concord, agreement and suppletion

[Claire Bowern]

>
> At 23:56 +0100 1/13/03, Ora Matushansky wrote:
> >Would anyone know if the following three phenomena are possible:
> >(1)	Definiteness agreement: the main verb/predicate reflects the
> >definiteness of the subject. Things like the Hebrew accusative "et" on
> >definite objects and Spanish "a" don't count :)
>

Many Bantu languages have object agreement that work this way too (e.g.
Swahili, Zulu and Ndebele). Subject agreement is obligatory though. I
remember Johanna Nichols giving a paper at the LSA a few years ago about
the evolution of head marking in one of the Caucasian languages she works
on (sorry I can't be more specific - I want to say Chechen but I didn't
think Chechen did this since it already had agreement) where definiteness
was involved in subject agreement.
Claire


-----------------------------
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