University of Kentucky UKnowledge Linguistics Faculty Publications Linguistics 1988 Maithili Verb Agreement and the Control Agreement Principle Gregory Stump University of Kentucky, [email protected] Ramawatar Yadav Tribhuvan University Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits oy u. Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/lin_facpub Part of the Linguistics Commons Repository Citation Stump, Gregory and Yadav, Ramawatar, "Maithili Verb Agreement and the Control Agreement Principle" (1988). Linguistics Faculty Publications. 37. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/lin_facpub/37 This Conference Proceeding is brought to you for free and open access by the Linguistics at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Linguistics Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Maithili Verb Agreement and the Control Agreement Principle This conference proceeding is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/lin_facpub/37 305 Maithili Verb Agreement and the Control Agreement Principle* syntactic relation of control. The latter relation is defmed in such as way that A controls B if A and B form a constituent whose interpretation Gregory T. Stump is the functional application of B's meaning to A's meaning. Thus, the University of Kentucky CAP entails that in each of the constructions in (2)-(8), an agreement relation between the two constituents is possible only because one Ramawatar Yadav constituent controls the other. Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu The CAP makes very specific predictions about possible patterns of verb agreement .in simple sentences. It predicts that verbs should only be Keenan (1974:302) first set forth an important generalization about the able to agree WIth two sorts of NPs. They may, of course, agree with an appearance of agreement morphology in natural language: object NP by which they are controlled; and because they carry the inflectional features of the VP which they head, they may also agree with (I) Function symbols may present a morpheme whose form is determined its controller, namely the subject. Other imaginable patterns of verb by the noun class of the argument expression. agreement are ruled out by the CAP. Thus, as a universal, the CAP would be disconfirmed if a language were found in which a verb could That is, assuming that linguistic expressions denote functions and agree not only with its arguments, but also with possessive NPs modifying ~guments in various .combinations, the. agreement morphology borne by a the heads of these arguments. glve~ functor expression ma~ be (partially or wholly) de~ermined by its L~guages have, of course, been identified in which a verb may agree WIth a NP whose logical function is that of a possessive modifying nominal ar~ment(s). Thus, 10 each of the constructions listed in (2)-(8), the underhned functor may be marked for agreement with its nominal one of the verb's ~guments. Consider, for example, the following pair of argument, as the accompanying examples illustrate. sentences from Chickasaw, a Western Muskogean language (cited from Munro (1984:646»: (2) [NP VP]: John snore-so 3SG 3SG (9) Sa-pash-at litiha. (10) Sa-pash-at a-litiha. (3) NP]: e.g. Swahili: If-me-ki-leta chakula? ISG-hair-SU dirty 1SG-hair-SU 1SG-dirty rv 'My hair is dirty.' 'My hair is dirty.' 2SG-TNS-3SG-bring food 'Have you brought the food?' (4) [Det N]: e.g. French: la rille In (2), the verb agrees in person and number with the subject NP sa-pash-at 'my hair'; in this case, the agreeing verb remains in its the(FSG) girl(FSG) 2 (5) [Adj N]: e.g. French: petites filles unmarked form. (10) is truthconditionally equivalent to sentence (9); in little(FPL) girls(FPL) (10), however, the verb agrees not with sa-pash-at, but with the first (6) [Gen N ]:1 e.g. Hindi: Ram-ld bahan person singular possessor (whose sole realization in (10) is as the Ram-FSG sister(FSG) possessive prefix sa- 'my'). Similar facts have been observed in a number 'Ram's sister' of diverse languages. (7) [N ReI ]: e.g. Dyirbal: Verb-possessor agreement of this sort would appear to be inconsistent with the CAP. It has been argued, however, that languages bayi yata baggun qugumbi{u [waYJlqi-IJu-ru ] bugan, exhibiting this kind of agreement pattern do so because they have a rule NM(ABS) man(ABS) NM(ERG) woman(ERG) go=uphill-REL-ERG saw of Possessor Raising, whose effect is to raise possessors out of argument 'The woman who was going uphill saw the man. ' NPs and to give them argument status. For example, Munro and Gordon (1982:95ff) and Munro (l984:636ff) argue that sentence (10) derives from (8) [.e NP]: e.g. Welsh: iddi hi (9) . by means of a Possessor Raising rule, so that despite their logical to(3SGF) her equivaleqce, the two sentences differ in structure: whereas (9) has the NP sa-pash-at as its subject, (10) is claimed to have the understood first . Note that. (1) doesn't actually rule out the possibility that a functor person singular possessor as its subject. Thus, languages showing rmght agree WIth a nominal expression other than one of its arguments; it verb-possessor agreement patterns such as that in (10) need not be would, however, be possible to strengthen Keenan's generalization so as yiewed as disco?f~ng the CAP, provided that they afford sound to .rul~ out any agreement rel~tions ~hich it does not specifically license. independent motivation for postulating a Possessor Raising rule. Independent arguments for a rule of Possessor Raising have been ThIS IS essentially the form 10 WhICh Keenan's generalization has been reconstructed within the framework of Generalized Phrase Structure proposed for a variety of languages. G~arnmar (Sag & Klein (1982); Gazdar, Klein, Pullum & Sag (1985». In Here, we show that the Maithili language presents genuine this framework, the Control Agreement Principle (CAP) requires that counterevidence to the CAP. In particular, we demonstrate that despite every agreement relation between separate constituents be licensed by a the widespread incidence of verb-possessor agreement in Maithili, there is 304 306 307 no independent evidence for a rule of Possessor Raising in this language; As these examples show, Maithili verbal morphology is highly fusional: in on the contrary, there is clear evidence against any such rule. general, it isn't possible to distinguish separate primary and secondary (Throughout our discussion, rules of Possessor Raising will be described in agreement affixes on the verbs in (12); on the contrary, both the primary the familiar terminology of transformational grammar, for expository and the secondary inflection may be embodied in a single affix, such as reasons; but the evidence discussed here casts doubt on the validity of -thun ('3H + 2MH') in (12a). Moreover, the exact form of these any sort of 'raising' analysis, whether this involves transformations, agreement affixes may vary with the tense of the verb. The inventory of lexical rules, or GPSG-style metarules.) regular past tense agreement inflections is given in Table I (cf. Williams (1973:361». 1. The Maithili verb agreement system Subject Nonsubject Maithili is a modern Indo-Aryan language in the Bihari group; it is spoken by approximately 23 million people in the Bihar state of India' and 3H 3NH 2H 2MH 2NH 1 in the southeastern plains of Nepal. The variety of Maithili discussed I I here is the dialect of Janakpur, Nepal, spoken natively by Professor 3H khin(h) khin(h) ain(h) khun(h) khun(h) ain(h) Yadav. thin(h) thin (h) 0 thun(h) thun(h) 0 In Maithili, verbal agreement inflections encode the person and the 3NH kain(h) kai(k) 0 ka(h) kau(k) 0 honorific grade of the controlling NP. Consider, for instance, the present 2H iain(h) iai(k) - - - 0 tense forms of aich 'to be' in (11); in each of these examples, the form 2MH ahun(h) aha(k) - - - 0 of the verbal agreement inflection is determined by the person and the aha(h) aha(h) honorific grade of the subject NP. 2NH ahun(h) ahi(k) - - 0 1 iain(h) iai(k) 0 ia(h) iau(k) - (11) a. ham chi d. to che io I am(l) you(NH) are(2NH) b. aha chi e. 0 chaith Table I - Composite past tense agreement inflections in Maithili you(H) are(2H) he(H) is(3H) [0 = no overt marking; _ = does not exist] c. to cha(h) f. u aich you(MH) are(2MH) he(NH) is(3NH) The principles governing the employment of secondary inflections are fundamentally pragmatic in nature. According to Jha (1958:472), a Note that Maithili verbal inflection distinguishes three honorific grades ~ secondary inflection encodes the 'most prominent' NP in the clause other the second person (namely, honorific, mid-honorific, and non-honorific) than the subject itself. Thus, in the examples in (12), the direct object and two grades in the third person (honorific and non-honorific); note in argument is necessarily the most prominent nonsubject NP, and thus addition that neither the gender nor the number of the controlling NP is controls the secondary agreement inflection. In (13), on the other hand, reflected in a verb agreement inflection. it is the instrumental object hunka that is the most prominent nonsubject In a thorough description of Maithili verb morphology, two kinds of NP and thus controls secondary agreement. agreement inflections must be distinguished. A verb's primary agreement inflection is controlled by its subject, and is obligatory; thus, in each of (13) to hunka-sa kie khisiel chahun? the examples in (11), the personal inflection of the verb is primary.