Omnivorous Person, Number and Gender: The view from Mundari
Gurujegan Murugesan
April 2021
 

Mundari, an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mundari tribes from the Jharkhand region of the Indian subcontinent, exhibits an omnivorous pattern for person, number, and gender. This pattern is seen in the ditransitive construction when both indirect and direct objects compete for a single object-marking slot in the verbal complex. The choice between them is determined by complex interplay of hierarchies of person (1>2>3) and number (SG>PL>DL), acting along with an animacy-based gender system. To give a derivational account of these scales and their interaction with each other, I propose an analysis that appeals to clitic doubling as an instance of head movement that necessarily involves prior syntactic '-agreement (Preminger 2019) and an articulated probe that agrees with a goal for certain features (BĂ©jar and Rezac 2003).
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005663
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Ms. Indira Gandhi National Tribal University [comments welcome]
keywords: person, number, gender, hierarchy, omnivorous, clitic, mundari, syntax
previous versions: v2 [January 2021]
v1 [January 2021]
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