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Agreement with conjoined arguments in Kuria

Domain:

natural language processing

Record type:

paper
Creator:
Michael DiercksLinMar
Publisher:
Uni
Host:
How languages solve the grammatical problem of agreeing with conjoined arguments is a well-known area of cross-linguistic variation. This paper describes these patterns for Kuria (Bantu, Kenya), documenting a pattern of agreement that has not been previously reported. We show the relevant patterns involving a range of noun classes, showing that human noun classes trigger different effects than non-human noun classes. We also demonstrate distinctions in the grammar between subject marking and object marking: whereas subject marking allows for resolved agreement forms, object marking does not. The paper also includes a brief survey of notable patterns in other Bantu languages to put Kuria in a relevant context.

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