project

Many grammatical processes reflect prominence hierarchies of morphosyntactic categories, such as 1st > 2nd > 3rd person or animate > inanimate. This project focusses on two especially striking hierarchy effects in polysynthetic multiargument agreement: Direction marking, i.e. affixal marking which indicates whether subject or object of a predicate are higher with respect to a specific hierarchy, and hierarchy-based competition (HBC), where similar hierarchies determine whether verb agreement is governed by the subject or the object for a specific combination of features.
The goal of the project is to broaden the empirical and theoretical understanding of these two phenomena by in-depth studies of two language families which show them in many different varieties: Algic and Kiranti.

last changed: Thu 01 Sept 2011 13:40 CEST