Markedness and morphotactics in Kadiwéu [+participant] agreement

We examine the realization of subject and object agreement in Kadiwéu, where there is only one prefixal position, and neither subject nor object can consistently be said to win—rather, the person and number of the arguments matters. We argue for an analysis in terms of the markedness of the 1st person compared to the second, dispreferring 1st person realization. This analysis is complicated by the fact that 1st person plural does in fact win over 2nd person, but only when it is an object. This turns out to be a consequence of the fact that the 1st plural object prefix is a portmanteau fusing person and number. The properties of the exponent inventory, combined with the morphological resources of Kadiwéu (understood here in terms of Trommer’s (2008) Coherence constraints) and its independent need for inverse marking thus conspire to yield the particular set of argument realization combinations. We argue that factoring out the analysis into feature-sensitive realization of the feature [+participant] and [+plural], dispreferred realization of marked [+author], and these morphotactic coherence constraints, provides a better analysis of crosslinguistic variation and language-internal facts than positing an autonomous language-specific hierarchy to encode the facts.

[1]  Dieter Wunderlich,et al.  Cause and the structure of verbs , 1997 .

[2]  Susan Steele,et al.  Towards a Theory of Morphological Information. , 1995 .

[3]  Paul Kiparsky,et al.  Structural case in finnish , 2001 .

[4]  John Beavers,et al.  Argument/oblique alternations and the structure of lexical meaning , 2006 .

[5]  Daniel Harbour,et al.  Descriptive and explanatory markedness , 2011 .

[6]  A. Nevins.  The representation of third person and its consequences for person-case effects , 2007 .

[7]  Ken Hale,et al.  On Argument Structure and the Lexical Expression of Syntactic Relations , 1993 .

[8]  M. McGinnis.  On Markedness Asymmetries in Person and Number , 2005 .

[9]  A. Marantz.  Implications of asymmetries in double object constructions , 1993 .

[10]  Sam Mchombo.  Theoretical aspects of Bantu grammar , 1993 .

[11]  J. Ohala,et al.  Acoustic basis for universal constraints on sound sequences , 1980 .

[12]  Filomena Sandalo,et al.  A grammar of Kadiwéu , 1997 .

[13]  Barbara A. Fox,et al.  Voice : form and function , 1994 .

[14]  Morris Halle,et al.  Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection , 1993 .

[15]  Diane Massam,et al.  Ergativity : emerging issues , 2006 .

[16]  H. Harley,et al.  Person and Number in Pronouns: A Feature-Geometric Analysis , 2002 .

[17]  Jonathan David Bobaljik,et al.  Eccentric Agreement and Multiple Case Checking , 2006 .

[18]  Robert Rolf Noyer.  Features, positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure , 1992 .

[19]  Alec Marantz,et al.  Some key features of distributed morphology , 1994 .

[20]  G. Müller.  Extended exponence by enrichment: Argument encoding in German, Archi, and Timucua , 2007 .

[21]  Ann Cooreman,et al.  A Functional Typology of Antipassives , 1994 .

[22]  Filomena Sandalo.  A grammar of Kadiwéu : with special reference to the polysynthesis parameter , 1997 .