Patterns of alignment in verb agreement

Abstract

Patterns of alignment in verb agreement 1 Siewierska's ProblemA highly productive inquiry in typology concerns the alignment of argument roles, especially the identical vs. different treatment of the three core roles S, A, and P by the rules of case assignment and agreement marking.With regard to case marking, determining alignment is straightforward: one can simply check which argumental NPs are assigned the same case markers.With regard to agreement, the issue is more complex.Whereas argumental NPs exist independently of case marking, agreement consist of two components: (i) whether or not it exists (i.e.whether cer tain argument features like person, number of gender, show up at all in the verb morphology), and (ii) if agreement exists, how its markers align roles.In many cases, the answers to these question are still straightforward and one can easily observe that the agreement markers of, e.g., Latin show accusative alignment.However, when expanding the typological scope, one often runs into what we call here "Siewierska's Problem": argument marking in agreement is often complex and does not allow simple answers.As a matter of fact, the analysis of an agreement system as being primarily ergative, accusative or neutral heavily depends on which criteria one employs.As Siewierska (2003) notes in her seminal article on the determination of the alignment of agreement in ditransitive constructions, in some instances the consideration of different criteria gives rise to conflicting classifications, i.e. the criteria may not converge in identifying a unique alignment type.Siewierska (2003: 342) considers the following four criteria that apply to the determination the alignment of agreement:2 1 Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Anna Siewierska Memorial Workshop in Leipzig, April 27, 2012, and at the conference "Syntax of the World's Languages IV" in Dubrovnik, October 1-4, 2012.We thank the audiences for helpful comments and questions.We are also grateful for very useful comments and suggestions on a first drft by Dik Bakker and Martin Haspelmath.Author contributions: B.B., G.I. and A.W.-M.conceived and designed the study and all contributed to the writing.B.B. conducted the statistical analysis.All authors were involved in discussion and interpretation of the results.G.I. and A.W.-M.contributed to data analysis and coded agreement data.T.Z. did most of the data extraction and aggregation work.We thank Lennart Bierkandt and Kevin Bätscher for help in data collection and encoding 2 A further criterion, not considered by Siewierska (2003), concerns the host(s) of agreement marker(s), i.e. auxiliaries, lexical verbs, etc.We will not consider this criterion here either.

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