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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 42:3 (2018) ► pp.529–561

Gender agreement alternation in Aqusha Dargwa

A case against information structure

| University of Bamberg | National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow

The article discusses gender agreement alternation in Aqusha Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian, the Caucasus, Russian Federation). The phenomenon is observed in periphrastic verbal forms with transitive verbs where gender agreement on the auxiliary can show the gender features of either the ergative subject or the absolutive direct object. Considering existing analyses of the phenomenon in terms of information structure, I argue that agreement alternation cannot be captured by sentence-topic-oriented accounts. I also discuss a structural proposal developed by Sumbatova and Lander (2014) and show that their analysis cannot be maintained in full. Instead, I propose a modified analysis according to which only subject agreement, but not object agreement, results from a cross-clausal referential dependency between the ergative subject of the lexical verb and the absolutive subject of the matrix restructuring verb. On this view, agreement alternation may be assimilated to the familiar distinction between ergative and biabsolutive constructions found elsewhere in Nakh-Daghestanian.

Keywords: Aqusha Dargwa, gender agreement, sentence topic, biabsolutive construction
Article outline
  • 1.Problem setting
  • 2.Previous accounts of alternating agreement: An overview
    • 2.1 Van den Berg (1999): Default Ergative Hypothesis
    • 2.2 Sumbatova and Lander (2014)
  • 3.Agreement controller is not discourse topic or old information
  • 4.Agreement controller is not sentence topic
    • 4.1Non-topicable quantifiers can control auxiliary gender agreement
    • 4.2Thetic sentences do not imply default agreement
    • 4.3Focus-marked arguments can control auxiliary gender agreement
    • 4.4“Defective” controllers of gender agreement on the auxiliary
  • 5.Syntax of gender agreement
  • 6.A structural parallel
  • 7.Summary and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.17018.gan
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