Hierarchies

This work investigates the role that hierarchies play in grammar, specifically the hierarchy of person and animacy. I will use the person/animacy hierarchy in conjunction with other hierarchies to account for instances where person or animacy specifications have an effect in the syntax, for example the case of null subjects in Hebrew, which are only allowed for first and second person arguments, or the complex cliticization patterns of Sesotho, which depend on the animacy of all the arguments in the sentence. The theory developed here is one of markedness, and the crucial observation is that markedness results from the relationship between different hierarchies: a marked configuration emerges when an element ranks high on one scale but low on another. A hierarchy of person and animacy has been proposed by various authors to account for different grammatical phenomena. For instance, Morolong and Hyman (1977:202) use such a hierarchy to determine the object status of arguments, and Silverstein (1976: 122) uses it in a typology of split ergativity systems. The exact characterization of the hierarchy varies from author to author; the following is the version proposed by Aissen (1998).