A Case for a Binary Feature Underlying Clusivity: the Possibility of ABA

This paper reevaluates claims about the status of inclusive pronouns and introduces a new database of pronominal morphology. There are conflicting views about inclusive person: on the traditional view inclusive person is a subcategory of first person, but there are disagreements about whether it realizes a privative feature or a binary one; on other views inclusive is its own separate category. In this paper, I use evidence from patterns of syncretism, suppletion, and morphological relatedness to reevaluate claims about inclusives with a new pronominal database of 270 genetically and geographically diverse languages. I find support for the traditional view that inclusive is a type of first person. However, my findings go against recent approaches to morphological features based on privative contrasts that create containment relationships and predict the so-called *ABA-constraint (Bobaljik, 2012; Caha, 2009; Moskal, 2018). I show several examples of ABA patterns in the data and no stark asymmetry between frequencies of inclusives derived from exclusives compared to the reverse situation. Both of these facts support the view that clusivity is due to a binary featural contrast. I propose a feature hierarchy that incorporates such a binary contrast and captures a number of facts about pronominal paradigms that go beyond patterns of clusivity.