Diagnosing object agreement vs. clitic doubling: Evidence from Inuktitut
Michelle Yuan
September 2019 

[NEW TITLE: Diagnosing object agreement vs. clitic doubling: An Inuit case study] Much recent literature has focused on whether the verbal agreement morphology cross-referencing objects is true phi-agreement or clitic doubling. This paper addresses this question based on comparative data from related Inuit languages Inuktitut and Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), and argues that both possibilities are attested in Inuit. Crucially, the evidence comes from the behaviour of the object DPs encoded by this agreement morphology, and cannot be detected by examining the morphology itself. Inuktitut object DPs display various properties mirroring the behaviour of clitic doubled objects cross-linguistically, while in Kalaallisut they display none of these properties, suggesting genuine phi-agreement. More broadly, this paper cautions against the reliability of canonical morphological diagnostics for (agreement) affixes vs. clitics.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003733 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Linguistic Inquiry [https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00366]
keywords:	phi-agreement, clitic doubling, pronouns, ergativity, syntax, morphosyntax, inuit, inuktitut
previous versions:	v5 [September 2019] v4 [April 2019] v3 [April 2019] v2 [November 2017] v1 [November 2017]
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