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Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy
Edited by Naomi Shin and Daniel Erker
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 76] 2018
► pp. 67–90

Discovering structure

Person and accessibility

| Australian National University | Pennsylvania State University
| The Australian National University | Penn State University

We probe grammatical person differences comparing 3sg with 1sg in actual language use, utilizing subject pronoun expression in Spanish. We reconfigure the familiar constraint of accessibility to distinguish between clause linking (prosodic and syntactic connectedness) in coreferential contexts and distance from the previous mention (intervening clauses) in non-coreferential contexts. This refinement reveals that accessibility impacts 1sg earlier than 3sg, for which the pronoun rate rises more slowly with increasing distance. At the same time, for pronominal and unexpressed subjects, a greater proportion of 3sg than 1sg occurs in coreferential contexts. 3sg pronominal and unexpressed subjects thus tend to cluster more closely. By these differences in the workings of accessibility and in contextual distribution, unlike speech act participant 1sg, 3sg is a transient person in discourse.

Keywords: third person, accessibility, subject expression, pronouns, lexical subjects, variable context, prosody, coordination, contextual distribution, Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Grammatical person in cross-linguistic perspective
  • 2.Spontaneous speech and prosodically transcribed data
  • 3.Reconsidering accessibility: Clause linking and distance
    • 3.1.Distance from previous mention: Refining non-coreferential contexts
    • 3.2.Clause linking, prosodic and syntactic: Refining coreferential contexts
  • 4.The workings of accessibility for 3sg vs. 1sg
  • 5.Contextual distribution
    • 5.1.Lexical vs. pronominal and unexpressed 3sg subjects
    • 5.2.The clustering of 3sg pronominal and unexpressed subjects
    • 5.3.Contextual distribution and genre
  • 6.Inside and outside the variable context
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.05tra
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