Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Poly-agreement in Sarazi: Conditions, Constraints and Hierarchies
- Date
- Thursday 1 October 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.18
Abstract
Sarazi is among the minority of Indo-Aryan languages which exhibits poly-agreement. The head of the verbal complex can index features of up to three arguments. Agreement is primarily sensitive to case. But a plethora of other factors – person, semantic role, grammatical function, information-structure, co-argument’s properties or verbal morpho(phono)logy – may interact in various ways and further condition the occurrence and realization of agreement.
The talk examines what is obligatory or optional in the agreement system and what constraints the possibilities of agreement. It seeks to unpack the complex architecture of agreement by examining the principles and hierarchies underlying these patterns and examines how they interact in determining agreement. Particular attention is given to the pervasive role of person, case, and grammatical-relation hierarchies in both the syntactic licensing and morphological realization of agreement. An analysis is proposed in which these interacting factors are organized into distinct but interrelated licensing and restricting mechanisms, with hierarchies determining their relative application.