The Morphosyntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement

Abstract

This paper analyzes ‘addressee agreement’ (“allocutive agreement”) in Magahi, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language. Magahi finite verbs encode honorificity (e.g., social status) of the addressee, in addition to encoding person and honorificity of the subject. Magahi addressee agreement is special in two respects. First, addressee agreement is associated with finiteness; it is available in all finite clauses, main and embedded. Second, addressee agreement and subject honorification combine features for spell out, indicating that heads involved in both phenomena are syntactically adjacent. I claim that the Hr-DP, a covert syntactically expressed representation of an addressee, which undergoes addressee agreement is lower in the clause structure and is a coordinate of FinP. I further propose that the functional head associated with Magahi addressee agreement is the ‘Fin’ head (i.e Force) located just above T. The proposal diverges from previous analyses, where the locus of addressee agreement is the highest projection of a clause (e.g., Speech Act Phrase or Context Phrase) found primarily in root clauses. This study implies that addressee is syntactically present in every finite clause. Cross-linguistic differences (e.g., root/embedded asymmetries) depend on what syntactic category acts as a probe in a language. I owe a great thanks to Mark C. Baker for his conversations and suggestions that helped develop the ideas presented here. I also greatly benefited from the comments and suggestions I got from three anonymous reviewers. The paper would not be in its present form without their feedback. I thank Rajesh Bhatt, Ayesha Kidwai and Veneeta Dayal for their discussions. I would also like to thank Ken Safir, Troy Messick, Ümit Atlamaz, Sreekar Raghotham, Shiori Ikawa and the participants of syntax lab and ST@R at Rutgers University for helpful comments. Although I am a native speaker of Magahi, I sometimes consulted with Anand Abhishek, Shashank Shekhar and Shekhar Joyti for their intuitions, many thanks to them as well. Thanks also to Ritesh Kumar, Tajudeen Mamadou Y. and the graduate writing program at Rutgers for helpful feedback on the writing. Needless to say, all remaining errors are my own. 2 The Morphosyntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement