Possessor agreement: Exploring Cross-Linguistic Variation
Keywords: possessors, Agree, syntax
Abstract: 1. Background. This paper investigates agreeing head marking in the nominal domain, as in (1) from Garifuna (Arawakan), where the head noun t-íleve ‘the flower’ has a prefix agreeing in person and gender with the possessor, nu-fáluma ‘coconut.’
(1) t- íleve nu- fáluma
3F-flower 1SG- coconut ‘the flower of my coconut’ (Haurholm 2016: (65))
Agreeing genitive possessors (hereafter AGP) have been studied previously, primarily in Uralic and Altaic, where they were observed to occur exclusively in a pre-Adj/pre-N position (Crisma et al. 2024). This talk presents novel findings from a typologically diverse dataset of 155 languages (Choussou-Polydouri et al. 2023), encompassing all major language families. Our analysis reveals a strong correlation between AGP-N vs N-AGP and SV vs VS. This discovery has implications for our understanding of the syntax of possessors and Agree, the relationship between clausal and nominal domains, and the nature of parameter hierarchies (Roberts 2019).
Submission Number: 22
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