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<p>Mundari, an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mundari tribes from the Jharkhand region of the Indian subcontinent, exhibits an omnivorous pattern for person, number, and gender marking. This pattern can be seen with ditransitives where both the indirect and direct object compete for a single object-marking slot in the verbal complex. The choice between them is determined by an interplay of prominence scales for person (1 &gt; 2 &gt; 3) and number (<span>sg</span> &gt; <span>pl</span> &gt; <span>du</span>), acting alongside a animacy-based gender system. We provide an analysis of scale-driven Agree in Mundari that makes use of both bivalent features for person and number in addition to cyclic Agree. Furthermore, we argue that syntactic probes must be able to probe for contextually unmarked values. This is motivated by the theoretical challenge posed by the number scale in Mundari, which seems to express a preference for unmarked number values over marked ones. Finally, we consider which other omnivorous patterns for person and number exist cross-linguistically and explore the predictions that our analysis makes for other languages.</p>

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Omnivorous person, number and gender in Mundari

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2025年2月3日

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  • Gurujegan Murugesan,
  • Imke Driemel,
  • Andrew Murphy

摘要

Mundari, an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mundari tribes from the Jharkhand region of the Indian subcontinent, exhibits an omnivorous pattern for person, number, and gender marking. This pattern can be seen with ditransitives where both the indirect and direct object compete for a single object-marking slot in the verbal complex. The choice between them is determined by an interplay of prominence scales for person (1 > 2 > 3) and number (sg > pl > du), acting alongside a animacy-based gender system. We provide an analysis of scale-driven Agree in Mundari that makes use of both bivalent features for person and number in addition to cyclic Agree. Furthermore, we argue that syntactic probes must be able to probe for contextually unmarked values. This is motivated by the theoretical challenge posed by the number scale in Mundari, which seems to express a preference for unmarked number values over marked ones. Finally, we consider which other omnivorous patterns for person and number exist cross-linguistically and explore the predictions that our analysis makes for other languages.