A plea for syntax and a return to first principles: monstrous agreement in Tamil  

Oleh:

Sundaresan, Sandhya

Jenis: Article from Proceeding
Dalam koleksi: Proceedings of the 21st Semantics and Linguistic Theory Conference, held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, May 20 - 22, 2011, page 674–693.
Topik: Monsters; indexicals; anaphors; Tamil; contextual and f-features; Agree(ment); cartography; propositional complements.
Fulltext: 674-693.pdf (216.85KB)

Isi artikel

The paper focuses on an interesting form of (person) indexical shift in the Dravidian language Tamil which surfaces as 1SG agreement marking in a clause embedded under a speech predicate. I show that this agreement is an instance of indexical shift and label it “monstrous agreement”. However, I demonstrate that its full range of empirical properties cannot be adequately explained by the major analyses of indexical shift in the literature. The bulk of these, I argue, in addition to being predominantly semantic in spirit, and thus ill-equipped to deal with a morphosyntactic phenomenon like agreement, also involve two core misconceptions regarding indexicality vs. logophoricity on the one hand and speech vs. attitude predicates on the other. I propose that these core assumptions be strongly reevaluated from first principles and that syntactic and typological clues on the subject be paid more heed. I propose a new analysis of the Tamil paradigms which derives indexical shift within an enriched grammatical model involving contextual features instantiated in a structurally articulated cartographic left periphery.

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