A statistical approach to African personal pronouns
Guillaume Segerer & Martine Vanhove - CNRS LLACAN, France

3b. Methodology

  • Identification of patterns
    • - As in WALS, only 1st root consonants are taken into account
    example: Fula [NC, Atlantic] (Sylla 1982):
    Free pronouns
     singularplural
    1 miin
    		enen (inc)
    minen (exc)
    2 aan
    		onon
    3 kanko
    		kamɓe

    Fula is not a m-N language because 2s aan can be analyzed as a-an with a suffix -Vn typical of 1st and 2nd persons in this paradigm.

  • Paradigmaticity
    • - As in WALS, we distinguished paradigmatic vs non-paradigmatic patterns, i.e. systems where the pattern shows up within a paradigm and systems where the two elements of the pattern belong to different paradigms. Paradigmatic patterns are far more frequent than non-paradigmatic ones.

    example: Ditammari [NC, Gur] (Reine in Miehe 2004):
      Object Free
    1sg n mi
    2sg da ~ la
    		fo

    Ditammari is a non-paradigmatic m-T language because the 1sg m-form and the 2sg T-form are not found in the same paradigm.
     <  ALT8 (8th Biennial Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology), University of California, Berkeley, July 23-26, 2009  >