Person and number agreement in Dumi
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Jochen Trommer
Abstract
Aissen (1999, 2003) argues that prominence hierarchy effects in morphosyntax are governed by fixed rankings of markedness constraints related to the hierarchies themselves by harmonic alignment (Prince and Smolensky 1993). In this article, I analyze the effects of prominence hierarchies on agreement in Dumi, an endangered Kiranti language spoken in Eastern Nepal (van Driem 1993), and argue that the empirical facts can be captured best if hierarchy effects follow from freely rankable binary preference and markedness constraints, not from the fixed ranking of markedness constraints. The analysis further reveals the relevance of number hierarchies for agreement, which are largely neglected in the literature. Thus Dumi resorts to the hierarchy plural > dual > singular that competes with the parallel effects of the more standard person hierarchy (1st > 2nd > 3rd person) on agreement control and also triggers an as yet undocumented number inverse marking, which indicates if one argument of a verb is more prominent for number than the other, but less prominent for person.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Current issues in optimality theoretic syntax
- Aligning restricted objects
- Matrix unloaded: binding in a local derivational approach
- The winner takes it all — almost: cumulativity in grammatical variation
- Constraining nominalization: function/form competition
- Person and number agreement in Dumi
- Weak function word shift
- Freezing and marking
- Publications received between 2 May 2005 and 1 June 2006
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Current issues in optimality theoretic syntax
- Aligning restricted objects
- Matrix unloaded: binding in a local derivational approach
- The winner takes it all — almost: cumulativity in grammatical variation
- Constraining nominalization: function/form competition
- Person and number agreement in Dumi
- Weak function word shift
- Freezing and marking
- Publications received between 2 May 2005 and 1 June 2006
