On Anti-Agreement Effects

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roninbodhisattva
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On Anti-Agreement Effects

Post by roninbodhisattva »

I decided to start a new thread here as to not disrupt the yay/nay thread.
Micamo wrote:I'll admit that all of my knowledge of AAE's comes from the literature on wh-movement, but I don't know of any examples of such effects blocking agreement with person but not number or gender. Could you cite some for me?
So in Ouhalla's original 1993 paper on Berber anti-agreement he says that basically all agreement features are blocked, but then in a 2005 papers he goes "oops turns out this varies with dialect and that original dialect was weird." So for most of the rest of Berber number and gender features are still expressed.

In Bantu, AAEs occur only with extracted Class 1 subjects, which includes pronouns. Extracted local pronouns level their agreement paradigm to the AAE marker for Class 1 when singular and then Class 2 (plural of class 1). So you get a leveling of the paradigm that basically looks like 3sg vs 3pl. If one takes 3rd person to be underspecified this basically gives only number agreement.

In Dinka, it looks like the extraction paradigm of person marking basically shows number. In Maasai the situation looks similar.

In Seereer, the language I work on, finite verbs take a prefix (sometimes suffix) to show person/number of the subject. In addition to this, many verbs undergo initial consonant mutation in the plural. I'll give you the basic declarative paradigm for ret `go':

Singualar
ret-aam 'I went'
ret-aa 'you went'
a-ret-a 'he/she went'

Plural
i-ndet-a 'we went'
nu-ndet-a 'you guys went'
a-ndet-a 'they went'

Focus and wh-questions involve fronting of the element in question and changing the final suffix of the verb to -u. When a subject is extracted, the paradigm levels, but consonant mutation stays around.

Singular Subject Focus
mi ret-u 'It's me who went'
wo' ret-u 'It's you who went'
ten ret-u 'It's him/her who went'

Plural Subject Focus
ino' ndet-u 'It's us who went'
nuun ndet-u 'It's you guys who went'
den ndet-u 'It's us who went'

So, all marking of person is completely erased, but the marking of number is not: the verb still shows that distinction. Seereer doesn't have class agreement on predicates so gender is irrelevant here. There are other examples of this kind of thing but I can't remember them off the top of my head. It's a striking trend, though.
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Micamo
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

Post by Micamo »

This is very interesting! Thank you for the examples :3
My pronouns are <xe> [ziː] / <xym> [zɪm] / <xys> [zɪz]

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roninbodhisattva
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

Post by roninbodhisattva »

No worries, I'm really into Anti-Agreement. Like I said, some kind of large study of anti-agreement effects is going to be my dissertation.
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Micamo
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

Post by Micamo »

Just curious, would you happen to have any examples/sources on this effect in Dinka and Maasai? I'm interested in these languages in particular and my (limited) resources on these languages don't mention it at all.
My pronouns are <xe> [ziː] / <xym> [zɪm] / <xys> [zɪz]

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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

Post by roninbodhisattva »

For Dinka, I'm going off of Coppe van Urk at MIT's work on Dinka agreement and Maasai some presentations I've seen on it, though I think Doris Payne has done a lot of work on Maasai.
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

Post by Micamo »

Thanks!
My pronouns are <xe> [ziː] / <xym> [zɪm] / <xys> [zɪz]

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chris_notts
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

Post by chris_notts »

I'm reviving an old thread in the hope of help with a current conlanging project. To explain, the project has a fairly complicated agreement system which is sensitive to the pragmatic status of the agreement controllers. Unmarked word order is verb initial with fronting for argument focus (i.e. limited to the pre-verbal argument and excluding the verb itself), in a similar way to many Mayan languages. Agreement is suppressed with the fronted, focused argument, e.g:

INVARIANT FOCUS PREFIX WITH FRONTED (FOCUSED) SUBJECT
na čàmh jaraìčık na kiins
ART.M dog FOC-D-bite-3M ART.M man
"THE DOG bit the man"

LACK OF OBJECT AGREEMENT WITH FRONTED (FOCUSED) OBJECT
na kiins karaìč na čàmh
ART.M man 3M-D-bite ART.M dog
"The dog bit THE MAN"

The issue I have is that while it's easy to find natural languages which show anti-agreement effects with focused/non-topical/pre-verbal actors/subjects, there are fewer clearly documented examples of languages which show the same effect with patients/objects. On top of that, searching is complicated by a difference in terminology: the equivalent of anti-agreement with objects is often called other things like differential object marking/agreement (DOM/DOA), even though in effect it may be similar to subject "anti-agreement". DOM may be triggered by animacy, definiteness, specificity, and there are some vague mentions that it may also be driven by argument focus and/or topicality, e.g. in some Bantu languages. But it is hard to find clear and detailed descriptions and examples of "anti-agreement" with fronted and/or focused objects or non-subject arguments.

So my question is:

1. Does anyone have a detailed description of non-actor/non-subject anti-agreement effects in any language?
2. More specifically, does anyone have examples where contrastive/argument focus triggers such an anti-agreement effect?
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

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chris_notts wrote: 26 Oct 2018 22:24 1. Does anyone have a detailed description of non-actor/non-subject anti-agreement effects in any language?
2. More specifically, does anyone have examples where contrastive/argument focus triggers such an anti-agreement effect?
Foley's grammar of Yimas touches this briefly (pp. 232-235). The language has a rich system of person and noun class agreement on the verb which involves the intransitive subject, the transitive agent, and direct and indirect objects. Normally all core arguments trigger agreement on the verb but this can be blocked if the argument is focused. Two of the examples that he gives are,

m-nFOC impa-tay-k paympanFOC
it-CL.III DL3.O-see-IRR eagle(CL.III)
"[It, the eagle,]FOC saw those two."

patnFOC pu-nan-ŋa-t
betelnut(CL.V) PL3.A-SG2.D-give-PERF
They gave you betelnutFOC.

where I have added indication for the focused elements. The examples are drawn from connected texts where the focused nouns are just being introduced (or reintroduced) into the discourse. The first sentence has the more typical anti-agreement pattern where the dropped agreement is for the transitive agent, leaving only object agreement on the verb. The second example is the more relevant one here. Now the focused argument is the direct object ("betelnut"), leaving the verb with both agent and dative agreement prefixes for the actor and recipient, but no expected class V object prefix na- corresponding with the noun patn.

The actual pattern is a bit more complicated than that and focused arguments can still trigger agreement on the verb. This seems to boil down for agreement being used to signal special emphasis. As a result, contrastive focus in Yimas generally goes back into triggering verbal agreement.

Another place I would suggest having a look at is the interplay between information structure and the choice of subject and object conjugations in Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic. Here's one possible place to start:
http://www.analecta.hu/index.php/stualt ... 3618/13474
There's one of those terminological issues here. These two conjugations are variously called different things like subjective and objective conjugations, indeterminative and determinative conjugations, or indefinite and definite conjugations. They all refer to the same things, one set of conjugation suffixes which encodes only subject person and number and another set which encodes subject person and number plus object number.
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

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gach wrote: 01 Nov 2018 17:48 Foley's grammar of Yimas touches this briefly (pp. 232-235).
I've been meaning to buy that book. Foley's "Papuan Languages of New Guinea" is one of the best / most interesting areal linguistic surveys I've read. I've been worrying that my agreement system is too complex (a kind of covert hierarchical agreement + anti-agreement effects), but Yimas sounds pretty complicated from my limited knowledge of its agreement system.
Another place I would suggest having a look at is the interplay between information structure and the choice of subject and object conjugations in Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic. Here's one possible place to start:
http://www.analecta.hu/index.php/stualt ... 3618/13474
There's one of those terminological issues here. These two conjugations are variously called different things like subjective and objective conjugations, indeterminative and determinative conjugations, or indefinite and definite conjugations. They all refer to the same things, one set of conjugation suffixes which encodes only subject person and number and another set which encodes subject person and number plus object number.
Thanks, I'll have a look. I did have a look at Hungarian, a distant relative, but it didn't seem to fit the bill unless I misunderstood.
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Re: On Anti-Agreement Effects

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chris_notts wrote: 01 Nov 2018 21:54 I've been meaning to buy that book. Foley's "Papuan Languages of New Guinea" is one of the best / most interesting areal linguistic surveys I've read. I've been worrying that my agreement system is too complex (a kind of covert hierarchical agreement + anti-agreement effects), but Yimas sounds pretty complicated from my limited knowledge of its agreement system.
Definitely buy it. I'm a big fan of both these books. I wouldn't worry about your system being too complex. You don't need to look far from Yimas to find Manambu with its two parallel systems of subject and topic agreement. That's a totally different system, but it demonstrates that agreement systems with unusual complexities related to information structure do crop up.
Thanks, I'll have a look. I did have a look at Hungarian, a distant relative, but it didn't seem to fit the bill unless I misunderstood.
One thing which makes interpreting the grammatical analyses of the several Uralic "subjective" vs. "objective" conjugations tricky is that traditionally they have been written more in terms of definiteness. There probably are functional differences between the languages but more detailed studies of at least the eastern Uralic languages point to a deeper connection with the object conjugation and topicality. Here's another paper to check on the object conjugation in Northern Khanty:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ir ... 540281.pdf
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