The subject of this book is switch-reference and closely related constructions. The aim was to see how far it was possible to give a compositional morphosyntactic/semantic account for the phenomena, but at the same time take seriously the range of data to be explained, both for the particular languages examined in detail and cross-linguistically, in a way rarely found in formal treatments. The book can thus be seen as a case study in marrying the concerns of linguistic description and formal theory.

Of particular concern both for the cross-linguistic survey and the discourse-semantic account was the functional basis for certain prototypical characteristics of switch-reference marking. Wilkins (1988: 172) says: ‘Notions such as “sameness” and “difference” through which switch-reference has been defined, have themselves been left virtually unexplored.’ In this book I begin to explore them. In so doing my main purpose is to encourage a substantially different way of thinking about switch-reference phenomena.

Along the way arguments are presented which bear on a number of other current issues, including the relation between the locus of morphologisation and its function, the nature of linguistically marked referential relations, the analysis of logophoric phenomena, and the semantic analysis of eventualities in particular with respect to their aspectual characteristics.

This book is a revised version of my 1988 doctoral dissertation (Centre for Cognitive Science and Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh).