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The category of person has both inflectional and lexical aspects, and the distinction provides a finely graduated grammatical trait, relatively stable in both families and areas, and revealing for both typology and linguistic geography. Inflectional behavior includes reference to speech-act roles, indexation of arguments, discreteness from other categories such as number or gender, assignment and/or placement in syntax, arrangement in paradigms, and general resemblance to closed-class items. Lexical behavior includes sharing categories and/or forms and/or syntactic behavior with major lexical classes (usually nouns) and generally resembling open-class items. Criteria are given here for typologizing person as more vs. less inflectional, some basic typological correlations are tested, and the worldwide linguistic-geographical distribution is mapped.

The ergative inflection of Kuuk Thaayorre nouns is remarkably irregular. More than 15 distinct ergative forms are attested, none of which is phonologically predictable. This ergative inflection is also remarkable for its optional use. In spite of its primarily syntactic function, it may also be used to mark pragmatically ‘unexpected’ intransitive subjects, or be omitted where the referent of a transitive subject is easily retrieved from the discourse context or world knowledge. This article proposes that both the formal irregularity of the Kuuk Thaayorre ergative morpheme and its optionality have their origins in a language-wide historical process of phonological erosion. The suite of diachronic processes this erosion triggered a bidirectional grammaticalisation pathway, whereby grammatical (ergative) morphs were imbued with pragmatic functions even as originally pragmatic (focal) morphs were reanalysed as grammatical.

The rise of the periphrastic perfect tenses – past participle + have or be – is a phenomenon for which the analysis is especially promising with regards to the research on grammaticalisation. Firstly, it involved several steps of syntactic reanalysis and lexical recategorisation leading to a construction-specific auxiliary verb form. This allows for conclusions to be drawn about processes involved in grammaticalisation in general. Secondly, it is a grammatical change in which both Germanic and Romance languages converged. This allows for conclusions about universal conditions underlying such kinds of change. Thirdly, in German, the rise occurred rather late and within a relatively short period of time. This allows for the observation of the periphrasis in statu nascendi. In this paper, the grammaticalisation process is modeled and explained in a formal framework of generative syntax, also taking into account performance-based changes and contextual aspects providing the conditions for the relevant changes in the grammar. The main claim is that this process of grammaticalisation was terminated by an abrupt parametric change, leading to a syntactically reanalysed form of analytic inflection and the recategorisation of have as an auxiliary. The result was a full paradigm of periphrastic perfect tense. The preconditions for this grammatical change were provided by a sequence of performance-based changes and minor formal reanalyses, giving the process its gradual nature.

Allocutivity is a term coined to describe a phenomenon in Basque whereby, in certain pragmatic (and syntactic) circumstances, an addressee who is not an argument of the verb is systematically encoded in all declarative main clause conjugated verb forms. Although the term has been exclusively applied to Basque, similar phenomena are found in other languages as well. Indeed, despite certain differences in the degree of grammaticalization and usage, allocutive verb forms are attested in at least Pumé (isolate; Venezuela), Nambikwara (isolate; Brazil), Mandan (Siouan; North America), and Beja (Cushitic; Northeast Africa). The aim of this article is to propose a typology of verbal allocutivity in a crosslinguistic perspective, taking into consideration the locus of encoding, the manner in which it is encoded, the information concerning the addressee which is encoded, and the syntactic environments in which it can appear.

In this article two hypotheses about the relationship of verbal and adnominal agreement are proposed: first, it is claimed that languages tend to have adnominal agreement only if they also have verbal agreement, but not vice versa. Second, it is argued that languages with adnominal agreement are areally restricted, while languages with verbal agreement are not. A sample of languages was selected to test these hypotheses, and both are confirmed by the data. The article closes with an admittedly speculative explanation of the hypotheses involving patterns of grammaticalization of different types of agreement markers.

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the notion of case, establishing the extent to which such a feature is needed in the grammars of individual languages. Case systems represent an advanced stage in the grammaticalization of lexical concepts, in which lexical meaning is lost and the cases function as exponents or signals of other grammatical categories such as grammatical functions. Although there are distinct allomorphs of case markers, the distribution of these allomorphs is usually determined by phonology. Morphological and syntactic cases are distinct properties and, in principle, can be found independent of each other. In morphology, an attribute of the morphological case is needed to generalize over inflectional classes. In the syntax, there is a need for an attribute of the syntactic case to state certain types of agreements, multiple-case marking, and some forms of government. The inflection/derivation distinction is a metagrammatical distinction that can only be drawn by grammarians by considering the interaction of all the principles of morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexical relatedness in the language.