Re: arguments

#1 wrote:
> A verb may agree with the subject, the object, or both depending of the
> language, but would it be possible to have a language that agrees with some
> of the other arguments?
Yes! Most Georgian distransitive verbs agree with subject, object
and indirect object.  In Meskwaki, verbs don't agree with secondary
objects, but they do have to morphologically mark that a verb is
taking an oblique phrase.  In Lak (a Daghestanian language I
briefly studied), verbs usually agree with the absolutive argument,
but can also agree with other phrases like adverbs.  So, agreement
with all sorts of weird things is definitely within the realm
of possibility.

-----------------------------------------------------------
From:    Patrick Littell <puchitao@...>
> Classical Nahuatl does something unusual along these lines, iirc.  The
> verb always agrees with the subject, but it agrees with the object
> *furthest down* the relationial hierarchy!  So if there's a
> benificiary, the object prefix agrees with the benificiary; if there's
> none, then it agrees with the indirect object; if there's no indirect
> object it agrees with the direct object.  This is typologically very
> rare; I know of no unrelated languages that do anything like this.
That's actually not so strange.  That's precisely what you'd
expect if the real contrast is between a primary and a secondary
object, which are syntactic relations not bound to a particular
thematic role.  English is such a language:  we can passivize
the goal argument ("The Museum was given funds") but not the
patient argument (*"Funds were given the museum", where that
equals "One gave the museum funds").  Many Bantu languages are
like English in this respect, except that they also have object
agreement (under some analyses, at least).  There are, in other
words, mismatches that can arise between argument structure and
syntactic structure.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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