Active-Stative Agreement in Tunica

Abstract

While the languages of the southeastern United States have been characterized as having active-stative alignment, there has been little or no discussion of exactly how the language isolate Tunica fits into this linguistic landscape. The Tunica agreement system can be formally characterized as an active system with stative vs. nonstative agreement—particularly in the earlier data, which preserves underlying forms that had eroded by the time of Mary Haas’s major documentation and make the active-stative nature of the agreement system more transparent.