verbal agreement other than person

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Vardelm
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verbal agreement other than person

Post by Vardelm »

I was looking at WALS regarding verbal person agreement. Out of 378 languages, 82 do not have person agreement marked on the verbs (21%). The chapter discusses languages that mark verbs for number and/or gender, but not person. Does anyone have any idea or information about what percentage of languages do not agree with referents at all vs. those that agree in gender, number, animacy, etc., but not in person?
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kodé
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Re: verbal agreement other than person

Post by kodé »

Modern Hebrew verbs in the present tense agree for gender and number, not person; these forms are derived from participles, IIRC. I think the same is true for some Russian verb forms based on participles. Both of these languages do, however, have person agreement elsewhere in their morphology.

Many unrelated North American languages (e.g., Hiaki, Navajo, Creek) have different verb stem forms depending on the number of the subject or object (typically the internal argument). This may or may not be considered agreement, since number is not here being marked by an inflection but by the form of the stem. Again, these languages also have person agreement marking.

I'm not sure of any language that has ONLY number or gender agreement, and not person agreement. But I'm sure there's one out there!

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Frislander
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Re: verbal agreement other than person

Post by Frislander »

kodé wrote:I'm not sure of any language that has ONLY number or gender agreement, and not person agreement. But I'm sure there's one out there!
Chechen and many other Northeast-Caucasian languages exhibit this. I don't think I have any other examples though.
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hwhatting
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Re: verbal agreement other than person

Post by hwhatting »

Russian agrees for gender and number, but not for person, in the past tense and the conditional, while it agrees for person and number for the rest of the finite forms (present & future tense, imperative).

Vardelm
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Re: verbal agreement other than person

Post by Vardelm »

Thanks for the replies!

For my conlang, I ended up with a solution that very vaguely feels like agreement but isn't. Verbs will have inherent voice/diathesis/transitivity/valence, and there are suffixes which change that. The voice suffixes control whether there is an active argumement, stative, both, or none (the language is, obviously, active-stative). I'm also debating if the voice suffixes are always required, but not sure about that.
Tibetan Dwarvish - My own ergative "dwarf-lang"

Quasi-Khuzdul - An expansion of J.R.R. Tolkien's Dwarvish language from The Lord of the Rings

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