Plural agreement in Udi
Maysak T. A. Soglasovaniye po
mnozhestvennomu chisluv udinskom yazyke. Acta Linguistica
Petropolitana. 680.
Within the person agreement system of Udi
(Lezgic branch of the East Caucasian family), six person-number
values are distinguished, including separate markers for the 3rd
person singular and the 3rd person plural. The agreement is
controlled by the subject, i.e. the agent of a transitive verb or
the single core argument of an intransitive verb. At the same time,
it is quite common to have singular agreement in the 3rd person
even if the subject is a plural noun phrase. The paper, based
mainly on the modern text corpus available for the Nizh dialect of
Udi, presents a discussion of those conditions that are commonly
mentioned in the literature in the context of optional number
marking: these are, in particular, animacy of the subject, its
topicality (or, to the contrary, focalization), its degree of
agentivity, etc. It is also shown that optional control of plural
agreement is attested with certain types of semantically plural
subjects without any formal plural marking, e.g. noun phrases
modified by numerals or quantifiers ‘all’ and ‘many’, coordinated
phrases, as well as elliptical or zero subjects. Special conditions
for plural agreement are also typical of other languages of the
area, which are genetically unrelated to Udi (in particular,
Persian and Azeri); it is thus cannot be excluded that the
optionality of plural agreement in Udi is a contact-induced
phenomenon.
Keywords
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