An illusory subject preference in Algonquian agreement

1. Introduction

The inflection of Algonquian transitive verbs includes an agreement suffix known as the central ending (Goddard 1969). The patterning of this suffix can ordinarily be described without reference to syntactic roles: the central ending indexes either (i) both arguments simultaneously or (ii) the argument with more richly specified phi-features. In certain contexts, however, the central ending instead appears to show a preference for indexing the subject, even when the subject's features are clearly less specified than those of the object (Xu 2016: 54–57, Bhatia et al. 2018). This exceptional subject preference is surprising to observe in an agreement slot that is otherwise conditioned purely by feature hierarchies rather than syntactic roles, and it presents challenges for the overall analysis of Algonquian agreement.

In this squib I argue that the exceptional subject preference is only apparent. Rather than a preference to index the subject, there is a more general preference to maximize the informational value of the agreement morphology by not redundantly repeating exactly the same information in two agreement slots. In certain contexts, this pressure has driven the central ending to index the subject even though the subject's features are less specified than those of the object, simply because the object's features have already been fully identified in a separate agreement slot. This process, which can be formalized as an impoverishment rule, creates the illusion of a preference to index the subject, but in fact the only preference is to make the agreement morphology as informative as possible. The lesson that emerges is that the possibility of describing a morphological pattern in syntactic terms does not guarantee that the correct explanation for the pattern actually lies in the syntax. Morphological factors can conspire to create patterns that deceptively appear to have a syntactic source.

The squib proceeds as follows. Section 2 introduces the exceptional subject preference. Section 3 considers and rejects a syntactic account. Section 4 proposes a morphological account in which subjecthood plays no role. Finally, section 5 contextualizes the morphological account by considering the diachronic origins of the exceptional subject preference. The discussion is based on data from Moose Cree (Ellis 1971), an Algonquian language spoken on the western side of James Bay, but the key patterns are shared across most Algonquian languages, as illustrated by the survey of Algonquian verb paradigms provided in the appendix, and the conclusions are intended to generalize beyond Moose Cree.¹

2. The Exceptional Subject Preference

This squib considers data from the "conjunct order" inflection that occurs canonically in subordinate clauses. Conjunct forms of transitive verbs always include at least two agreement markers: a theme sign (Bloomfield 1946: 102), which follows the verb stem and expresses the person of the object, and a central ending (Goddard 1969: 103), which follows the theme sign and is realized as either a portmanteau suffix that expresses features of two arguments simultaneously or as a simple suffix that expresses features of one argument. The theme signs and central endings that appear in Moose Cree conjunct forms are listed in (1) (see Dahlstrom 1991: 27, Zúñiga 2006: 78). The use of these agreement markers is illustrated by the paradigm in Table 1 (Ellis 1971: 90), which shows the inflectional endings for all transitive forms that involve at least one speech-act participant (SAP, i.e. first or second person). To aid recognition, the theme sign is underlined and the central ending is bolded in all data in the squib.

(1)

a. Theme signs: -i '1obj', -it ∼ -is '2obj', -aː ∼ -Ø '3obj', -ikw ∼ -iko 'inv'

b. Simple central endings: -aːn '1sg', -an '2sg', -aːhk '1pl', -ahkw '21pl', -eːkw '2pl', -t ∼ -k '3'

c. Portmanteau central endings: -ak '1sg:3', -at '2sg:3', -akiht '1pl:3', -amiht '3:1pl', -aːkw '3:2pl', -akok '1:2pl'

How does the agreement system in Table 1 work? The patterning of the theme sign is conditioned by the syntax: the theme sign consistently indexes the object, whatever its features may be...