Agreement principles in coordinative and comitative constructions in Bezhta

Khalilova Z. M. Printsipy soglasovaniya s sochinennoy imennoy gruppoy i komitativnoy konstruktsiyey v bezhtinskom yazyke. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 814.

The article deals with the main principles of verbal agreement with the coordinative and comitative noun phrases in Bezhta. In Bezhta, nominal categories of gender and number are implied to cross-reference the verbal arguments. Bezhta has a covert category of gender and there are four nominal genders in the singular: male human nouns are (gender 1), female human nouns (gender 2), animate nouns (gender 3), and animate and inanimate nouns (gender 4). There are two genders in the plural, human plural and non-human plural.Bezhta, like other Daghestanian languages, uses different markers to express noun phrase coordination and comitative noun phrases. A coordinative noun phrase consists of two conjoined noun phrases which share the same function and are always marked with the same case. The coordinative noun phrase has the following pattern [A=na B=na] meaning ‘A and B’, where -na ‘and’ is a coordinative enclitic used bisyndetically, i.e. attached to both conjoined noun phrases. A comitative noun phrase also consists of two noun phrases but they have different syntactic functions (different cases). The comitative marker attaches to the secondary participant of the event, with whom the main participant accomplishes an action [X with Y]. It is the Absolutive main participant of the comitative noun phrase that controls the gender/number agreement. Agreement with the coordinative noun phrase has some peculiarities. A coordinative noun phrase includes two nouns that can be of the same or different genders. We establish the following gender resolution rules for coordinative noun phrase: 1) if all conjuncts are human nouns, then the human plural gender is used; 2) if all conjuncts are non-human nouns, then the non-human plural gender is used; 3) if one of the conjunct is human, and the other noun is non-human, then the human plural gender is used. The same agreement principles are found in the disjunctive noun phrase formed with the conjunction ‘or’.