoted straight from Haspelmath:

  1. Specific, known to speaker (SK):
    1. Ang no naraya arilinya vaya – leku sinyāng!
      [gloss]Ang no nara-ya arilinya.Ø vaya – lek-u sinya-ang!
      AT want talk-3SG.M someone.TOP you.LOC – guess-IMP who-A[/gloss]
      ‘Somebody wanted to talk to you – guess who!’
    2. Le rua ningyang arilinya vayam.
      [gloss]Le rua ning-yang arilinya.Ø vayam.
      PT.INAN must tell-1SG.A something.TOP you.DAT[/gloss]
      ‘I must tell you something.’
  2. Specific, unknown to speaker (SK):
    1. Le tangyang arilinya, nārya ming naroyyang, adareng sinyaley.
      [gloss]Le tang-yang arilinya.Ø, nārya ming nara-oy-yang, ada-reng sinya-ley.
      PT.INAN hear-1SG.A something.TOP, but can say-NEG-1SG.A, that-A.INAN what-P.INAN[/gloss]
      ‘I heard something, but I can’t say what it was.’
    2. Ang pegaya arilinya pangisley nā!
      [gloss]Ang pega-ya arilinya.Ø pangis-ley nā
      AT steal-3SG.M steal.TOP money-P.INAN my[/gloss]
      ‘Somebody stole my money!’
  3. Irrealis, non-specific (I/NS):
    1. Pinyan, prantu yāril palung.
      [gloss]Pinyan, prant-u yāril palung.
      Please, ask-IMP somewhere different[/gloss]
      ‘Please ask somewhere else.’
    2. Intu arilinyaley kondanyam yām![1. Not quite sure about the kondanyam part here, maybe better: Intu arilinyaley yām siley ming konjang ‘… which I can eat.’ (… REL-P.INAN can eat-1SG.A).]
      [gloss]Int-u arilinya-ley kond-an-yam yām!
      Buy-IMP something-P.INAN eat-NMLZ-DAT me.DAT[/gloss]
      ‘Buy me something to eat!’
  4. Polar question (QU):
    1. Ang ningya arilinya vayam arilinyaley adanyana?
      [gloss]Ang ning-ya arilinya.Ø vayam arilinya-ley adanya-na?
      AT tell-3SG.M anybody.TOP you.DAT anything-P.INAN that.one-GEN[/gloss]
      ‘Did anybody tell you anything about it?’
    2. Ang koronva arilinyaley edanyana?
      [gloss]Ang koron-va.Ø arilinya-ley edanya-na
      AT know-you.TOP something-P.INAN this.one-GEN[/gloss]
      ‘Do you know something/anything about this?’
  5. Conditional protasis (COND):
    Le silvvāng arilinya, ningu yām adanyana!
    [gloss]Le silv-vāng arilinya.Ø, ning-u yām adanya-na
    PT.INAN see-2SG.A something.TOP, tell-IMP me.DAT that.one-GEN[/gloss]
    ‘If you see something/someone, tell me about it!’
  6. Indirect negation (IN):
    Paronoyyang, ang koronya arilinya guratanley.
    [gloss]Parona-oy-yang, ang koron-ya arilinya.Ø guratan-ley
    Believe-NEG-1SG.A, AT know-3SG.M anybody.TOP answer-P.INAN[/gloss]
    ‘I don’t think that anybody knows the answer.’
  7. Direct negation (DN):
    1. Ang koronya ranya guratanley.
      [gloss]Ang koron-ya ranya.Ø guratan-ley
      AT know-3SG.M nobody.TOP answer-P.INAN[/gloss]
      ‘Nobody knows the answer.’
    2. Le koronyang ranya.
      [gloss]Le koron-yang ranya.Ø
      PT.INAN know-1SG.A nothing.Ø[/gloss]
      ‘I know nothing/I don’t know anything.’
  8. Standard of comparison (COMP):
    1. Engara simingreng edaya ban yanen palung.
      [gloss]Eng-ara siming-reng edaya ban yanen palung
      be.more-3SG.INAN weather here good anywhere else[/gloss]
      ‘The weather here is better than anywhere else.’
    2. Engyeng larau enyās palung.
      [gloss]Eng-yeng larau enya-as palung
      be.more-she.A nice everyone-P else[/gloss]
      ‘She is nicer than anyone else.’
  9. Free choice (FC):
    Ang ming guraca enya eda-prantanley.
    [gloss]Ang ming gurat-ya enya.Ø eda=prantan-ley
    AT can answer-3SG.M anyone.TOP this=question-P.INAN[/gloss]
    ‘Anyone can answer this question.’

It turns out that Ayeri merges all of (1) through (6) as arilinya ‘somebody, something’, has a separate (7) ranya ‘nobody, nothing’, and then also merges (8) and (9) as enya ‘anyone, everyone’. Among the dozen or so of natural languages cited as example types, Ayeri is thus closest to Catalan, given as 123456 (algun), 45678 (cap), 89 (qualsevol). What Ayeri doesn’t have, however, is an indefinite negative pronoun in the fashion of French personne or Catalan cap, since ranya can only be used for direct negation and arilinya is inspecific as to affirmative or negative expectation or reference. Comparing the results to the first table above, it should be clear that Ayeri lacks a polarity distinction in that negative polarity is not a distinct category but pronouns overlap with both negative and positive (or non-negative?) categories.

Flicking Switches: Ayeri and the Austronesian Alignment

  • This article still receives rather a lot of views, so if you are seriously interested in what I wrote below, please read my reevaluation of Ayeri’s syntactic alignment (a preliminary version of chapter 5 of the Grammar). The article below neither properly reflects current Ayeri grammar nor relatively more recent academic research on Austronesian alignment.

In this article, a number of features of the Austronesian alignment will be discussed in hope to gain a better understanding about the difference between what David J. Peterson called the ‘conlang trigger system’ – of which Ayeri uses a variety – and the naturally occurring ‘trigger system’ of South-East Asia, namely the ‘Philippine’ or ‘Austronesian’ alignment which served as an inspiration for part of Ayeri’s grammar, albeit with some misunderstandings. In order to examine and test how Ayeri works with regards to the terms topic, focus, and subject and in how far it differs from Austronesian languages such as Tagalog, papers by Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson, Paul R. Kroeger, and Paul Schachter were taken into consideration.

As the focus of this article is mainly on how Ayeri relates to the Austronesian alignment system, the language’s detailed way of assigning case to the different semantic roles as well as the details of its handling of morphologic case marking with regards to verb transitivity and the classic constituent-order typology will only be touched on superficially. Continue reading Flicking Switches: Ayeri and the Austronesian Alignment