Verbal agreement with NP-internal modifiers

Sat Aug 23 15:09:41 UTC 2014

This is a (perhaps naïve) question I have about many of the examples cited in this discussion. How do you know the relevant verb marking is really “agreeing with”/“cross-referencing” an NP internal element, or whether it just happens to be coreferential with it?

I’m thinking of English adversative constructions like: “My car died on me,”  in which “me” just happens to be coreferential with the possessor of the subject. One can also say “My car died on her” if, e.g., someone else were driving the car. Or “Her car died on me,” etc. While the coreferential examples may be more common, the others are possible. This is similar to “ethical dative” or “dative of interest” constructions. If one were to propose a “verb agreement with NP-internal possessor of subject” construction, it would be important to show that it is not this type.

Tom

From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Randy John LaPolla (Prof)
Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2014 4:58 AM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Re: Verbal agreement with NP-internal modifiers

Hi Rachel, 

The key to the Tangut person marking, and many other Tibeto-Burman systems, like Rawang/Dulong and to some extent Qiang, is that the system is hierarchical or includes a hierarchical component. So the marking is not really of role, but of person. So, for example, in Rawang/Dulong, first person is marked in a clause regardless of the role the referent has, as direct argument, possessor, or whatever. In Qiang there is a set of non-actor person markings that can even mark a person not involved in the clause as an argument at all, as in example (453.a) in the attached page from my Qiang grammar (the second clause, where there is no second person argument, but as the second person will be affected by her leaving, it takes second person non-actor marking--I call it "non-actor" marking because there is also actor marking).

Hope this helps.

Randy

----- 

Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （罗仁地）| Head, Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-80, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | http://sino-tibetan.net/rjlapolla/

On 23 Aug, 2014, at 4:59 pm, Guillaume Jacques <rgyalrongskad at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Rachel, 

In the Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan family, several languages that have been described with possessor raising might be cases of what you are looking for.

In the extinct Tangut language, the verb can agree with a SAP possessor marked with the genitive (Jacques 2014:224)

xjow²tɕʰjwo¹  dʑjɨwji¹ [nji¹ jij¹ gji²bjij²] dja²-sja¹-wji¹-nja²-sji¹

Fengchang   ERG    [you GEN wife] DIR-kill-AUX-2SG-PFV

Fenchang killed your wife.

Another case is Jingpo, which has a special set of agreement markers (Dai et al. 1990:382) for possessors, which can be used with both stative and dynamic verbs, and which are distinct from the regular set of agreement markers:

[nyéʔ          pālọ̄ng]   grài hprò       lìʔāi

1SG:POSS clothes very be.white  POSS:1SG:IPFV

My clothes are (very) white.

[shi             ńnpyé]       grài tsòm           lùʔāi

3SG:POSS backsack very be.beautiful  POSS:3SG:IPFV

His backsack is very beautiful.

The agreement markers above differ from those for 1SG and 3SG S argument, which are n̄ngāi and āi respectively. Here again, the possessors are marked with a possessive form, and are part of the NP.

Bickel (2000) also discusses related phenomena in Hakha Lai.

Best wishes,

Guillaume

References

Bickel, Balthasar (2000). On the syntax of agreement in Tibeto-Burman. Studies in Language, 24:583-609

http://www.zora.uzh.ch/76615/1/Bickel2000Syntax.pdf

Jacques, Guillaume 2014 Esquisse de phonologie et de morphologie historique du tangoute. Global Oriental. Leiden: Brill.

Dai, Qingxia and Xu Xijian 1990. Jingpoyu yufa. Beijing: Zhongyang minzuxueyuan chubanshe.

2014-08-22 7:53 GMT+02:00 Rachel Nordlinger <racheln at unimelb.edu.au>:

Dear LINGTYP-ers,

I am looking for languages in which verbal and/or clause-level agreement morphology (or bound pronoun system) is able to cross-reference an internal NP modifier. In other words, constructions where the agreement morphology is not cross-referencing the NP itself, but something inside the NP.  External possession constructions may appear to be an instance of this, but there is usually good evidence not to treat the possessor (which is cross-referenced) as an internal NP modifier in these cases, but rather to treat it as the argument of the verb itself (hence the traditional term ‘possessor raising’).  So I am not after examples like this. 

Rather, what I am looking for are examples in which the cross-referenced element can be clearly shown to still be internal to the NP, even though it is cross-referenced.  Consider the following example from Gurindji (Australia) (data courtesy of Dr. Felicity Meakins):

(1)           [Ngayinyb-ju       karu-ngku]a   ngu=yib=lua                        tawirrjip      pa-ni           marluka-wu         kurrurij.

            1MIN.DAT-ERG     child-ERG       AUX=1MIN.O=3AUG.S      pelt               hit-PST       old.man-DAT        car

     My children pelted the old man's car (with rocks).

In this example there are two cross-referencing bound pronouns: -lu which cross-references the (augmented number) subject ‘My children’, and –yi which cross-references the possessor internal to the subject ‘my'.  That the possessor remains a modifier within the subject NP is shown clearly by the fact that it carries dative case, and agrees with the head noun ‘child-ERG’ in ergative case as well.  Thus, what we have here is a construction in which an NP-internal modifier is cross-referenced with morphology otherwise reserved for clausal arguments.

I am aware of an old paper by Stump and Yadav (1988) that discusses data from Maithili very similar to the Gurindji case shown above, and the brief discussion of ‘verb agreement with possessives’ in Corbett (2006: 61) which mentions a couple of languages including Jarawara and Tabasaran.  However, I am keen to find more examples, if possible.

If any of you are aware of other languages that do something like this, I would appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction.  If there is sufficient interest, I will post a summary.

Thanks,

Rachel

Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: CUP.

Stump, Gregory and Ramawatar Yadav. 1988. Maithili verb agreement and the control agreement principle. Linguistics Faculty Publications, Paper 37. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/lin_facpub/37.

-- 

Rachel Nordlinger

Associate Professor and Reader

School of Languages and Linguistics

University of Melbourne

VIC 3010

AUSTRALIA

+61-(0)3-8344-4227 <tel:%2B61-%280%293-8344-4227> 

http://languages-linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/academic-staff/rachel-nordlinger

-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques

http://himalco.hypotheses.org/

http://panchr.hypotheses.org/

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