Person-based Prominence in Ojibwe

This dissertation develops a formal and psycholinguistic theory of person-based prominence effects, the finding that certain categories of person such as first and second (the local persons) are privileged by the grammar. The thesis takes on three questions: (i) What are the possible categories related to person? (ii) What are the possible prominence relationships between these categories? And (iii) how is prominence information used to parse and interpret linguistic input in real time? The empirical through-line is understanding obviation — a “spotlighting” system, found most prominently in the Algonquian family of languages, that splits the (ani- mate) third persons into two categories: proximate, the person who is in the spotlight, and obviative, the persons who are introduced into the discourse, but are not in the spotlight. I provide a semantics for the feature [proximate], and detail a lattice-based theory of feature composition to derive the categories related to obviation in Border Lakes Ojibwe and beyond. This leads to insights about the syntactic and semantic relationships between person, animacy-based noun classification, number, and obviation. The novel contribution to the theory of person-based prominence effects is to de- compose person features into sets of primitives. This proposal allows the stipulated entailment relationships between categories and features, as encoded in prominence hierarchies and feature geometries, to be derived from the first principles of set theory. I further motivate the account by showing that it has increased empirical coverage, and apply it to capture patterns of agreement and word order in Border Lakes Ojibwe. Finally, I present a psycholinguistic study on how obviation is used to process filler- gap dependencies in Border Lakes Ojibwe. I show that obviation, and by extension, prominence information more generally, is used immediately to predictively encode movement chains, prior to bottom-up information from voice marking about the argument structure of the clause. I argue for a modular and syntax-first model of parsing, revising the Active Filler Strategy to be guided by pressures to minimize syntactic distance and maximize the expected well-formedness of each link in the chain. These pressures compete, accounting for effects of prediction, integration, and reanalysis in long-distance dependency formation