Indexing vs. pronouns - grambank/grambank GitHub Wiki

Indexing (also sometimes 'indexation') concerns phonologically bound forms on the verb expressing some features of verbal arguments, such as person, number, and gender. Traditionally, the terms 'verbal agreement', 'concord' and also 'head marking' have been used, but for a number of reasons (discussed extensively in e.g. Haspelmath 2013, 2019) the term indexing is considered to be more neutral and is used in the relevant questions of the questionnaire.

For a marker to be considered an index, it does not matter whether it can or cannot co-occur with nominals that have the same role and reference in the clause. In some grammar writing traditions, if a marker on the verb cannot co-occur with an overt coreferential noun phrase in the same clause, the respective marker on the verb is not considered to be an agreement marker, and might be called a pronoun or a pronominal. For the purposes of this questionnaire, this distinction does not matter: any person-number-etc. marking on the verb – no matter whether it underlies some co-occurrence restrictions and no matter how it is called in the grammar – is a case of indexing. Voice markers are not considered indexes according to this definition since they do not express any features of verbal arguments. If coders encounter something that looks like an index, but it does not express person, number or gender, we encourage them to raise an issue about this.

Pronouns, on the other hand, are defined here as person forms that constitute phonologically independent words. If information about the phonological status of some person form cannot be found, orthography can be used as a proxy: person forms written as separate words can be considered pronouns. Again, note that some descriptions also use the term 'pronoun' for phonologically bound person forms, which are considered indexes here.

References

Haspelmath, Martin. 2013. Argument indexing: a conceptual framework for the syntactic status of bound person forms. In Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath, Languages Across Boundaries: Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska, 198–226. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2019. Indexing and flagging, and head and dependent marking. Te Reo (The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand) 62(1): 93–115.