Rara #137

Legacy number: 137

 Number  137
 Phenomenon  object and subject NPs agreeing
(a) in gender/class and number
(b) in person
 Found in  (a) Archi (Northeast Caucasian); Ripatransone dialect of Italian (Romance, IE)

(b) Coahuilteco (Hokan)
 Domain  syntax — agreement: controllers, targets, categories, domains, conditions
 Type  rarissimum
 Keywords  object, subject, gender, class, number, person
 Source  Kibrik, Aleksandr E. (1977). Opyt strukturnogo opisanija Arcinskogo jazyka, vols. 2 and 3. Moskva: Izdatel'stvo moskovskogo universiteta.
Lüdtke, Helmut (1977). Die Mundart von Ripatransone: Ein sprachtypologisches Kuriosum. In Milan Romportl et al. (eds.), Studies in Linguistic Typology, 173-177. Prague: Charles University.
Troike, Rudolph C. (1981). Subject-object concord in Coahuilteco. Language 57: 658-673.
 Violates  ?

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Discussion
Notes
See also HagËge (1993: 77-88) or Corbett (1994) for more general surveys of agreement, mentioning also a few further instances where targets can hardly be seen as being in direct syntactic construction with controllers, which is usually considered necessary to license agreement. In Ripatransone Italian, nouns (of suitable form, i.e. of the a-declension) do not only agree with subject when direct objects, but also in adverbial relations ? and adverbials are somewhat less uncommon agreement targets crosslinguistically. In Archi, the targets are experiencers in the dative case and the controllers are stimuli in the absolutive case; which of these two arguments of verbs of experience and emotion is subject and which is object for other grammatical purposes is another question. HagËge, Claude (1993). The Language Builder: An Essay on the Human Signature in Linguistic Morphogenesis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Corbett, Greville G. (1994). Agreement: An overview. In R. E. Asher et al. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, 54 - 60. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Comment
Frans Plank · 21 Sep 2006
See also Hagège (1993: 77-88) or Corbett (1994) for more general surveys of agreement, mentioning also a few further instances where targets can hardly be seen as being in direct syntactic construction with controllers, which is usually considered necessary to license agreement. In Ripatransone Italian, nouns (of suitable form, i.e. of the a-declension) do not only agree with subject when direct objects, but also in adverbial relations – and adverbials are somewhat less uncommon agreement targets crosslinguistically. In Archi, the targets are experiencers in the dative case and the controllers are stimuli in the absolutive case; which of these two arguments of verbs of experience and emotion is subject and which is object for other grammatical purposes is another question.

Hagège, Claude (1993). The Language Builder: An Essay on the Human Signature in Linguistic Morphogenesis. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Corbett, Greville G. (1994). Agreement: An overview. In R. E. Asher et al. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, 54 - 60. Oxford: Pergamon Press.