Agreement with overt and null arguments in Ingush
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Johanna Nichols
Abstract
Ingush (Nakh-Daghestanian, Caucasus) offers a variety of contexts with contrast, variation, or speaker choice between agreement and non-agreement and between overt and null arguments, which provide speakers many opportunities to manipulate agreement and argument marking. Ingush discourse is therefore a good test case for the plausible hypothesis that agreement and overt arguments are in complementary distribution. I survey referential density in a corpus of about 5000 words and find no evidence of either straightforward complementarity or expected incidental effects of such complementarity, and some evidence going against it. Some additional, orthogonal distributions were evident, showing that the corpus is large enough to reveal discourse effects if they were present. Ingush agreement is in gender, not person, and there is an arbitrary and strictly lexical bifurcation of verbs into those that do and those that do not have gender agreement; these typological points raise comparative and theoretical issues of interest.
Acknowledgements
Work on Ingush, including collection and annotation of the corpus materials used here, has been partly supported by U.S. NSF grants 9616448 and 0966675, and logistically supported by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Work on the paper was supported in part by a grant from the Russian Academic Excellence Project 5-100 to the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. I thank the editors and two external referees for very helpful comments on the submission version of this paper.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Agreement in grammar and discourse: A research overview
- Whence subject-verb agreement? Investigating the role of topicality, accessibility, and frequency in Vera’a texts
- The grammaticalization of object pronouns: Why differential object indexing is an attractor state
- The rise of person agreement in East Lezgic: Assessing the role of frequency
- Agreement with overt and null arguments in Ingush
- Gender agreement is different
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Agreement in grammar and discourse: A research overview
- Whence subject-verb agreement? Investigating the role of topicality, accessibility, and frequency in Vera’a texts
- The grammaticalization of object pronouns: Why differential object indexing is an attractor state
- The rise of person agreement in East Lezgic: Assessing the role of frequency
- Agreement with overt and null arguments in Ingush
- Gender agreement is different
