concord, agreement and suppletion

[Daniel Everett]

On the connection between subject agreement, object agreement, and etc,
I noticed the following generalization in my book on clitics, which, so
far as I can tell, no one else has made (where the arrow represents
implication):


Subject clitics ---> object clitics

object agreement --> subject agreement

In the book I try to relate this to topicality and, to a lesser degree,
definiteness. However, I also tried to derive this generalization from
tree structure, calling it the 'Configurational Distance Agreement
Principle'. Nowadays I am not very sanguine about any approach based on
tree structure, but still it is an interesting generalization. Some
ergative languages give what I consider to be (only) apparent
counterexamples.

Dan


On Wednesday, January 15, 2003, at 04:28 PM, Claire Bowern wrote:

>>
>> 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
>
>
> -----------------------------
> Department of Linguistics
> Harvard University
> 305 Boylston Hall
> Cambridge, MA, 02138
>
>

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

Daniel L. Everett
Chair of Phonetics and Phonology
Department of Linguistics
The University of Manchester
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