[PapuanLanguages] phonologically determined agreement

[Sebastian Bredemann]

Dear memebers of the papuan language mailing list,

I am a graduate student at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany. I am investigating a special type of agreement relation, which is called ‚alliterative concord‘ or ‚phonological agreement‘. This is a type of agreement in which the form of an agreement marker is determined by the phonological information of the noun that controls the agreement. This type of agreement is found in Abuq (Arapesh):

Abu’ phonological agreement (Nekitel 1986 cited in Dobrin 1995)
 
a. 	almil 	afu-l-i 			l-ahe
	bird		good-AGR-ADJ 	AGR-went
	‘a good bird went. 
b. 	ihiaburuh 	afu-h-i			h-ahe 
	butterfly		good-AGR-ADJ	AGR-went 
	‚a good butterfly went‘

The agreement markers suffixed to the adjective afu ‚good‘ and prefixed to the finite verb ahe ‚went‘  are identical to the final consonant of the nominal roots of the nouns almil and ihiaburuh. The final segment controlling agreement for the nouns is NOT the exponent of any morphological category like gender or number. The agreement markers in the examples thus cannot be assumed to be determined by any morphological property. If you have knowledge of any agreement system found in a Papuan language (or in any language) that is based on the phonological properties of nouns, I would be very happy to hear from you.


Thank you for any help, 
Sebastian Bredeman