Mandan φ-marking and the morphosyntax of first person plural

den Dikken,, Marcel (2025) Mandan φ-marking and the morphosyntax of first person plural. In: Syntax in uncharted territories: Essays in Honor of Maria Polinsky. eScholarship, Berkeley, CA, Berkeley, pp. 151-163.

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Abstract

In the Mandan (Western Siouan) complex verb, the makeup of the prefixal field features two loci for φ-feature marking, separated by what the Siouanist literature calls “preverbs” (PV). The pre-PV φ-slot is for marking first person plural (1PL); the post-PV φ-slot is for markers of speech-act participants. The question central to this paper is what explains the positioning relative to the preverbs of the 1PL marker and the other φ-morphology of Mandan. The Mandan 1PL prefix, which has a morphologically transparent dual inclusive reading, is syntactically represented in the form of a comitative phrasal structure involving the asyndetic coordination of a plural pronoun and a combination of the first person singular and second person pronouns: ‘we, viz., I with you’. While 1PL is a morphosyntactic complex occupying SpecTP (preceding preverbs), the first and second person markers are agreement inflections (following preverbs), linked to pro’s in A-positions.

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