Talk:Allocutive agreement

In Slavic languages too?

Is "allocutive agreement" also the different treatment of [second] person in the past tense in Slavic languages? Eg in Czech:

he went - on šel (he+masculine past tense verb form)

she went - ona šla (she+feminine past tense verb form)

you went (to a male) - ty jsi šel (you+auxilliary verb+masculine past tense form)

you went (to a female) - ty jsi šla (ditto but feminine)

It also happens in the first person though:

I went (male) - já jsem šel (I+auxilliary verb+masculine past tense form)

I went (female) - já jsem šla (ditto but feminine)

And similar differences appear in the plural (masculine šli v feminine šly). --Thrissel (talk) 20:29, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

No because the gender marking here is in reference to the gender of the 3rd person, not the second person. Marking the speaker's gender is very common cross-linguistically, as is marking 3rd person gender. Marking the gender of the addressee is really rare, I've looked but I haven't been able to identify another language which does it. Akerbeltz (talk) 22:43, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for the quick answer! --Thrissel (talk) 22:54, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

No probs. If you do come across another language which does it, do mention it! Akerbeltz (talk) 23:59, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Beja

What's going on in the Beja example cited - and Arabic, Hebrew, and just about any Semitic or Berber language you care to name - is pretty much the same as the Slavic example above: subject agreement for gender whether the subject is 3rd person or 2nd person (1st person is more unusual). Lumping this together as "allocutive agreement" alongside cases like Basque - where you're getting verbal agreement with the addressee even when the addressee is not an argument - is misleading at best; if such cases count, then far more languages could be cited. - Lameen Souag (talk) 16:02, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Read the page. That's why Beja is there and Arabic et al aren't. The Beja example, same as Basque, changes based on the speaker of the addressee's gender. Akerbeltz (talk) 20:28, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

I've read the page, thanks - in fact, I've read quite a few published articles on allocutive agreement, and written one that touches on it. And the Beja examples given translate precisely into Arabic: taqburu "you (masc.) bury" vs taqburīna "you (fem.) bury". That's not allocutivity, that's just subject agreement. It is in fact true that Beja has allocutivity, but to illustrate that you would need an example like the following (from Antonov 2015): rihja=heːb=a

‘He saw me.’ (said to a man) vs. rihja=heːb=i ‘He saw me.’ (said to a woman). - Lameen Souag (talk) 20:19, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Ok, there's no reason why we can't use better examples :) Feel free to amend the section. Akerbeltz (talk) 21:51, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Interlinear gloss

@Akerbeltz Just that it is an interlinear gloss, and that there is a template for doing precisely that — it has all the features built in, like the links and smallcaps and whatnot, rather than recreating all those features by hand. --Eievie (talk) 17:15, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

So it does - just revert to your version, I must be going goggle eyed. My bad! Akerbeltz (talk) 17:45, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

@Eievie Although there's a problem - ALL now leads to Allative, not Allocutive? Akerbeltz (talk) 17:47, 14 March 2022 (UTC)

Japanese

I'm not sure adding Japanese is appropriate. As far as I understand Japanese, these markers are not gender marking and are therefore just normal honorifics, not allocutive markers. It also doesn't seem to be a mainstream view in Japanese linguistics, more like this one person pushing an interpretation of honorifics as allocutives. If that counts, then we might as well merge it with the honorifics page except that there's nothing honorific about Basque allocutives, quite the opposite. Akerbeltz (talk) 23:15, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

The idea seems to be that allocutivity (if that's a word) is something which recognizes a feature of the listener, rather than the features of things mentioned in a sentence, whether that feature is gender or something else. However, the assertion in the article that "boku" is the masculine 1st. person Japanese pronoun and "atashi" the feminine is oversimplified to the point of being almost meaningless. In many cases, Japanese dispenses with pronouns, or replaces them with relationship, occupational, and status terms, but when a pronoun is used, the most basic Japanese 1st person pronoun is "watashi", which does not distinguish gender, while "watakushi" is a little more formal. Variants without the "w-" ("atashi"/"atakushi") are not recommended for use by men, while "boku" is a specialized variant traditionally used by boys and young men. Japanese simply doesn't have grammatical gender in the way that European and Semitic languages do. AnonMoos (talk) 08:54, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that's taking a much too broad interpretation of allocutivity (it is a word now :D!) which was coined specifically for a scenario where a verb form encodes the m/f distinction of the addressee. I agree that Japanese pronoun usage and honorifics are complicated but as you said, most of it is about relational status, not a m/f distinction of the addressee. I'm going to revert out all the Japanese stuff for now until we get some good mainstream sources describing Japanese as having an allocutive categories. Akerbeltz (talk) 17:52, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Hello! I'm the one who edited Allocutive agreement a few days ago. I should have discussed this on the talk page before editing the article, but it looks like (a) even Basque linguists do not think allocutives are just about gender agreement, and (b) recent works on this phenomenon usually mention Japanese honorifics.

Speaking of (a), the literature cited in the article doesn’t define allocutives with any reference to gender as far as I’m aware. According to Trask (1997:234), “[t]he allocutive forms are those in which a second-person marker is placed in the finite verb ni order to mark the addressee even though the sentence contains no second-person argument”. Antonov (2015:56) defines allocutivity as “explicit marking of presence of an addressee even is s/he is not an argument of the verb”. Their use of the term is even consistent with where it came from; Bonaparte (1869:19) pointed out allocutive forms “ne s’emploient que quand on veut adresser la parole d’une manière expresse, soit à un homme, soit à une femme, soit à une personne des deux sexes à laquelle on veut témoigner quelque respect”, which suggests he regarded addressee honorifics as allocutives.

In any case, this article doesn’t indicate the page number of the reference so I'm not sure I have a point. Rzmlvlk (talk) 12:56, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

As for (b), please refer to

Thomas McFadden (2020) “The morphosyntax of allocutive agreement in Tamil” and Deepak Alok (2021) “The Morphosyntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement”. Rzmlvlk (talk) 13:01, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for consecutive posts!

What I wanted to suggest is, including (addressee) honorifics in allocutives is not “too broad interpretation” of the term since it is defined as such in the first place. Bonaparte was aware that marking the social status between the speaker and the listener is also a feature of allocutive agreement. Trask (1997:235) mentions “a few eastern varieties” of Basque have the allocutive form for the pronoun zu. Antonov (2015) cites data from Souletin Basque, where the allocutive suffixes -k, -n and -sy indicate a male, a female, and a respected addressee respectively. It’s no wonder he considers languages like Japanese and Korean to have what he calls “verbal allocutivity”. I suppose Oyharçabal (1993) “Verb Agreement with Nonarguments: On Allocutive Agreement” is the first work to put forward the idea that Japanese teineigo or addressee honorifics are something comparable with allocutive agreements in Basque (p.91). Though I must admit the allocutive interpretation of teineigo only attracts the attention of generative linguists and typologists rather than those who work within the tradition of Japanese linguistics.

My final concern is whether Basque people will find those ideas about allocutives weird or unintuitive because they’re apparently the ones familiar with the term the most. I just knew it from Antonov’s article and found it interesting as someone who speaks Japanese, so I can’t represent them but hopefully it’ll turn out to be okay. Thank you! Rzmlvlk (talk) 15:49, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Is allocutive agreement only about gender?

Hi! I mentioned this on the last topic but I think it should be discussed on a separate topic because it’s concerned with more general issues about the subject.

As far as I understand, the concept of allocutives has always been associated with the marking of non-argumenal addressees whether they're familiar to the speaker or not. In fact allocutive forms do not necessarily indicate the gender distinction as is the case with the Souletin Basque -sy (please refer to Bonaparte 1862, Trask 1997:234, Antonov 2015, which are cited in the current version of this article, as well as Bernard Oyharçabal's (1993) “Verb Agreement with Non Arguments: On allocutive agreement”, José Ignacio Hualde and Jon Ortiz de Urbina's (2003) Basque grammar, and Haddican's (2018) “The syntax of Basque allocutive clitics”). This implies addressee honorifics that are found in Japanese, Korean, Magahi etc. should be included in allocutives, which is actually in accord with recent generative and typological studies of allocutivity (again please see Antonov 2015).

Although it would be quite fair to say allocutive agreement Standard Basque is about the listener's gender, this article does not contain any reference to the page number of Trask (1997) and Antonov (2015), making the definition look highly questionable. I couldn’t even find any works that suggest allocutives are only about gender rather than the addressee in general. This is why I believe we should revert it to the older version, where I tried to specify the page number of citations so that we can easily check the statements made there. Thank you! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allocutive_agreement&oldid=1204566933 Rzmlvlk (talk) 07:28, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Bit strapped for time, just a couple of quick points. Zuberoan is an outlier in the way it incorporates zu forms into the allocutive paradigm. I don't think anyone would argue that this represents the common/underlying allocutive system but is a localized extension.

Trask says "when the addressess is addressed with the intimate singular pronoun hi, ... Thus etorri da 'he has come' has allocutive forms etorri duk (male addressee) and etorri dun (female addressee)...

Saltarelli says (p244): The agreement markers distinguish person, number and, in the case of the second person singular informal, gender.

Elhuyar, who include a section on hitanoa verb forms in their big dictionary also say: Hiztunak aurrean duen solaskidea hika (eta ez zuka) tratatzen duenean erabiltzen dira hikako alokutiboak. Hikari dagozkion markak (-n solaskidea emakumezkoa denean eta -k hozonezkoa denean, funtsean) adizkietan ageri dira.

No matter where this is discussed in relation to Basque, it is always discussed in relation to the gender of the addressee in settings where hi is used. The Zuberoan outlier usage of zu (and the intermediate xu) by and large is often not even mentioned.

I really don't think it's possible to shoehorn honorofics in general into allocutives, although one of course CAN discuss hi/zu/xu levels of formality as a type of honorific. But that doesn't make every honorific an allocutive. Akerbeltz (talk) 11:07, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

PPS I think Antonov -sy must be a script conversion artefact and he actually means xu, there is no sy in any variant of Basque. Akerbeltz (talk) 15:49, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for replying!

While I understand that allocutive agreement in Basque is usually mentioned in reference to the listener's gender and that the Zuberoan zu form is rather exceptional, I still don’t really get why not define allocutives in a way that includes the polite form (which, in fact, Bonaparte 1862:19, Trask 1997, Hualde and Jon Ortiz de Urbina 203:243, and Haddican 2018 unanimously do). Again, “[t]he allocutive forms are those in which a second-person marker is placed in the finite verb in order to mark the addressee even though the sentence contains no second-person argument” (Trask 1997:234) is sufficient to cover all of the allocutive forms in Basque dialects when reference to “the gender of an addressee” is not even necessary. Ignoring “outliers” simply leads to a wrong description unless otherwise specified; it's as misleading as saying “tones are pitch patterns inherent in a syllable” without making it clear that pitch-accent languages like Swedish and possibly Shanghainese don’t count as tonal for a reason (e.g. many authors don't see them as tonal even though some do). Anyway, I’m glad to finally find some work explicitly excluding the zu form from allocutives, like Elhuyar Hiztegia. I think this work is somehow mentioned in the article as well!

Also, it looks like you think Antonov and his followers regard whatever kinds of honorifics as allocutives, but this is simply not the case. Their point is only addressee honorifics count as allocutives because it indicates the presence of a non-argumental hearer of a sentence just in the same way as the Basque masculine -k and the feminine -n. It’s not because of some “localized extension” of zu into the Basque allocutive system.

Addressee honorifics are completely different from subject honorifics (which are part of referent honorifics) in that they aren't associated with any argument of a verb. Consider the following Japanese example:

1. Yatsu ga kimashita. ('He came', addressee honorification)
2. Sensei-ga korare-mashi-ta. ('The teacher came', addressee plus subject honorification)
3. Sensei-ga korare-ta. ('The teacher came', subject honorification)
4. *Yatsu-ga korare-ta. ('He came', subject honorification)
5. *Yatsu ga korareta. ('He came', subject honorification)

The last sentence sounds unnatural since the subject honorific form of the verb 'to come' is used for the pejorative pronoun yatsu. The form korareta should be only used when a person to be respected, like your teacher or boss, is the subject of the clause. On the contrary, the first sentence sounds completely okay in spite of the use of the honorific kimashita. What the addressee honorific kimashita is doing here is to indicate the addressee is someone to be respected even if s/he isn't the subject nor any other argument of a verb. This means you can’t use the same sentence when you talk to someone you’re familiar with; in that case you’ll just say yatsu ga kita without any honorifics instead. The way addressee honorifics "agree" with the second-person is reminiscent of Basque gender indexes -k/-n even though these are by no means honorifics. This is the very reason why authors like Oyharçabal and Antonov suggest ADDRESSEE honorifics are something comparable with allocutive agreement in Basque, and it is no surprise considering some Basque dialects actually have honorific allocutives (please refer to Antonov 2015 for further discussion).

Finally, I don't think the definition of “allocutive agreement” in this article is inaccurate or inappropriate as long as most varieties of Basque and Beja are concerned. At the same time, I believe Antonov's idea of allocutivity as a cross-linguistic concept deserves to be mentioned there as well, not only because it's been more and more widely accepted in the recent literature, but also it has its roots in how Bornaparte coined the term in the first place.

Sorry for my long reply! I appreciate your understanding. Rzmlvlk (talk) 16:51, 13 February 2024 (UTC)