Introduction

Chapters 1 and 2 have given a comprehensive picture of switch-reference phenomena and some discussion of the relationship between switch-reference and comparable phenomena such as logophoricity. It should be clear from what has been said so far that the question ‘how can one be sure when one is dealing with a switch-reference system?’ (Munro 1980b: 2) has been an important one for workers in this area. Researchers have had a fairly concrete notion of what a ‘canonical’, ‘classical’ or ‘true’ switch-reference system looks like, and have been concerned to produce a ruling on languages which fail to conform to this profile in certain respects, such as Yup'ik Eskimo, the languages of the Northeast Caucasus, Warlpiri or Gokana. Thus, Munro (1980b: 2) notes that ‘most of the participants [at the conference, L.S.] felt that the Eskimo “fourth person” system was not a canonical switch-reference system.’ Such decisions are not unrelated to the other classificatory task which researchers have undertaken; that of trying to situate (canonical) switch-reference with respect to other linguistic phenomena, such as for example logophoricity or syntactic binding phenomena.

Why have these been such persistent preoccupations? After all, it would seem very reasonable to take the position that the way some function is realised formally in a language will be due to numerous factors which may themselves be amenable to systematic description, such as the morphosyntactic typology of the language, its historical development, and functional or semantic universals (for example, the animacy hierarchy, or links between nominal and temporal cohesive devices).