ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies
ISSN: 2306-5737E-ISSN: 2658-4069
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana
Transactions of the Institute for Linguistic Studies 

Subject-object agreement markers in Moksha-Mordvin complement clauses

DOI:10.30842/alp2306573716316
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Serdobolskaya N. V., Yegorova A. D. Grammaticheskiy status pokazateley subyektno-obyektnogo soglasovaniya v konstruktsiyakh s sententsialnymi aktantami (moksha-mordovskiy yazyk). Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 2020. XVI(3): 480–532.

In Moksha-Mordvin, transitive verbs can occur with either subject agreement markers, or subject-object agreement markers. The choice between the two sets of markers depends on a number of factors, such as definiteness and animacy of the Direct Object, or aspectual characteristics. Both agreement sets can be used if the object of the transitive verb is a clause. The paper is focused on the syntactic structure of sentential arguments occurring in the context of subject and subject-object agreement patterns of transitive verbs. We are considering 24 matrix verbs and three most frequent complementizers, što ‘that’, məz’ardə/məjardə ‘when’ and koda ‘how’. The data have been collected during our field trips to the villages of Lesnoe Cibaevo, Lesnoe Ardashevo and Lesnye Siyali (Temnikovskiy region of the Republic of Mordovia) in 2014–2016 by means of elicitation. Some examples have been taken from the newspaper «Mokshen’ pravda» (2008–2014).

We show that complement clauses triggering object agreement on transitive verbs have syntactic properties of NPs, namely, they can be replaced by nominal anaphoric devices (including pleonastic anaphora) and can be referred to by the universal quantifier. It is not allowed with complement clauses occurring with subject agreement. We conclude that complement clauses triggering object agreement on the verb contain a nominal head, while complement clauses occurring with subject agreement do not. The two types of clauses are semantically distributed: the subject-object agreement is triggered by eventive and factive complements, while the subject agreement occurs in the context of propositional and irrealis complements. Thus, the presence of the nominal head correlates with the presence of a presupposition of truth of the complement clause. Similar correlation has been observed in other languages, see [Dalrymple, Lødrup 2000; Kastner 2015], as well as[Hanink, Bochnak 2016]).

Keywords
clausal arguments, complementation, complementizer, subject-object conjugation, subject-object agreement, anaphora, fact, event, presupposition
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Keywords
clausal arguments, complementation, complementizer, subject-object conjugation, subject-object agreement, anaphora, fact, event, presupposition
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