Monday, January 28th @ 12:30 PM, Social Sciences 302

Allocutive agreement and forms of address in Basque

As in many other languages, Basque has a T-V distinction in the second
person: ‘hi’ (and related pronominal and agreement forms) is used with
close relatives and friends, while ‘zu’ (and related morphemes) is the
neutral form. Although the distinction is a familiar one, several
peculiarities of this system set it apart from better-known ones in
European languages. For instance, ‘hi’ forms encode
(masculine/feminine) gender in a language that otherwise has no
grammatical gender marking, which goes against the universal tendency
for gender to be marked in the second person only if the language
marks this distinction in the third person. In addition, ‘hi’ forms
trigger ‘allocutive agreement’: when speaking to close relatives and
friends (i.e. people that would be addressed with ‘hi’ forms), finite
verbs must include a non-argumental second person agreement marker
that agrees with the addresee (even if the latter is not referred to
by any overt or covert nominal in the sentence). Thus, the verbal
forms used with close male relatives and friends can be quite
different from those used with close female relatives and friends, and
both sets are different from the set of forms used with other
addressees.  In this talk, we discuss these and other grammatical and
social aspects of the second person system in Basque.