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Universal 561: Du (non-pronominal agreement forms) ⇒ Du (personal pronoun & noun)

Posted in Universals Archive

Universal 561: Du (non-pronominal agreement forms) ⇒ Du (personal pronoun & noun)

Original
If the dual extends to non-pronominal agreement forms, it also extends to personal pronouns and nouns.
Standardized
IF the dual extends to non-pronominal agreement forms, THEN it also extends to personal pronouns and nouns.
Keywords
agreement, number, dual, noun, personal pronoun
Domain
inflection, syntax
Type
implication
Status
achronic
Quality
absolute
Basis
languages in Humboldt 1830, including Basque (isolate), Greenlandic (Eskimo-Aleut), Saami (Uralic), Tahitian, Malay (both Malayo-Polynesian), Indo-European (e.g. Sanskrit, Ancient Greek), Semitic languages, American languages (e.g. Quechua, Totonaca, Huasteca, Mapuche, Tamanaca, Chayma)
Source
Humboldt 1830, as interpreted in Plank 1989: 299; Plank 1994b: 231
Counterexamples
Gothic (E. Germanic, Indo-European), Siroi and Kewa (Trans-New Guinea), Dizi (W. Omotic, Afro-Asiatic; but see Counterexamples to #567 for a caveat), Akkadian, Eastern Libyan Arabic (both Semitic, Afro-Asiatic), maybe also Chamorro (Chamorro, Western Malayo-Polynesian) and Hupa (Athabaskan) (Plank 1989: 299 ).

One Comment

  1. FP
    FP

    Plank 1989: 299-301, proposes to change the conjunction of the implicatum to a disjunction in order to avoid the counterexamples mentioned above: The dual does not extend to non-pronominal noun-phrase-internal agreement unless it extends to nouns. The dual does not extend to non-pronominal noun-phrase-external agreement unless it extends to personal pronouns.There is a natural diachronic reading of “extend” in this implication, and in many others of that kind.

    1. May 2020

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