Skip to content
Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton September 13, 2006

Person and number agreement in Dumi

  • Jochen Trommer EMAIL logo
From the journal Linguistics

Abstract

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.


*Address for correspondence: Institut für Linguistik, Universität Leipzig, Beethovenstrasse 15, 04107 Leipzig, Germany.

Received: 2004-02-19
Revised: 2005-12-20
Published Online: 2006-09-13
Published in Print: 2006-09-01

© Walter de Gruyter

Downloaded on 28.3.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/LING.2006.033/html
Scroll to top button