S-Lab - Ruth Kramer / Discontinuous Agreement in Amharic Imperatives: A Haplology Approach
S-Lab - Ruth Kramer / Discontinuous Agreement in Amharic Imperatives: A Haplology Approach
March 29, S-Lab is led by Ruth Kramer, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She will be giving a talk titled: Discontinuous Agreement in Amharic Imperatives: A Haplology Approach.
Discontinuous Agreement in Amharic Imperatives: A Haplology Approach
Like in many Semtiic languages, subject agreement is discontinuous in Amharic: part of it is expressed with a prefix and another part with a suffix. However, in imperative verbs, the prefix disappears and the suffix remains. This talk explores why and how this happens within the framework of Distributed Morphology, proposing that the prefix disappears under haplology with the 2nd person features on an imperative head. I show how a haplology approach explains the distribution of the prefix across various kinds of imperatives and furthers our understanding of morphological operations. A haplology approach also allows us to differentiate between two different analyses of discontinuous agreement in general, providing evidence against a linearization-based approach (Harbour 2008) and in favor of an approach that relies on the Distributed Morphology operation Fission (Hewett 2020).