Agreement and related phenomena in North American languages (original) (raw)
2019, The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages
North American languages exhibit a variety of agreement systems, including nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, hierarchical/direct-inverse, and agent-patient patterns, as well as phenomena such as object agreement, inverse number, and omnivorous number. This chapter examines the patterning and exponence of agreement in these languages, including the φ-features tracked by agreement, types of agreement systems and how these systems reflect grammatical alignment, debates about the syntactic status of agreement markers (as genuine agreement or clitics), and the points at which agreement can occur in the clausal spine.
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Object Agreement, Grammatical Relations, and Information Structure
Studies in Language, 1999
Northern Ostyak (Uralic) has optional object agreement. This paper analyzes the grammatical behavior of objects that trigger agreement and objects that do not, and demonstrates that while the former participate in certain syntactic processes, the latter are syntactically inert. The asymmetry cannot be explained with reference to semantics or argument status, as both objects bear an identical argument relationship to the predicate. Following the functional approach to language, under which the clause has three independent representational levels (syntax, semantics, and information structure), I suggest that the two objects differ in their information structure status. The object that does not trigger agreement bears the focus function, and systematically corresponds to the focus position. It is further argued that virtually all grammatical relations in Ostyak demonstrate reduced syntactic activity when they are in focus. This leads to a search for an information structure-driven moti...
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