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[1] Acknowledgements and links to be added. All Dogon data are from the authors’ fieldwork.

[2] We take no position here on the NP versus DP issue.

[3] Nanga accusative -ŋ often reduces to nasalization of the preceding vowel, and in allegro speech it may be inaudible.

[4] That is, reflexive ‘you hurt [your self/head/body]’ mimics nonreflexive ‘I/he/she hurt [your self/head/body]’ and for that matter’I/you/he/she hurt [your foot]’. Even in languages where such reflexives have some prosodic or morphological idiosyncracies (English himself for #hisself, usually), it cannot be simply assumed that such reflexives lack any trace of the original literal reading. The ambivalent status of possessive-type reflexives is more pronounced in languages without these differentiating quirks, including some Dogon languages with transparent ‘my/your/his/her head’ reflexives. As for c-command effects, #Yourself was hurt by you is barely if at all worse than #?Your foot was hurt by you, suggesting that the problem is not limited to reflexives.

[5] In Nanga negative relative clauses, there is limited agreement of the verb with the intrinsic category, e.g. animate plural, of the relative head NP, which need not be the subject.

[6] We note in passing that defining such break points in arboreal syntactic terms would be difficult, if possible at all.

[7] Imperative examples parallel to TgK (18d) and TmK (19d) can also be elicited in Nanga, but this is unsurprising since Nanga, unlike TgK and TmK, has no overt second-person reflexive-object form even in indicative sentences, see (3b) above.

[8] In other Dogon languages that rely on verb suffixation to express pronominal subject category, overt clause-initial subject pronouns are optional, in hortatives as in indicatives.

[9] Dogon languages divide into a subset including Ben Tey that have a dedicated morphological indirect imperative, and another that use the regular imperative verb form in quoted imperatives. In another African language, Ewe, a third person imperative morpheme ne occurs in wishes and imprecations (‘May he stop talking’) as well as in overtly quoted imperatives (‘Tell him to stop talking!’) (Agbodjo & Litvinov 2001).

[10] The suggestion that English overt imperative subjects, as in Somebody pass the butter, are vocatives has occasionally been made (Thorne 1966) but has found little favor.

[11] Unfortunately, Semele does not have reflexive objects, so we cannot bring it to bear on the issues covered in §2.1. Instead, verbs are intransitivized, using the “middle voice” form in one of its several functions, to express subject-object coindexation (Kruspe 2004:119).

[12] Except that TmK quoted imperatives do not allow the plural-addressee suffix -ỳ. This is not the case with Ben Tey quoted imperatives, whose indirect imperative verb form can take an indicative (not imperative/hortative) 3Pl suffix -bɔ̀.

[13] TmK imprecatives (‘may God help X!’) and wishes behave like quoted imperatives but lack a quotative verb and allow the plural-addressee suffix on the verb. The subject is always overt and can bind a reflexive, as in ‘May the people help themselves!’ (TmK ɲɛ̀ʔⁿɛ̀-wé hé-lì bàrà:-y, with reflexive plural hè- and plural-addressee ‑ỳ.

[14] A survey of Afro-Asiatic meteorological expressions (Mettouchi & Tosco 2011) found equivalents of it’s raining phrased as follows: [the rain] rains, [the world/sky/God] rains, [God] hits/rains [the rain], [the rain] falls/hits, rains, and [it is] rain. On meteorological verbs see also Ruwet (1986).

[15] In TmK parallels to (40a-c), kàndà ‘now’ follows high-referentiality subjects as in ìⁿ kándà gwé ‘I have gone out now’ (cf. 40a) and péjí kàndà gwé ‘The sheep-Sg has gone out now’ (cf. 40b), but unlike the case in TgK the adverb also follows temporal and meteorological subjects like dàʔá ‘night’ in dàʔá kàndà dwɛ́ ‘Night has arrived (=fallen) now’. The distinction between true and pseudo-subjects is more crucial in TgK than in TmK.

[16] Nanga kɛ́ndɛ̀ properly denotes the heart-liver complex, which is removed as a unit (along with the lungs) in butchery and is cooked as a unit. The slightly incorrect gloss ‘heart’ captures the fact that kɛ́ndɛ̀ is the center of primary emotions (happy/sad, excited/calm).

[17] What has been called “possessor raising” to nonsubject position (object or dative) occurs in a different set of languages (many in Europe), raises different issues (especially involving the role of affectedness), and is not treated here.