none 10.1075/tsl.114.02des John Benjamins Publishing Company John Benjamins Publishing Company 1757 85518493 2195997 1421459 202507031743000000 10.1075 2025-07-03T15:42:54Z 2016-10-04T13:44:42Z 1 0167-7373 10.1075/tsl https://benjamins.com/ catalog/tsl Rik van Gijn University of Zurich https://ror.org/02crff812 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9911-2907 Jeremy Hammond The University of Sydney https://ror.org/0384j8v12 Switch reference is a grammatical process that marks a referential relationship between arguments of two (or more) verbs. Typically it has been characterized as an inflection pattern on the verb itself, encoding identity or non-identity between subject arguments separately from traditional person or number marking. In the 50 years since William Jacobsen’s coinage of the term, switch reference has evolved from an exotic phenomenon found in a handful of lesser-known languages to a widespread feature found in geographically and linguistically unconnected parts of the world. The growing body of information on the topic raises new theoretical and empirical questions about the development, functions, and nature of switch reference, as well as the internal variation between different switch-reference systems. The contributions to this volume discuss these and other questions for a wide variety of languages from all over the world, and endevaour to demonstrate the full functional and morphosyntactic range of the phenomenon. 114 10 25 2016 10 4 2016 9789027206954 9789027266774 John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam 10.1075/tsl.114 http://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027266774 https://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/9789027266774.pdf https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/tsl.114/html Hilário de Sousa Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics https://ror.org/00671me87 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3790-8245 Switch reference [sr] is complex; doing a truly-comprehensive typology of sr is difficult due to the plethora of “non-core” functions that different sr systems have. Inspired by the difference in usage of the sr system by older and younger speakers in the Papuan language of Menggwa Dla (de Sousa 2006a, b, c), I propose a (somewhat wide) definition of “canonical sr”. Canonical sr systems have two primary functions: the grammatico-semantic function of reference tracking, and the grammatico-discourse function of indicating participant continuity versus discontinuity of the sr pivots (the interclausal references monitored by a sr marker). Three types of non-canonical sr systems found in different parts of the world will also be discussed; we will see how they are non-canonical based on the two primary functions of canonical sr. 10 25 2016 10 4 2016 55 92 10.1075/tsl.114.02des https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.114.02des https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1075/tsl.114.02des/html