Plurality Agreement in Some Eastern Mayan Languages
International Journal of American Linguistics2011Vol. 77(3), pp. 397–412
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2011 papers
Abstract
A preliminary analysis of texts shows that third-person plural agreement marking in K’ichee’ is obligatory for animate nouns and optional but strongly dispreferred for inanimate nouns. In Mam, however, plural agreement marking is strongly preferred but still optional for animate nouns and, while it is not preferred for inanimate nouns, it is used with much greater frequency than in K’ichee’. It is likely that in K’ichee’ an innovative syntactic rule for agreement marking has been introduced that requires it for animates and not for inanimates, thus converting a pragmatic strategy, still used in Mam, to a syntactic strategy that pays attention to animacy features.
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