The morphosyntax of allocutive agreement in Tamil
Thomas McFadden
August 2017 

In this paper I will examine allocutive agreement in Tamil, a phenomenon in which an agreement suffix attached to the verb or other clause-final element indexes features not of any argument, but of the addressee of the utterance. I will report in detail on the morphophonology, syntactic distribution and discourse use, supplementing the basic facts reported by Amritavalli (1991) with several additional crucial details, and will compare the Tamil data with what has been reported for other languages, especially Basque and Japanese. I will then discuss the consequences of Tamil allocutive agreement for the theoretical treatment of how discourse information interacts with the morphosyntax, leading to a preliminary analysis of the patterns I find. We will see that the Tamil data provide interesting insights into the structural representation of the addressee and into how allocutive agreement is derived, in particular from how the relevant suffix is ordered relative to other verbal material.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003629 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	submitted
keywords:	agreement, allocutive, speech act phrase, addressee, discourse context, tamil, politeness, semantics, morphology, syntax
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