Amerind personal pronouns

A reply to Campbell

Bibliographic Data

ID14614595
AuthorsJ Nichols (0000-0002-3709-1861), Drexel A Peterson (0000-0002-5673-4826), David A Peterson (0009-0004-5862-3531)
Year1998
Volume74
Issue3
Pages605-614
Publication date1998-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.1998.0126
OpenAlexW2090416321
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited10

INTRODUCTION. Lyle Campbell's comments (Campbell 1997a) on Nichols & Peterson 1996 appear to be based on misunderstandings. Our paper surveyed pronominal systems with first person n and second person m, a mini-paradigm well attested in western America, and showed that (a) the n:m system is not sufficient to prove, or even to strongly suggest, genetic relatedness among the languages exhibiting it and (b) nonetheless its distribution can hardly be due to universals or chance. We argued that, though neither genetic marker nor universal, the n: m system can nonetheless be given a historical interpretation. It is one of several features with nearly identical Pacific Rim distributions (including tones, numeral classifiers, and others we did not discuss), and the set of congruent distributions strongly suggests that language populations all around the Pacific Rim, and only there, include a good many lineages ultimately dispersed from the same founding population. For the dispersal a chronology (both absolute and relative), a center, and a trajectory can be reconstructed, although, given the great time depth involved, neither a mechanism of dispersal (migration? diffusion?) nor a descent (are all n:m language families sisters? some of them? none?) can be securely established. Our point was that, despite this indeterminacy, a fairly determinate origin and history can be posited. We posited a late phase in the linguistic colonization of the Americas, in which a few successive entrants-not necessarily sister languages-all emanated from the same coastal Asian population, brought markers of that population (such as n: m pronouns, numeral classifiers, etc.) into America, and retained their coastal orientation in a southward spread from the Beringian point of entry well into South America. The set of entries began at about the end of glaciation and had ended by about 6000 BP (the chronology follows from the geography: the markers of the Pacific Rim population are nearly continuous around the Pacific, but are stopped in Australasia at the point where postglacial sea-level rise separated Australia from New Guinea, and are cut off in the far north by the more recent Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut expansions). Our reconstruction is consistent with the linguistic facts and with what can plausibly be assumed about the colonization of the Americas. We would welcome other interpretations of the evidence; the main point of our paper was that the distribution of n:m pronoun systems cannot be dismissed as due to random chance or to universals. We have organized Campbell's remarks into two groups: those having to do broadly with method (sampling in general, construction of our sample, how we surveyed pronouns) and those having to do with our interpretation of the results. We quote or summarize each of his major criticisms in bulleted paragraphs, with our response in the following paragraph.1

Linguistics · Personal pronoun · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Language and cultural evolution · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology