Common Contracts
1 similar Allocutive Agreement contracts
Allocutive agreement in KumalAllocutive Agreement • September 26th, 2022
In languages with allocutive agreement, a verb agrees with some feature of the addressee to whom a sentence is uttered despite that addressee not being an argument of the verb (Oyharçabal 1993; Antonov 2015; Alok, in press; Alok & Baker, in press). As part of a broader analysis of its agree- ment patterns, I present evidence that Kumal (Indo-Aryan), as spoken in Gorkha, Nepal, displays allocutive agreement (AA). Unlike the other AA languages, however, verbs in Kumal may not agree with both an argument and an addressee – only with one or the other. Furthermore, the availability of AA in Kumal is dependent on the person and case features of the verb’s subject. I propose analyzing this as competition between the argument and addressee for agreement ex- ponence, and offer a model of this competition using morphological OT constraints in a MaxEnt framework that is particularly well-suited to capturing the observed variability and optionality as well as conformity to typological trends of pe
