Person and number agreement in Dumi

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3987537
AutoresJochen Trommer (0000-0001-6381-2418, autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Volumen44
Número5
Fecha de publicación2006-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling.2006.033
OpenAlexW1990359169
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas10

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

Argument (complex analysis) · Hierarchy · Linguistics · Markedness · Plural · Political science · Ranking (information retrieval) · Sociology · Syntax · Verb · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Mathematics · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation