Archi

ISO 639-3	aqc
GLOTTOLOG ID	arch1244
LOCATION	Dagestan, Russian Federation
CO-ORDINATES	42.32, 46.83
AFFILIATION	Nakh-Dagestanian, Lezgic

✔︎	Adverb agreement
✔︎	Adposition agreement
✘	Complementiser agreement
✘	Noun agreement
✔︎	Pronoun agreement

Within the clause, all possible agreement targets index the absolutive argument. In biabsolutive constructions, where both the core arguments occur in the absolutive case, the controller of agreement can differ across targets (Chumakina & Bond 2016).

Archi is particularly noteworthy for its diversity of agreement targets, both in the noun phrase, and in the clause. In the clausal domain, verbs, auxiliaries, converbs, and predicative attributives agree, as do a subset of adverbs, a single postposition, and an emphatic clitic (Kibrik 1977a, b; Kibrik et al. 1977; Bond & Chumakina 2016). From a typological perspective, Archi’s most notable targets are agreeing pronouns, which have been attested in only a handful of other languages to date (Polinsky 2017; Bond et al. 2023).

Bond, Oliver, Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina & Dunstan Brown (eds.). 2016. Archi: Complexities of agreement in cross-theoretical perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kibrik, Aleksandr E. 1977a. Opyt strukturnogo opisanija arčinskogo jazyka, II: Taksonomičeskaja grammatika [Towards a structural description of Archi, vol. ii: Taxonomic grammar]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta.

Kibrik, Aleksandr E. 1977b. Opyt strukturnogo opisanija arčinskogo jazyka, III: Dinamičeskaja grammatika [Towards a structural description of Archi, vol. iii: Dynamic grammar]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta.

Kibrik, Aleksandr E., Sandro V. Kodzasov, Irina P. Olovjannikova, & Džalil S. Samedov. 1977. Opyt strukturnogo opisanija arčinskogo jazyka, I: Leksika. Fonetika [Towards a structural description of Archi, vol. i: Lexicon and phonetics]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo universiteta.

Polinsky, Maria, Nina Radkevich, & Marina Chumakina. 2017. ‘Agreement between arguments? Not really’, in Roberta D’Alessandro, Irene Franco, & Ángel J. Gallego (eds), The verbal domain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 49–84.

Adverb agreement

Archi has 13 adverbs that agree. See Bond & Chumakina (2016: 72-75) for an introduction to their behaviour in clauses with ergative-absolutive alignment and Chumakina & Bond (2016) for discussion of their agreement controllers in biabsolutive constructions.

Adposition agreement

Archi has just one agreeing adposition, the postposition eq’en ‘up to’. It agrees with the absolutive argument of the verb, and governs contlative case on its complement. Its morphosyntactic behaviour is discussed at length in Chumakina & Brown (2015), who argue that eq’en developed diachronically from a converb. See Bond & Chumakina (2016: 72-75) for examples.

Complementiser agreement

There are no agreeing complementizers in Archi.

Noun agreement

Nouns in Archi do not agree with clause level arguments.

Pronoun agreement

Agreeing pronouns in Archi are discussed in Polinsky et al. (2017) and in various contributions to Bond, Corbett, Chumakina & Brown (2016). Polinsky et al. (2017) argue that pronominal targets bearing agreement morphology are weak pronouns that lack any inherent specification for the noun class (i.e. gender) feature [cl], and due to a language-specific constraint on all DPs having a [cl] feature, they must acquire their gender features from the nearest v head. Essentially, agreement on ‘deficient’ pronouns is seen as a by-product of agreement proper.

References

Bond, Oliver, & Marina Chumakina. 2016. ‘Agreement domains and targets’, in Oliver Bond, Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina, & Dunstan Brown (eds), Archi: Complexities of agreement in cross-theoretical perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 43–76.

Bond, Oliver, Marina Chumakina, & Steven Kaye. 2023. ‘Unusual agreement targets in unexpected domains’, in Marina Chumakina, Oliver Bond & Steven Kaye (eds), Agreement beyond the verb. Unusual targets, unexpected domains, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–47.

Bond, Oliver, Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina, & Dunstan Brown (eds.). 2016. Archi: Complexities of agreement in cross-theoretical perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chumakina, Marina, & Oliver Bond. 2016. ‘Competing controllers and agreement potential’, in Oliver Bond, Greville G. Corbett, Marina Chumakina, & Dunstan Brown (eds), Archi: Complexities of agreement in cross-theoretical perspective.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 77–117.

Chumakina, Marina, & Dunstan Brown. 2015. Charting adposition agreement’ Typescript, University of Surrey and University of York.