The Morphosyntax of Magahi Addressee Agreement

Abstract

This article analyzes addressee agreement (allocutive agreement) in Magahi, an Eastern Indo‐Aryan language. Magahi finite verbs encode the honorificity (social status) of the addressee, in addition to encoding the person and honorificity of the subject. Magahi addressee agreement is special in two respects. First, it is associated with finiteness: it is available in all finite clauses, main and embedded. Second, addressee agreement and subject honorification combine features for spellout, indicating that heads involved in both phenomena are syntactically adjacent. I claim that the covert syntactically expressed representation of the addressee, which undergoes addressee agreement, is relatively low in the clause structure: it is a coordinate of FinP, the layer just above TP. I further propose that the functional head associated with Magahi addressee agreement is the Fin head. The proposal diverges from previous analyses, in which the locus of addressee agreement is the highest projection of a clause (Speech Act Phrase or Context Phrase), found primarily in root clauses. This study implies that the addressee is syntactically present in every finite clause. Crosslinguistic differences (e.g., root–embedded asymmetries) depend on what syntactic category acts as a probe in a language.

Person and honorification: Features and interactions in Magahi

“…I go-prog be-1.s-hh.ad 'I am going.' (said to a teacher) As mentioned in section 2, our analysis of this taken from earlier work (Alok & Baker 2018;Alok 2020;Alok 2021) is that addressee agreement is the result of a C like head (Fin) agreeing with Ad-the same Ad that is posited in (27a). In root clauses, this Ad refers to the addressee of the sentence ((27b)), resulting in addressee agreement.…”

“…Since the verbal morphology shows distinctions that are not evident on the subject in (4a,b), one might wonder whether this is really agreement as opposed to some feature value that is originally born on the verbal functional head itself. However, Alok (2021) argues that this verbal morphology has the formal behavior that one expects of agreement. Magahi has dative subject constructions with nominative objects, like those known from Icelandic and other languages.…”

“…McFadden's (2020) study of Tamil, Alok (2020;2021) analyzes this paradigm in a way that is parallel to the one in (4). He claims that sentences like (7b-d) have a null second person pronoun Ad in the periphery of the clause that denotes the person the clause is addressed to, as in Speas & Tenny's (2003) neo-performative hypothesis.…”

“…In the domain of agreement Magahi again goes a step farther than Western IE languages, in that verbs show honorificity marking not only for the subject of the clause but also for the status of the individual who the sentence is addressed to. This addressee agreement (also known as allocutivity; see Oyharçabal 1993) has been analyzed in detail by Alok (2020;2021).…”

Dimensions of honorific meaning in Korean speech style particles

“…In conveying such information, they are similar to allocutive markers in Basque (Oyharçabal 1993;Miyagawa 2012;Haddican 2018 a.o. ), Magahi (Alok & Baker 2019;Alok 2021;Alok & Baker 2022), Tamil (McFadden 2020, and other languages. 3 While Choo (2006) claims that there are only two types of speech styles, honorific and non-honorific, these are further classifed into heavily formal, gently formal, soft casual and non-conversational or plain casual.…”