1999 In Paul Kotey ed. New Dimensions in African Linguistics and Languages (Trends in African Linguistics 3), 203-216. ANIMACY HIERARCHY EFFECTS ON OBJECT AGREEMENT

Languages with true object agreement (grammatical, rather than anaphoric agreement in Bresnan and Mchombo' s 1987 terms) often restrict agreement to objects with certain features. It is well-known that objects whose features are high on one of the animacy/topicality hierarchies (e. g. human, specific, first person, etc.) are more likely to trigger agreement (Comrie 1981, Croft 1988, 1990, Bentley 1994). Yet, this generalization has not been easy to capture within formal syntactic theories because the actual conditions on object agreement differ so considerably from language to language. As a result, conditions on object agreement have generally been treated as idiosyncratic language-specific grammatical information, unrelated to universal linguistic principles. The goal of this paper is to present a theory of conditions on object agreement that captures the universal aspects of this phenomenon, minimizing the language-particular information that must be stipulated in grammars and correctly predicting the range of typological variation that occurs.