1st Person Research Articles

Семантика и прагматика высказываний с эмотивными предикатами

The paper considers Russian causative (transitive) psych verbs with semantics of state and action, such as udivlyat’ - udivit’ (to surprise), ogorchat’ - ogorchit’ (to upset). Also, the authors discuss how the speech of Internet communication and traditional dialogue influences the addressee by means of the statements comprising the verbs concerned. An analysis was made of such statements as: (1) advertising slogans (imperative mood); (2) active Internet links-headlines (past perfect tense with the 3rd person causer); (3) prospective rhetorical strategy (the simple future form with the 1st person causer and 2nd person causer); (4) a retrospective speech strategy (the present tense with 2nd person causer and the 1st person causer). Being used in special illocutionary acts, the statements in question feature different aspects of action and state depending on communicative conditions. The study has revealed a distinct perfect meaning in the actual present tense of causative psych verbs. Expressing non-descriptive (non-ascertaining) meaning, the statements are similar to speech acts. Emotive component of the psych verbs under study combined with inherent agentive one of speech acts has a manipulative potential on addressee that is realized in: (1) the urge to buy through the promise of a pleasant emotion; (2) the urge to click links through the implicit promise of emotion; (3) the speaker’s mental control of the addressee’s emotions; (4) the declarative-emotional influence on the addressee to induce him/her to change his/her behavior. Causative psych verbs function as a powerful argument allowing the speaker to appeal to the emotional sphere of addressee.

Unorthodox Agreement in Turkish Copular Sentences

Turkish verbs agree with the subject in almost all cases. The same goes for the copular adjectival or nominal structures. However, if a nominal predicate is 2nd or 1st person whereas the subject is 3rd person the agreement, the agreement takes place with the predicate instead of the subject. Some features had been proposed in order to account for the different behavior of the persons, most famous of which being Harley & Ritter’s (2002) three-way feature system. I will try to develop an economical argument using solely one feature: [ref]. It correctly explains some phenomena that previous feature-dependent accounts come short explaining. I will mostly build up on work of Ince & Aygen & Aydın (2015), spotting problems in their proposal and offering solutions.

Unbestimmte Subjekte: zur problematischen Äquivalenz von deutschem man und italienischem si

German sentences with man and Italian sentences with si impersonale or si passivante are often presented as equivalent in contrastive grammars. However, this functional equation proves to be problematic when Italian students refer with man to their own role as authors, such as in: “Darauf wird man aber im folgenden Kapitel eingehen”. Evidently, man cannot refer to the speaker role, while in the same context the Italian si is well suitable. Starting from this interference error, the paper examines the possible range of reference of the two pronouns. It turns out that the most common reading of man and si in both languages is the generic one, which can be paraphrased as “everyone”. Systematic divergences, on the other hand, occur in the particular reading, i. e. when referring to single unspecified subjects. While the German man characterizes the subject as anonymous and does never include listeners or speakers (e. g: Gestern hat man bei uns eingebrochen; man ≈ ‘jemand’, ‘somebody’), the Italian si, according to the verb class (transitive, unergative, unaccusative, etc.), can or must be read as speaker-exclusive (Mi si è raccontato che ...; si ≈ ‘qualcuno’, ‘someone’) or as speaker-inclusive (Ieri si è andati al ristorante; si ≈ ‘noi’, ‘we’). The speaker-inclusive reading also occurs when si is used in academic texts as a substitute for the established form of speaker (author) reference by means of the 1st person plural (noi, ‘we’). In addition to man and si, other forms of indeterminate subjects are examined, namely the non-anaphoric uses of German “sie (pl.)” (Sie haben schon wieder die Preise erhöht.) and of the Italian 3rd person plural null subject (Ti hanno cercato.) as well as the so-called impersonal passive form in German (Es wird gemurmelt.).

Development of educational system for paramedics specializing to dementia elderlies analyzed by artificial intelligence and its learning effects

AbstractBackgroundWhile the number of emergency transfer of dementia elderlies to acute care hospitals has being increasing, paramedics are facing challenges to perform their duties promptly due to difficult communication with patients.ObjectivesTo develop the standardized educational system for paramedics specializing to dementia elderlies with the use of artificial intelligence.DesignSingle arm, pre‐post study. Participants are paramedics in a metropolitan area of Japan.ExposureThe two sessions of standardized multimodal communication training program which contains lecture and workshop were provided twice, 1 month apart. The training consists three parts. 1: Mechanism and clinical manifestations of dementia, 2: Communication skills: face‐to‐face interaction; mutual gaze, geometric characteristics and duration of eye contact, verbal communication with phonetic elements, and touch interactions. 3: Interaction strategies with dementia elderlies in emergency situation. All participants performed the rescue simulation training before the training and 1 month after the completion of the training, which were video‐recorded and analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI). The video was taken by wearable camera with eye‐trackers (1st person camera) and fixed camera (3rd person camera). The satisfaction survey of effectiveness on their work and the Jefferson Scale of Empathy for healthcare professionals were also taken.Main OutcomesThe primary outcome is the change of communication skills in physical position, distance, eye contact with patients, phonetic elements and touch. The system to analyze face‐to‐face communication; mutual gaze, geometric characteristics and duration of eye contact by AI was developed by our team. Other elements of communications were evaluated manually. Secondary outcome were satisfaction and the empathy to patients.Result31 paramedics enrolled the study. Prior to the training, 88% had experienced any difficult condition taking care of dementia patients. The video analysis showed significant change of the interactive communication in the direction of approach, eye contacts and duration of mutual gaze. 96.7% considered the training was effective for their daily work and 97.5% of participants recommended this training to a colleague. The score of empathy scale showed no significant change.ConclusionThe educational system for paramedics specializing to dementia with the use of artificial intelligence is effective for their work.

On the origin of 2nd person prefix #tV- in Trans-Himalayan languages

Abstract Two 2nd person verbal indexation forms are reconstructed back to Proto-Trans-Himalayan (PTH): a suffix #-n(a) (Bauman 1975; DeLancey 1989, 2014; H. Sun 1983, 1995; van Driem 1993; Watters 2002), and a prefix #tV- (Watters 2002; Jacques 2012; DeLancey 2011a, 2014). While #-n(a) is in paradigmatic distribution with other suffixal forms, the prefixal position of #tV-raises the question of its functional origin. DeLancey (2011a, 2014: 23) suggests hypothetically that #tV- finds its origin either in a non-finite nominalization or in an irrealis nominalization, “ideal for an impersonal 2nd person use: ‘One might [speak]’ rather than ‘You will [speak].’” Through the comparison of cognate tV- possessive and tV- nominalizer prefixes found in rGyalrongic, Kuki-Naga (Ao), and Sinitic, I propose that 2nd person #tV- can be traced back to a nominal possessive modifier such as one’s or someone’s: a man-type of R-impersonals (Malchukov & Siewierska 2011). Spreading to verbs, #tV- was used as a nominalizer indexing the notional S or A argument. With nouns and verbs alike, the referent of the possessor, whether 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, was specific (Siewierska 2011: 62), accessible in discourse, anaphorically or deictically, regardless of the presence of a coreferential overt noun-phrase. The prefix #tV- started to be used in particular to address 2nd person indirectly, a development likely triggered by pragmatic motivations, i.e. politeness, before being reanalyzed as a 2nd person indexation marker.

Looking for Razors and Needles in a Haystack: Multifaceted Analysis of Suicidal Declarations on Social Media-A Pragmalinguistic Approach.

In this paper, we study language used by suicidal users on Reddit social media platform. To do that, we firstly collect a large-scale dataset of Reddit posts and annotate it with highly trained and expert annotators under a rigorous annotation scheme. Next, we perform a multifaceted analysis of the dataset, including: (1) the analysis of user activity before and after posting a suicidal message, and (2) a pragmalinguistic study on the vocabulary used by suicidal users. In the second part of the analysis, we apply LIWC, a dictionary-based toolset widely used in psychology and linguistic research, which provides a wide range of linguistic category annotations on text. However, since raw LIWC scores are not sufficiently reliable, or informative, we propose a procedure to decrease the possibility of unreliable and misleading LIWC scores leading to misleading conclusions by analyzing not each category separately, but in pairs with other categories. The analysis of the results supported the validity of the proposed approach by revealing a number of valuable information on the vocabulary used by suicidal users and helped to pin-point false predictors. For example, we were able to specify that death-related words, typically associated with suicidal posts in the majority of the literature, become false predictors, when they co-occur with apostrophes, even in high-risk subreddits. On the other hand, the category-pair based disambiguation helped to specify that death becomes a predictor only when co-occurring with future-focused language, informal language, discrepancy, or 1st person pronouns. The promising applicability of the approach was additionally analyzed for its limitations, where we found out that although LIWC is a useful and easily applicable tool, the lack of any contextual processing makes it unsuitable for application in psychological and linguistic studies. We conclude that disadvantages of LIWC can be easily overcome by creating a number of high-performance AI-based classifiers trained for annotation of similar categories as LIWC, which we plan to pursue in future work.

Perspectival factors and pro-drop: A corpus study of speaker/addressee pronouns with creer ‘think/ believe’ and saber ‘know’ in spoken Spanish

This paper examines overt and covert speaker/addressee pronouns with the cognitive verbs creer ‘think/believe’ and saber ‘know’ in a corpus of spoken peninsular Spanish – the Madrid and Alcalá samples of PRESEEA (2014– ) – with a focus on 1st person singular (yo) creo que ‘(I) think that’. Departing from the observation made in the literature that overt pronouns are highly frequent with creer and that topic shift cannot account for all of them, it will be argued that perspectival factors related to evidentiality/epistemicity and subjectivity influence overt pronoun realization. A corpus study was conducted to investigate whether (i) [person] and [polarity] and (ii) the type of complement affect overt pronoun realization with the cognitive verbs creer and saber. The results indicate that the type of belief expressed in the embedded clause should be taken into account, as well as person and polarity. The ultimate trigger for phonetic realization of speaker/addressee pronouns will be argued to be the notion of contrast: cognitive verbs whose embedded complement encodes evaluations and non-visual, abstract information have high frequencies of overt pronoun realization because these contexts favor the evoking of alternative perspective holders. Overt pronouns will be analyzed as the result of a [+contrast] feature which is assigned to the specifier of a functional category encoding perspective in the split IP.

Morphology of argument marking in Zaghawa-Wagi

This paper presents an analysis of the system of argument marking on the verb in Zaghawa. Zaghawa, also called Beria in the literature, is a Saharan language of the Nilo-Saharan language phylum spoken in the border region of Sudan and Chad. Like other Saharan languages, it has complex verbal morphology including person indexing. The primary aim of the study is descriptive in that it presents linguistic data of the underdescribed Wagi dialect which is mainly spoken in Sudan. First, the paradigm of bound verbal affixes and their morphology is described. Secondly, one of the functions of the final morpheme of the verb which has not yet been described in detail in previous studies on Zaghawa is analysed. This final morpheme interacts with the person indexes to mark plural participants, and it is exploited to mark a morphological category not yet recognized in the other dialects of Zaghawa: the exclusive/inclusive distinction in the 1st person plural. Therefore, the study provides new data on the Zaghawa verb system and contributes a further detail to our knowledge of the Nilo-Saharan language family.

SAY-complementizers and indexical shift in Poshkart Chuvash

Abstract Although SAY-complementizers have been extensively documented, the question of the forms used in this function and their specific properties has received less attention. The paper focuses on the complementizer tenine (an action nominalization of SAY), which is used with communicative reception verbs (‘hear’, ‘read’, etc.), in a dialect of Chuvash (Turkic). The main puzzle concerns the difference between tenine and the more general complementizer teze (the same-subject converb of SAY) with respect to the controller of shifted first person (namely, teze, but not tenine, disallows non-subject controllers). An account of this restriction based on three independent language-specific constraints is offered. An alternative account is discussed whereby tenine (and teze) are synchronically non-finite forms of SAY. The findings highlight the importance of the form of the complementizer as well as of the choice of controller for shifted 1st person in SAY-based complementation and extend the typological parameters of indexical shift.

After the Null Subject Parameter: Acquisition of the Null-Overt Contrast in Spanish

ABSTRACT In many so-called canonical null subject languages, null and overt subject pronouns have contrasting referential preferences: null subjects tend to maintain reference to the preceding subject while overt pronominal subjects do not. We propose that children acquire this contrast by initially restricting their attention to 1st and 2nd person pronouns, whose reference is simpler to infer compared to 3rd person pronouns. We provide supporting evidence from spontaneous production and comprehension in Mexico City Spanish, showing that (i) the null/overt contrast is in principle acquirable from exclusively observing the referential preferences of 1st and 2nd person subject pronouns in caretaker speech; (ii) children themselves condition subject pronoun expression on pronoun reference in the 1st and 2nd persons before doing so in the 3rd person; and (iii) children use the null/overt contrast in comprehension at a similar age when they begin making this distinction in production.

WIR im interaktionalen Gebrauch: Zur Verwendung des Pronomens der 1. Person Plural in der institutionellen Kommunikation – am Beispiel onkologischer Aufklärungsgespräche

AbstractThis empirically oriented article focuses on uses of the pronoun “wir” (‘we’) in medical interaction – more precisely, in oncological consultations. After a brief presentation of major research on the 1st person plural pronoun in German, I will – based on methods of Interactional Linguistics – analyze interactional uses of this deictic pronoun in institutional doctor-patient conversations. This article aims at contributing to research of how grammar is used in response to local interactional needs within social interaction (Auer/Pfänder 2011). As the data show, participants in these institutional settings make use of various types of “wir” – beyond the prototypical forms of usage (a) “self and person addressed”; (b) “self and person or persons spoken of” and (c) “self, person or persons addressed, and person or persons spoken of” (Boas 1911: 39). These “alternative”, non-prototypical uses of “wir”, which partly override the “residual semanticity” (Silverstein 1976: 47), are found to be related to the way in which they are embedded within the particular “social field” (Hanks 2005: 18). Thus, the indexical anchoring of “wir” proves to be rather flexible and responsive to interactional contingencies.

Clusivity and the history of personal pronouns in East Caucasian

Abstract Personal pronouns are among the most stable lexemes in the East Caucasian family, which consists of at least forty different languages distributed over eight well established branches, with nevertheless important variations and paradigmatic reshaping across branches, languages, and even dialects. The 1st and 2nd singular pronouns have been replaced or changed shape at least once in many subparts of the family, and the main 1st person singular innovation was apparently followed by areal spread. Most languages retain two different pronouns for the 1st person plural European pronoun, but the cognates are not always clear, suggesting that although clusivity is an inherited feature of East Caucasian pronominal paradigms, its history is complex, with various types of loss and renewal. This paper attempts to draw a fine-grained and accurate picture of these 1st person plural pronouns and their history within the larger setting of personal pronouns in general. Most individual stories behind variation across branches, languages and dialects provide reasons to see inclusive pronouns as prone to be maintained or renewed over time, whereas exclusive pronouns (1st person singular or plural) are specially targeted by avoidance and replacement processes.

Differential innovation in 2nd person pronouns and agreement indexation in Trans-Himalayan languages

Abstract Tibeto-Burman languages show a drastic difference in the stability of independent and bound 2nd person forms. The 2nd person pronoun *naŋ is the most stable form in the Proto-Trans-Himalayan paradigm, preserved in almost every low-level clade, while 1st person is sometimes replaced. But 2nd person indexation in the verb is highly unstable. There were two distinct forms already in PTH, a suffix #-na, belonging to the original paradigm, and an innovative prefix #tV-, as well as an irrealis form which could be used with 2nd person reference. In daughter languages across the family we find further innovations in this category. These facts pose two questions. The first – why is 2nd person indexation so unstable? – can be interpreted in terms of politeness and face management. But this raises another question – if 2nd person indexation is inherently unstable, why is 2nd person independent pronominal reference not? The difference in stability reflects a difference in function. In Tibeto-Burman languages, with or without argument indexation, independent pronouns are always ‘optional’, i.e. carry some information management function such as contrast. Thus when pronominal reference to the addressee might be awkward, it can always be avoided, so there is no need to innovate face-saving substitutes for it. In contrast, in languages with argument indexation, the verbal index is obligatory, so any desire to avoid direct reference to one’s interlocutor requires adopting an alternative construction which then, over time, may grammaticalize into a new 2nd person index.

Towards a typology of change in person marking reference

AbstractPrevious studies of person marking referent shifts posited directionality:pl > sgand 3rd > 2nd > 1st person. The current study expands the documentation of person shifts, finding possible counter-examples to any directionality if all shifts represent the same phenomenon. However, comparison of shift trajectories allows them to be separated into two categories: paradigm-dependent and paradigm-independent shifts, analogous to the stages of known cycles like Jespersen’s Cycle for negation. Dependent shifts are context restrictions that occur after the introduction of more specific contrasting person markers. Independent shifts are context extensions. I analyze both shift types using a model of competition between referent-specific and referent-general markers causing pragmatic restriction of the more general form. Dependent shifts occur when the innovation of a referent-specific marker pragmatically restricts a general one to a subset of its original uses with no real change in reference. Independent shifts begin when some speakers use a referent-specific marker non-prototypically in more general contexts, triggering reanalysis of the marker’s reference by reducing specification to match the broader context. Crucially, using a general marker in more specific contexts would not trigger reanalysis, naturally resulting in directionality similar to ‘bleaching’.

Pragmatic Analysis of Deixis in SBY’s Speech upon Accepting the World Statesman Award

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is the president of Indonesia. He quite famous in the world. It is proved by award that he got as the world statesman conferred by the appeal of conscience foundation in May 29, 2013. This research analyzes deixis in pragmatic point of view on SBY’s speech upon accepting the world statesman award. The data for this research is in form of speech brows from online websites. This research applies a qualitative research. The result of SBY speech show that, he more often person deixis, it show 55 (74%) times, while others, he only use 10 times (14%) for place deixis and 9 (12%) for time deixis. In personal deixis, SBY most use 1st person plural (63.6%) in his speech, that is the word we and our, both of them refer to Indonesian. Thus, in his speech, he represents his self as Indonesian. It is also shown by using of proximal place (80%) along the speech. For time deixis, he more use present tense (45%) because he talk about the event that happens when speech is delivered.

Reflexivization and Reciprocality in the Kalabari Language

This paper examines reflexivization and reciprocality in Kalabari with particular attention to the forms, functions and structures of reflexive and reciprocal constructions (the nominal sub-type) in the language. The paper adopts the binding theory as a framework in analysing the data. The data were gathered through interaction and introspection. The findings reveal that reflexives and reciprocals in Kalabari require a compatible clause-mate antecedent due to the strong anaphoric relationship between reflexive and reciprocal markers and their antecedents respectively. The findings further reveal that the form of Kalabari reflexives consists of -ḇù (-self) and the appropriate form of the pronoun in the language. The paper also reveals that the Kalabari language makes a tripartite distinction for number, person and gender, and the form of the reflexive does not change; only the pronoun changes, while reciprocals consist of a reduplicated form jụmọ jụmọ, jápụ jápụ and jéin jéin. In terms of the structure, findings reveal that reflexives and reciprocals come before the verb of the clause in which they occur. The finding further reveals that reflexives in the language perform both non-emphatic and emphatic functions, while reciprocal relates to human and non-human reference of mutuality. Tonal inflection also makes a distinction in 1st person singular and 2nd person singular reflexives. It is therefore recommended that more studies be done to ascertain the form, function and structure of the verbal and possessive sub-type of reflexive and reciprocal constructions in the language.

The imperative-hortative paradigm in Biblical Hebrew in typological and diachronic view

Abstract In this paper, applying the cross-linguistic criterion of formal homogeneity, I represent the morphological properties of the imperative-hortative paradigm (volitive modals) in classical Biblical Hebrew: each personal form is marked individually; the 1st person hortative (traditionally called cohortative) has two freely distributed spelling variants, with and without the ending -ɔ̄; the 2nd person (imperative) has two contrasted forms—the basic one and one marked by the ending -ɔ̄; the 3rd person (jussive) has just one allomorph. The imperative—hortative forms are not available in syntactic subordination, but they are used in different types of dependent clauses introduced by the conjunction w- “and”. One of the major hallmarks of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system is the influence of other paradigms—w-perfect, imperfect, and infinitive absolute—on the imperative-hortative paradigm. The linguistic diversity in the Biblical Hebrew corpus points to other types of the imperative-hortative paradigm that are explained in terms of the linguistic chronology—the archaic type and the late type of the imperative-hortative paradigm in Biblical Hebrew. In the conclusion, I will point to the circularity in the diachronic development of the volitive forms in Biblical Hebrew and to the correlation of the diachronic development with the cross-linguistic typology.

On the potential of virtual reality for locomotion rehabilitation

Introduction In recent years, we have witnessed a growing number of people needing locomotion rehabilitation (e.g. stroke). The inability to walk has tremendous effects on the individuals' wellbeing and quality of life, making locomotion rehabilitation a vital component of physiotherapy. Virtual reality (VR), a term used to describe a technological system that creates a simulated world or environment, is a promising technology that has proven significant benefits in rehabilitation [1]. Our research goal is to help physiotherapists include VR in locomotion rehabilitations. In this work, we built an immersive VR system, Locomotiver, where users believe they are present in another specific environment. Locomotiver aim to support locomotion rehabilitation and fit physiotherapists' practices and patients' abilities, which included customisable exercises for lower limb recovery. These exercises mapped real ones from traditional interventions, also provide a very engaging and motivating experience for the users. Materials and Methods Locomotiver consists in a VR environment that can be used by therapists and patients, simultaneously. The patient experiences a 360° immersive environment using an HTC Vive headset and four trackers. Kondo et al. [2] inspired us to the minimalistic designed representation of the virtual body, representing the patients’ head, hands, and feet in the virtual world. Furthermore, we did field research, where we observed the therapists working with several neurological and musculoskeletal patients and perform a variety of exercises related to their locomotion therapies. Also, based on formative series studies, we created three exercises (“Walking Forward”, “Barriers” and “Zigzag”), customisable to fit the patients’ abilities and session goals. Also, the physiotherapist can observe the patient’s 3rd person or 1st person perspective, along a graphical user interface to control the rehabilitation session. Corrective feedback is given during the performance of exercises while therapists have access to a set of measures, which can then be leveraged to build personalised therapy plans. Also, the physiotherapist can observe the patient’s 3rd person or 1st person perspective, along a graphical user interface to control the rehabilitation session. We conducted a usability study with nine physiotherapists using a think-aloud protocol, semi-structured interviews, and adoption questionnaires, aiming to understand Locomotiver’s potential to be deployed in the field. We did a thematic analysis of the interviews and the feedback collected during the experiments. The Ethics Committee of Egas Moniz approved this study (process number 657). All participants signed consent forms. Results Physiotherapists agreed that Locomotiver would be an innovative solution to their interventions and to increase patients’ engagement. They agreed that Locomotiver is more proper for patients with musculoskeletal disorders than for neurological patients. Therapists also stated that exercises need to allow further customisation and collect additional performance data. Participants praised both the instruments and prototype, namely how fast and easy they were to set up, compared to other conventional systems. Overall, professionals show high interest in adopting Locomotiver, pointing benefits such as optimisation of their methods, ease of customisation, and improved diagnosis. Discussion and conclusions We presented Locomotiver, an immersive VR system for locomotion rehabilitation that includes three customisable exercises. We verified that Locomotiver an engaging and motivating experience for the users. We concluded that professional therapists would be interested in adopting Locomotiver as a rehabilitation tool. This research contributes to highlight key challenges and opportunities when introducing immersive VR technologies in clinical rehabilitation practices. We believe that this research contributes to establish this a baseline to develop and introduce immersive VR technology that significantly increases the motivation of patients, optimises intervention processes and improves the overall locomotion rehabilitation. As future work, we propose that physiotherapists use Locomotiver with patients for a certain period, in a real-life scenario.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Personal Deixes in Lyrical Poetry: Ezra Pound's Lyrics "Girl" and "A Virginal"

Deixes belong to the field of both semantics and pragmatics as they lie in the edge of these two fields. Pragmatically, they are concerned with the relationship between the structure of a language and the contexts. The present work aims at analyzing the use of deixes using Levinson’s (1983) and Yule's (1996) concept of deixes, where the latter maintained that the referents of the deixes cannot be realized apart from the context where they are used. He added that the contextual information of certain utterances involves information about the participants (the speaker and the addressee), the time and the place. Consequently, a qualitative- descriptive approach has been adopted to meet the objective of the study which reads, “examining the 1st and 2nd person deixes in two of Pound’s lyrics ‘Girl’ and ‘A Virginal’. The study has revealed that knowledge about context affects the manifestation of the referents of deixes and uncovers the ambiguity of understanding the poetic extracts. Pragmatically speaking, the referents of the pronouns cannot be detected in isolation from the context where they are used. It has also been found that the context and the interpretation of the literary text can help in determining the referents of the deixes in terms of person, number and gender. Finally, a great relation appears when the referent of the deixis is realized in accordance with its context.

Personal Markers and Verbal Number in Meroitic

Thanks to the use of linguistic comparison and analyses of new inscriptions, Meroitic, the extinct language of the kingdom of Meroe, Sudan, has become increasingly well known. The present article deals with the identification of personal markers and verbal number. It shows how Meroitic, like many other languages, used a former demonstrative, qo, as a 3rd person independent pronoun. An in-depth analysis of the royal chronicles of the kings and princes of Meroe, compared with their Napatan counterparts written in Egyptian, further yields the 1st person singular dependent pronoun e- (later variant ye-), which can be compared with 1st person singular pronoun found in related languages. A stela of Candace Amanishakheto found in Naga is the starting point for identifying the 2nd person singular and plural independent pronouns are and deb. These two morphemes are linked with the most recent reconstructions of Proto-Nubian pronouns and conrm the narrow genetic relation between Nubian and Meroitic. Finally, the reassessment of the so-called “verbal dative” ‐xe/‐bxe shows that this morpheme is simply a former verbal number marker with integrated case endings. This makes it a rare instance of transcategorisation in the cross-linguistic typology of verbal number.