Linguistics Seminar Talk - Imke Driemel

Title:  Omnivorous agreement via post-syntactic overwriting: the object marker in Mundari

Abstract 

In this talk I will present the omnivorous agreement pattern we find in double object structures in Mundari (Austroasiatic, India). The choice of cross-referencing either the indirect or the direct object is determined by the interaction of two prominence scales, one for person (1 >2>3) and one for number (SG>PL>DU). Moving away from a privative number system to account for omnivorous number effects (Nevins 2011), I present an alternative way to account for omnivorous agreement patterns, one that involves cyclic Agree and post-syntactic overwriting. This is partly motivated by the fact that we find omnivory with person features as well as the unusual number scale we find in Mundari, which is in a sense the opposite of the markedness scale we would postulate for number marking across languages. If time permits, I will lay out the predictions of this model and discuss its consequences for the landscape of Agree systems.