Verbal agreement with NP-internal modifiers

Mon Aug 25 13:31:08 UTC 2014

Hi Guillaume,
Thanks for that, but I was not suggesting that all the languages you mentioned have hierarchical marking or that having hierarchical marking necessarily entails allowing marking as free as that of Rawang or Qiang; I was just saying that the fact that these languages are hierarchical is key to understanding the way the marking works in those languages.

Randy
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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 25 Aug, 2014, at 6:40 pm, Guillaume Jacques <rgyalrongskad at gmail.com<mailto:rgyalrongskad at gmail.com>> wrote:

Dear Randy,

While I certainly do not mean to dispute your analysis of the Qiang data, having a hierarchical system does not entail allowing marking of the person of a possessor on the verb in general (and vice-versa). Qiang and Rawang only represent a particular (or rather two particular) subtype(s) of hierarchical agreement.
Many, if not most, languages with hierarchical person marking systems do not allow indexation of non-arguments on the verb (be it possessor of an argument, beneficiary etc). In the Sino-Tibetan family, in particular, Japhug (and other Rgyalrong languages), while it presents a near-canonical direct-inverse (and thus hierarchical) agreement system, has a very strict syntactically-based person marking system (for instance, in the case of indirective ditransitive verbs the recipient cannot be marked on the verb even if it is a SAP etc).
In fact, there is probably a gradient of possibilities intermediate between the Qiang type and the Japhug type, such as Khroskyabs (Lavrung), where we do find limited evidence of possessor raising for some specific verbs (see a forthcoming article by Lai Yunfan in TPhS).

In any case, Jingpo differs from Qiang in interesting ways. First, unless I misunderstand something (and correct me if I am wrong), in Qiang non-actor (including possessor) person marking is attested only on transitive verbs, while possessor agreement is found on intransitive (inclduing stative) verbs in Jingpo.
Second, in the case of Jingpo we also have special marking for third person possessor, which would not be possible if person hierarchy were the only factor at play (since both possessor and possessed are third person).
It is unclear from the data in Dai 1990 whether in Jingpo any animacy/empathy hierarchy determines the use of 3rd person possessor agreement (for instance, whether we would still have possessor agreement in the case of an inanimate possessor, in a sentence like 'its owner is not here'), but this is something that would be worth testing with native speakers.

Guillaume

2014-08-23 13:57 GMT+02:00 Randy John LaPolla (Prof) <RandyLaPolla at ntu.edu.sg<mailto:RandyLaPolla at ntu.edu.sg>>:
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
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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<mailto: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<mailto: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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Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques
http://himalco.hypotheses.org/
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/

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