Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and conventions
- 1 Introduction: category distinctions as a window on the theory of agreement
- 2 Basic agreement and category distinctions
- 3 The unity of verbal and adjectival agreement
- 4 Explaining the restriction on person agreement
- 5 Parameters of agreement
- Appendix: Table of languages and their agreement properties
- References
- Index
Appendix: Table of languages and their agreement properties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and conventions
- 1 Introduction: category distinctions as a window on the theory of agreement
- 2 Basic agreement and category distinctions
- 3 The unity of verbal and adjectival agreement
- 4 Explaining the restriction on person agreement
- 5 Parameters of agreement
- Appendix: Table of languages and their agreement properties
- References
- Index
Summary
The following table displays the properties of agreement that are most relevant for assessing how the Direction of Agreement Parameter and the Case Dependence of Agreement Parameter are set, for each of the 108 languages in my sample. The languages are listed in the same order as they are in the description of the World Atlas of Language Structures core sample, starting in Africa and moving northward and eastward in roughly the presumed ways that language-speakers spread across the globe by migration, ending in South America. The first two columns identify the primary word order and case-marking properties of full noun phrases in the language; in almost every instance, these values are taken from WALS maps 81–3 and 98. This information is included as background and plays no direct role in the analysis. The last eight columns record the answers that I found to the following eight questions concerning the syntax of agreement:
a. Is subject agreement dependent on the subject being in a particular syntactic position?
b. Is subject agreement sensitive to the case of the subject? For example, does the verb agree only with nominative subjects, or can it show the same sort of agreement with ergative or dative subjects as well?
c. Is object agreement dependent on the position or definiteness of the object (two kinds of evidence that the object has moved to a higher position)?
d. Is object agreement sensitive to the case of the object? For example, does the verb agree only with accusative/absolutive/unmarked objects, or can it show the same sort of agreement with dative or oblique complements?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Syntax of Agreement and Concord , pp. 246 - 253Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008