In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments (usually up to four). Polypersonalism is a morphological feature of a language, and languages that display it are called polypersonal languages. Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (to decompose (itself), to glitter), or a state of being (exist, live, soak, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... A syntactic verb argument, in linguistics, is a phrase that appears in a relationship with the verb in a proposition. ... Morphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. ...

In non-polypersonal languages, the verb either shows no agreement at all or agrees with the primary argument (in English, the subject). In a language with polypersonal agreement, the verb has agreement morphemes that may indicate (as applicable) the subject, the direct object, the indirect or secondary object, the beneficiary of the verb action, etc. This polypersonal marking may be compulsory or optional (the latter meaning that some agreement morphemes can be elided if the full argument is expressed). The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The subject of a verb is the argument which generally refers to the origin of the action or the undergoer of the state shown by the verb. ... In Linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a given language. ...

Polysynthesis often includes polypersonalism, which in turn is a form of head-marking. Polypersonalism has also been correlated with ergativity. Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i. ... A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads (or nuclei) of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. ... An ergative-absolutive language (or just ergative language) is one that marks the subject of transitive verbs distinctly from the subject of intransitive verbs and the object of transitive verbs. ...

Examples of languages with polypersonal agreement are Basque and Georgian, as well as most polysynthetic languages, like Mohawk, Inuktitut and many other Native American languages. This language or phonology-related article needs to be fully converted to IPA. See IPA in Unicode for information about the correct codes for IPA characters. ... Mohawk is a Native American language spoken in the United States and Canada. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

Examples

In Georgian, the verb consists of a root and several optional affixes. The subject and object markers might appear as suffixes or prefixes, according to the verb class, the person and number, the tense and aspect of the verb, etc.; they also interact with each other phonologically. The polypersonal verbal system of Georgian can also encapsulate the meaning of for as in "X does something for someone", which is the indirect object. As examples of the extremely complicated Georgian verb morphology, these are some simple polypersonal verbs (hyphens indicate morpheme boundaries):

v-khed-av "I see him"

g-mal-av-en "they hide you (sin. or pl.)"

g-i-mal-av-en "they hide it from you (sin. or pl.)"

gv-i-ket-eb-s "he is doing it for us"

a-chuk-eb-s "he will give it to him (as a gift)"

mi-u-lots-av-s "he will congratulate him on it"

Reference: THE GEORGIAN LANGUAGE - An outline grammatical summary (http://www.armazi.com/georgian/).

Clitic pronouns

Polypersonalism involves bound morphemes that are part of the verbal morphology and therefore cannot be found separated from the verb. These morphemes are not to be confused with pronominal clitics, like English 'em (contracted them) or the Spanish object clitics lo, le, etc. While in Spanish it is quite possible to express meanings like "s/he gave it to him/her" or "show them to me" in one word, the pronominal morphemes indicating the direct and indirect objects are not part of the verb. Bound morphemes can only occur when attached to root morphemes. ... In linguistics, a clitic is a morpheme that functions syntactically like a word, but does not appear as an independent phonological word; instead it is always attached to a following or preceding word. ...

Some have observed that the French pronominal clitics (common to all Romance languages) have evolved into inseparable morphemes in the colloquial use, and that French could now rightly be analyzed as polypersonal. The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages, are a subfamily of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken by the common people evolving in different areas after the break-up of the Roman Empire. ...

See also

• Morphological typology
• Clitic doubling
• Incorporation