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Gender agreement is different

  • Diana Forker EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 14, 2018

Abstract

Person and gender are typical agreement features within the clause, and crosslinguistically they are frequently part of one and the same agreement system and even expressed through the same morphological exponents. Some theories even go so far as to claim that person and gender agreement on different targets, e.g., verbs and adjectives, are instances of one and the same agreement phenomenon.

This paper discusses gender and person agreement in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Lak. It shows that the two agreement systems are formally and functionally completely separated from each other. Corpus data from Lak does not prove that gender agreement in this language is used to establish reference. Therefore it should rather be treated as concord, that is, similar to modifier agreement within the noun phrase.

Abbreviations

SAP

speech act participants

i-iv

genders i-iv

abl

ablative

add

additive

adv

adverbializer

apud

apud-essive

attr

attributive

aux

auxiliary

cvb

converb

dat

dative

dir

directional case

dur

durative

emph

emphatic

erg

ergative

fut

future

gen

genitive

hpl

human plural

in

inessive

inf

infinitive

indef

indefinite

ipl

plural of gender i

obl

oblique stem marker

q

interrogative marker

lat

lative

pl

plural

prs

present

pst

past

ptcp

participle

sg

singular

spr

location ‘on’

refl

reflexive

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Published Online: 2018-6-14
Published in Print: 2018-6-26

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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