[PapuanLanguages] phonologically determined agreement

[Timothy Usher]

"The final segment controlling agreement for the nouns is NOT the exponent
of any morphological category like gender or number."

I think the traditional understanding here is in fact that these are gender
markers which are suppletive by number? (Fortune 1942 etc.)


On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 3:59 AM Sebastian Bredemann <
basti.bredemann at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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