A report on an exchange between me and my UNC-Chapel Hill colleague Bruno Estigarribia about polypersonalism (explanation to follow). As it unfolded in e-mail between us, presented here with BE’s permission.
This is one in a series of reports on linguists musing about stuff and groping with ideas — showing people something of what we do professionally (before actual publication, if that eventually comes) and something of our passion for and commitment to this work.
About BE. Some notes to convince you that BE is not an ignorant mook off the street with some goofy inspired speculation about language. It’s important that he is, first of all, both multilingual and multicultural; and then, also, a Stanford PhD in linguistics (2007, with a dissertation on language acquisition by children) and now a distinguished professor of linguistics at an elite university, someone for whom I have considerable respect. Not to be disregarded.
I say this — and am about to unload a pile of BE’s biographical details on you to bolster my claims — even though my initial judgment on the idea he wrote me about was that, to put it with brutal crudeness (exploiting the resources of my working-class background) he had his head up his ass — but tempered with the observation that while he was in there he noticed some things he wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
His university titles and affiliations.
Prof. Bruno Estigarribia: Chair, Department of Romance Studies; Professor of Spanish & Hispanic Linguistics; and affiliated faculty in various programs (Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Global Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Institute for the Study of the Americas) all at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Education.
Ph. D. in Linguistics, Stanford University, 2007 (dissertation: Asking Questions: Language Variation and Language Acquisition. Earlier higher education at the Sorbonne, in French
From his faculty site. Framed in the 3rd person
Bruno Estigarribia is a Hispanic linguist who studies the structure of Paraguayan Guarani and of Spanish (in particular Argentinian Spanish), and in the contact of both these languages. He was born in Argentina to a Paraguayan father (bilingual speaker of Spanish and Guarani) and an Italian mother (bilingual speaker of Spanish and Calabrian). This background sparked in him an early fascination with language … Estigarribia believes in using cross-disciplinary methodological approaches to linguistic problems. He uses literature sources, conversational data, web and social media data, experimental designs, and standardized assessments.
About Guarani. From Wikipedia:
Paraguayan Guarani, or simply Guarani, is a language of South America that belongs to the Tupi–Guarani branch of the Tupian language family [comprising some 70 languages of Suth America]. It is one of the two official languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish), where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and where half of the rural population are monolingual speakers of the language.
Variants of the language are spoken by communities in neighboring countries including parts of northeastern Argentina, southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil. It is the second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes since 2004 and the Brazilian city of Tacuru since 2010.
For an indigenous language, this is a picture of success. But Guarani is nevertheless threatened by the big national and international languages Spanish and Portuguese, so that there’s some urgency in research on it.
BE and AZ chatting.
— BE > AZ on 4/3: I have a quick question and I think you may know the answer: what is the origin of the term polypersonalism or polypersonal agreement? I am trying to find who first used the term but all I found are discussions of polysynthesis [AZ: (of a language) having most words composed of many morphemes] (of course, the first use may have been in Russian for all I know, or German, but I am not looking there )
— AZ > BE on 4/3: You ask about a very familiar phenomenon, so familiar that I forgot there was a name for it. Which means, of course, that I have no idea who first used the term, in what context. (I am reminded of the fact that it’s the very devil to track down to first use of some bit of terminology, and not especially easy even to determine whose usage became the locus for the spread of the term. (Recently these questions have come up with reference to the English use of open class vs. closed class of lexical items; I know exactly where I got the usage, but that’s a fact abut me, not the field of linguistics.) (And then there’s the history of ruki rule for a morphophonogical phenomenon of Sanskrit — where I turned out to have been the vehicle for its spread, but was not its point of origin.)
As for polypersonalism, I first became conscious of it in Bantu (KiSwahili, specifically), then was impressed by Steve Anderson’s work on Georgian, and then of course realized it was right there in French all along. But that’s just autobiography, not intellectual history.
What makes you interested in the history of the terminology?
— BE > AZ on 4/3: Well, I am trying to do something that may be wrong: I am trying to claim that the hierarchical alignment of Guarani (and I suspect other languages) can be described as polypersonalism of a kind (because it is almost always possible to infer both participants for a transitive verb). But instead of 50+ forms as in Iroquoian, for example, in Guarani you can do this almost perfect (inferential) polypersonalism with 14.
And I was just curious as to when the term has been first used. And of course it may be a stretch to want to call this polypersonal agreement.
— AZ > BE on 4/11: I might well be misunderstanding your proposal, but at first glance it looks like a confusion between valency / valence and indications (via inflectional morphology or via dependent words (adpositions with nouns or clitics with verbs)) of the syntactic functions associated with some head word. Let me explain this by restricting myself to verbs and their nominal arguments.
In ths world, the valency / valence set of a verb is a list of its nominal arguments as serving various grammatical functions; some verb “takes” a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object, for example. The grammatical functions of these arguments can potentially be indicated in any or all of three ways:
(a) by the ordering of the arguments
(b) [case marking] by marks on the arguments; these marks can be case inflections or adpositions
(c) [agreement marking] by marks on the verb; these marks can be agreement inflections or verbal clitics showing agreement (so there can be multiple marks — that’s polypersonalism)
But the fact that (many, in fact most) verbs have valency sets of more than one argument doesn’t mean that they are to be treated as showing (?implicit) polypersonalism.
As I say, I might well have misunderstood your intentions. Illuninate me.
— BE > AZ on 4/13: Yes, those are the issues. And because I am not sure what the limits of the notion of polypersonalism are, that is why I was trying to find the origin of the term.
A second thought. There might be a little something in the idea of implicit polypersonalism. The idea being that citing a lexical item — a verb, say — evokes the valency sets for that item, many of which will have multiple arguments for that item. Not what earlier users of polypersonalism had in mind, but still something.
April 24, 2026 at 2:23 pm |
I read this and don’t have the foggiest idea what polypersonal is. Could we have an English translation?
Estigarribia – looking up the pronunciation of this Basque name online – ess-tee-gah-REE-bee-ah.
April 24, 2026 at 2:33 pm |
See the Wikipedia article on polypersonal agreement.