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Topic, Pronoun, and Agreement in Chicheŵa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Joan Bresnan and
Sam A. Mchombo
Joan Bresnan
Affiliation:
Stanford University
Sam A. Mchombo
Affiliation:
San Jose State University
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Abstract

This study offers a theory of agreement within the framework of lexical-functional grammar. In this theory, verbal affixes may mark either grammatical or anaphoric agreement. In grammatical agreement, a NP bears an argument relation to the verb, while the verbal affix expresses redundantly the person, number, and gender class of the NP. In anaphoric agreement, the verbal affix is an incorporated pronominal argument of the verb, and the coreferential NP has a non-argument function—either as an adjunct of the pronominal argument, or as a topic or focus of the clause or discourse structure. Grammatical topics have syntactic properties deriving from a theory of discourse functions. The minimal difference between an incorporated pronoun and a grammatical agreement marker is the presence or absence of a semantic attribute in the lexical content of the affix. Likewise, the minimal difference between a subject NP and a topic NP is the function, rather than the phrase structure attributes of dominance, precedence, and category. This theory offers an explanation for the close relation between grammatical and anaphoric agreement, as well as clear criteria for distinguishing anaphoric and grammatical agreement by their discourse, syntactic, and even phonological effects. The Chicheŵa language (Bantu) has both grammatical agreement with the subject and anaphoric agreement with the object, and related languages show various distributions of these two agreement types.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1987, pp. 741 - 782
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful for the support of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, and for the unique open intellectual environment which it provides. Our students and other colleagues—particularly Carolyn Coleman, Amy Dahlstrom, Mary Dalrymple, Abdelkader Fassi-Fehri, Mark Gawron, Mark Johnson, Jonni Kanerva, Paul Kiparsky, Will Leben, Al Mtenje, Peter Sells, Susan Stucky, Michael Wescoat, Annie Zaenen, and Draga Zee—have made many invaluable suggestions and criticisms that have constantly inspired us in this work. Thanks also to Avery Andrews, Sandy Chung, Nick Clements, Talmy Givón, John Goldsmith, K. P. Mohanan, Johanna Nichols, and David Perlmutter for comments on an earlier version of this work; however, the deficiencies of the present version remain our responsibility. Jonni Kanerva prepared the broad phonetic transcription of the tones of all our examples, using tapes in which Mchombo spoke them at normal speed. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Charles Ferguson's role in broadening our outlook on agreement, through his conception of the Stanford Conference on Agreement in Natural Language held in October 1984 at CSLI. A shorter version of this paper was presented at ESCOL 1985 (Bresnan & Mchombo 1985).

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