Hyperagreement and Case-licensing in Tigrinya
Jason Overfelt, Gioia Cacchioli
October 2024 

This paper investigates the hyperactivity of nominal constituents in the Ethiosemitic language Tigrinya (Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia; SOV). Embedded arguments trigger 𝜙-complete agreement in the embedded clause in addition to 𝜙-complete object agreement on the matrix verb. We argue that this long-distance hyperagreement—adapting terminology from Carstens 2011—is fed by (possibly covert) clause-bounded scrambling (Polinsky & Potsdam 2001). Despite several indicators for Case-licensing in the language, hyperagreement in Tigrinya is not case-sensitive. Thus, we argue that Case-licensing is divorced from 𝜙-agreement, like the closely related language Amharic (Baker 2015), and does not contribute to an Activity Condition for the language (cf. Chomsky 2001).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008468 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted for Selected Papers from the 55th Annual Conference on African Linguistics
keywords:	tigrinya, hyperagreement, long-distance agreement, case, licensing, syntax
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