Abstracts

The familiar structure of a clause consists of a subject, an object, a verb, and something like a Tense inflection, aligned somewhat in the following fashion. For various reasons however, agreement was thought to deserve a place and a head called AGR found a place in its own right (at the end of the 1980s, to be precise). Soon however, it was realised that there should be two of them not one, the latter being a reflection of the research energy being spent mostly studying languages showing single argument agreement phenomenon, that is, agreement with the subject – the dominant construct in the little history of theoretical linguistics (or more accurately, Syntax), contributed mostly, again for historical reasons, by studies on Romance and Germanic languages. However, even a small WALS sample (of 378 languages) suggests that by far most languages that show agreement, show multiple-argument agreement (>51%). This has not been noticed before.

In this talk, I localise this observation and propose “multiple” agreement as a Sprachbund/ areal feature across a contiguous belt extending eastward from the foothills of Himalayas to Burma, where verb-indexation and/or agreement with more than one argument is not uncommon. However, syntactic accounts of agreement within the context of at least languages in India have been dominated by studies on Hindi-Urdu. I have been working for some time on some of these languages spoken in south Asia, particularly in India. First, there is a group of languages that evolved from Māgadhi Prākrit, namely, languages like Maithili, Magahi, Angika etc., that are different from languages that evolved from Sauraseni Prākrit, namely, Hindi-Urdu, in being multiple-argument agreement languages. In Bhattacharya (2016), I tried to show that these group of languages are parametrically different from Hindi-Urdu in certainly this aspect of agreement and therefore must find a different theoretical explanation for the phenomenon of agreement. Following that research, in Bhattacharya (2017a,b), I have tried to show that the pronominal cliticization is common in the Munda languages, at least in the Kherwarian or North Munda languages like Mundari, Santhali and Ho. In Bhattacharya (2018), I extended the observation to agreeing Tibeto-Burman languages across the Himalayan region (including Nepal) and southern Chin languages in Mizoram.

However, I will show that this areal feature of “multiple” agreement is a microparameter, requiring different syntactic treatments, whether it is agreement or cliticization or indexation. Thus, it is only a formal syntactic account that can provide the true picture.