Agreement in Syntax and Its Morphological Manifestation: A Mayan Perspective

It is well known that patterns of agreement are sensitive to syntactic configurations. Third-person postverbal subjects in Northern Italian dialects fail to trigger agreement, unlike their preverbal counterparts, for example. If a unitary approach to narrow syntax agreement is taken, however, this variation within a single language cannot be handled by maneuvering in syntax. In this talk, I will demonstrate that the morphological manifestation of agreement is affected by operations that take place after narrow syntax agreement is executed, on the basis of data concerning the Agent-Focus construction in Mayan, where transitive subject extraction leads to suppression of ergative marking. The idea that this suppression is due to a morphological operation is directly supported by the fact that Yucatec drops the preverbal mood/aspect marker together with the ergative marker. Morphological realization of agreement in accordance with the person-number hierarchy in Kichean languages of the Mayan family such as Kaqchikel, K’iche’, and Tz’utujil also points to the same conclusion.

上智大学四谷キャンパス中央図書館　8階L-821